It's starting to look like somebody handed the keys to the nation's microbreweries to a restless vodka distiller.
Have you scanned the specialty offerings at your local beer store lately? Orange, green apple, black currant, blueberry - they sound more like new Absolut flavours than ingredients for a hearty pint.
The newest entry: Great Lakes Orange Peel Ale. The citrus-flavoured beer, launched last month, had an initial production run of 10,000 650-millilitre bottles and sold out in slightly more than three weeks, four times faster than expected.
"We thought this was going to be a three-month program," says Peter Bulut Jr., vice-president of Great Lakes Brewery in Toronto, who's hard at work loading more orange rinds and pulp into his antique copper kettle to keep up with demand.
Other newcomers to the fruit bar include Nickel Brook Green Apple Pilsener from Better Bitters Brewing Co. in Burlington, Ont.; Strawberry Anti-Social, a brown ale launched last summer by Trafalgar Ales & Meads of Oakville, Ont.; and two offerings from Ottawa-based Heritage Brewing Ltd., Passion Brew (infused with passion fruit) and Black Currant Rye Lager.
They join a list that includes more established brands such as Wraspberry from Wild Rose Brewery in Calgary and Aprikat from Alley Kat Brewing Co. in Edmonton.
Granite Brewery and Restaurant, which has locations in Toronto and Halifax, has been making Ringberry Ale out of raspberries for years. The same goes for the Blueberry Ale at Pump House Brewery in Moncton, N.B., and the apple-based Éphémère from Quebec's Unibroue.
While the brewing industry doesn't keep statistics on fruit beer consumption, independent brewers and pub owners say consumers are welcoming the fresh injection from the produce section.
"You'll see 21-year-olds now drinking everything," says Tashi Sundup, owner of Bryden's in Toronto's west end.
The pub-restaurant has 16 brews on tap, including the new Orange Peel Ale, drawn from its eye-catching orange-shaped tap handle. "People just look at the bar and say, 'What is that?' "
Traditionally, fruit beers were most often associated with spring and the start of the fruit season, when people in northern climates crave garden flavours. That's why Mr. Bulut launched his Orange Peel Ale in April, notwithstanding the fact that oranges have zilch to do with Canada's springtime harvest.
But there's a more contemporary impetus behind today's trend. Seasonally available fruit enables brewers to seize on the kind of cyclical buzz and pent-up consumer demand typically enjoyed by the fastest-growing segment of the alcoholic-beverage market, wine.
With delicate wine grapes, each fall can bring a radically new harvest, leading to significant variations in flavour. That's why collectors pay studious attention to vintage dates on bottles. Not so with beer, which is made from grain, a relatively homogeneous raw material whose flavour varies negligibly from season to season.
"A limited-release beer is almost like a vintage wine," says Mr. Bulut of Great Lakes.
Dave Jamieson, head brewer at Trafalgar Ales & Meads, agrees. "Seasonal beers are good for the market because people always want what they can't have."
More generally, for small brewers, fruit offers a conspicuous and affordable point of differentiation amid a sea of taste-alike monster brands backed by multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.
Fruit beers are not a modern invention. Fruits and vegetables have been used as adjuncts in beer for centuries. Historically, they were often substituted when the grain harvest fell short. But in some regions, ingredients such as cherries, raspberries and peaches have become intrinsic to enduring styles, most notably the sweetly seductive Lambic beers of Belgium.
Technically fruit beers are easy to make, a matter of adding fruit to the fermenting vat, though some brewers take a shortcut by adding flavoured extracts to the finished product.
