Mondays suck. Cask beer doesn't.

It's official - I've found a cure for "the Mondays". It's cold, malty, slightly carbonated... and gives you just enough of a nice warm fuzzy feeling to erase the 15 TPS reports Lumburgh made you crank out before 5 pm.

So what is this magic potion, you ask? And where can you get your shaky Monday afternoon hands upon it?

No surprises here - the magic cure I speak of is none other than my old pal beer. More specifically, it's beer from a cask (here's why cask beer, or "real ale" is awesome). And it's readily available every Monday at 6 pm sharp at St. Augustine's on Commercial Drive.

Beer adventures: Canmore, AB

Driving through south-western Alberta on our way to Banff, it was the last thing we expected to see. After kilometre upon kilometre of flat, overcast skies and grey asphalt, the words almost seemed to jump off the brown government-issue highway sign: “Next Exit - Grizzly Paw Brewery”.

Bleary-eyed, parched and half-starved from a day of travel, I had to restrain myself from grabbing the wheel and settled instead on a croaked, "take the exit! Oh god please take it!"

And thus, we found ourselves in Canmore, Alberta, at 1pm on a Thursday, with our sights set on the Grizzly Paw Brewery. (Truth be told, I might have settled for a warm Coors Light at that point, but what we got was so, SO much better. Off-the-scale better. Grizzly Paw better.)

Good and evil? More like all awesome.

I was lucky enough to grow up with a dad who scorned the Molsons and the Budweisers for microbrewery products, both local and imported. He was always trying new beers, which encouraged me to try them too (only after I was 19, of course... cough). And now that I'm co-inhabiting with another fellow beer aficionado, I can pursue my quest of beer exploration even more vigorously.

So to the point - let's just say, when I heard about the first annual Vancouver Craft Beer Week earlier this month, I was one happy little beer lover.

VCBW, the first craft beer week in Canada, consisted of a series of events, all centered around that most delectable of malty beverages: beer. There were 5 course meals with food and beer pairings, beer crawls, tastings, award events and week-long specials at participating bars and restaurants.

Sadly, due to a rather nasty bout of bad luck, the purse strings at the Poulton-Shore residence were a little tight. But my fantastic partner in crime managed to scrape together enough coins for us to attend one of the events: Good and Evil at Subeez.