Darkbier is not a style that shows up often on an Ontario taplist, and Flux Brewing Company uses it once a year. Corduroy returns to the taps and the cooler this week at the brewery's Scotland taproom, where Flux calls it an end-of-summer staple.
The pitch is that it sits between two things at once. Corduroy drinks somewhere between a porter and a dunkel, the brewery says, light enough for warm afternoons and roasty enough for cool evenings by the fire.
That is a more precise description than it first sounds. Darkbier and dunkel both belong to the dark lager family, and at 4.3 percent, per the brewery's own beer list, Corduroy is built along the same lines as most of what Flux pours. The current menu runs heavily to lagers - a Czech pale lager, a helles, a Dortmunder export, an amber, a cerveza - and Corduroy is the dark corner of that room rather than a departure from it. Flux keeps a separate wheat porter, Show Pony, for the genuinely roasty job, which leaves this one free to stay light on its feet.
The name earns its keep on the shelf, too. The can is printed with a corduroy rib texture in a burnt orange that would look right on a fall jacket, which is roughly the weather the beer is aimed at: the two or three weeks when the afternoon still belongs to summer and the evening has stopped pretending.
Corduroy is available on tap and in cans at Flux Brewing Company in Scotland, Ontario.
Source & Editorial
JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.