Now onto the beer…
With both a year-round and seasonal selection of beers, there is no shortage of flavor. You can expect to see their 5 year-round beers on tap, with an addition to 3-4 more seasonals or one offs rotating through the year available in 12 & 20 oz pints. Alternatively, you could grab a flight to taste a variety and choose your favourite to take home.
With a nice variety of both malt forward and hop forward beers the one I always love to indulge in is their Raspberry Wild Child a Berliner Weisse, which is a German sour beer that uses natural fermentation to produce a tart, citrusy, flavour. You would never guess it’s 3.9%, but you can definitely tell it is award winning. It’s now available year round and, believe me, it’s a beauty, although admittedly I may be a little bias towards the name as I am pretty sure my parents called me that growing up…. Or still do?
Their English Pale Ale (EPA) is a traditional, malt-forward, British Style beer. It has that beautiful light copper colour and though it is malt forward you enjoy the slight hop flavour and light bitterness the hop selection provides. It begins with a mild toffee sweetness, and moves to a nice, biscuity, toasted-bread from the malt, followed with the grassy, leafy hop notes of a British Hops. It finishes bittersweet and is Medium-light in body, with gentle carbonation levels true to style.
Their packaged beer comes solely in growlers, both 32oz & 64oz. There is a $4 deposit on the Growler and you can come in and exchange their branded growler for another, though prices do vary on the beer. Here at Black Swan they fill their own growlers to ensure cleanliness and allow for their own quality control. The brewery exchanges the used, dirty growlers for ones that have been cleaned at the brewery, so you don’t have to worry about cleaning your own. As far as quality goes, their filling method is to use a counter pressure C02 filler that purges oxygen out of the growler before filling it with fresh draught. This keeps the beer fresh for a longer time.
Though they don’t have a kitchen on site, they occasionally have local food brought in, such as charcuterie boards, and there are some chips you can snack on as well. Stratford is also renowned for its culinary excellence, so be sure to ask what they have or where to eat while you’re there. They even have a gorgeous selection of shirts, hats, glasses, and more in their retail section to buy and wear with pride as you remember what is sure to be a great day in Stratford at the Black Swan.
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