TORONTO – Reports of heavy, house-shaking booms, believed to be frost quakes, were once again hitting social media sites Tuesday morning. But instead of complaining about the cold and rattling booms, a southern Ontario brewery is having fun with the new winter phenomenon.
Wellington Brewery, an independent brewery located in Guelph, released a one-off beer on Saturday called Frost Quake.
Frost Quake, a bourbon barrel-aged barley wine, was released last Saturday at their location in Guelph. It isn’t available at bars or restaurants.
“Barley wines are traditionally the winter warmer, so we were considering the concept of a winter warmer beer that’s robust, strong and very intense in the winter,” Brad McInerney, the marketing and event co-ordinator for Wellington Brewery told Global News.
“It seemed like a frost quake was the perfect pairing for that, because it’s like this intense winter phenomena and we thought that the intensity and rarity of this beer spoke to that.”
Frost quakes were first heard on Christmas Eve across the GTA and into eastern Ontario.
Frost quakes are caused when water seeps into the ground and then freezes rapidly, cracking rock and soil as it has nowhere else to go. With the temperatures being above zero last week and then dipping to a chilly -22 C overnight, it’s likely that the water from melting ice and snow seeped into the ground causing the booms heard around southern Ontario early this morning.
READ MORE: More mysterious booms heard around GTA
The brewery started their Welly one-offs about three years ago. Their brewmasters experiment with new recipes and brew small batches from a few hundred bottles to a few thousand. The brewery only made about 1,000 bottles of Frost Quake.
McInerney said that almost half of the Frost Quake brew have been sold.
“The response was crazy this weekend. We opened on Saturday…and we had a lineup outside of the brewery,” said McInerney.
Asked if they may consider brewing another batch, McInerney said this batch will be the only one available this season.
“Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to do this one this year because you have to age the bourbon barrels,” said McInerney. “So we’d be looking at next year.”
McInerney said that beer is very much associated with the weather.
“You always hear people ask ‘What’s the best winter beer?’ or ‘What’s the best summer beer?’ So we’ve been talking about doing a weather-related series. We’ll see where it goes,” he said.
So, if you don’t have your bottle of Frost Quake, maybe you can hold out for the summer. Who knows? Maybe the next one will be Humidex Advisory.
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