As an unreformed craft beer nerd, I have sometimes wished Mr Pynchon would slip a few more specialty brews in among the Burgundian vintages and unlikely cocktails. Not that we don’t get thrown a few bones; one beery highlight I recall fondly was the lambic from Against the Day, and I’ve made the most of Italian beer, French beer, etc… But beer in Pynchon is most often just good old no nonsense “beer.”

Imagine my delight and surprise, then, to come across this:

“That’ll help, just keep that pan as dumb and honest as it is, it’ll be like picking up an easy spare. All else fails, go in there and make with the clod-hoppers, who knows, she might not even yell for help. Here, let’s just …” Boynt rolling over to the window, opening it, reaching outside into the freezing night and retrieving two heavy warped icicles, each with a vivid emerald bottle of Canadian IPA frozen into it.

Shadow Ticket, p. 78.

Boynt’s icicled Canadian IPA plucked from without the window also struck me in the moment as a bit of an anachronism. Of course, Pynchon isn’t shy of crossing the temporal streams, but actually, Canadian IPA turns out to be an entirely standard 1930s beverage.

Legendary beer historian Ron Pattinson has a post investigating Canadian beer styles of the 19th century. Apparently even in the 1890s, IPA accounted for three quarters of beer sold by Labatt, one of the major Canadian brewers then and now. Canada had a period of prohibition during WWI that a few big brewers weathered by selling low alcohol “temperance ales.” This ended right around when the US kicked off their own Prohibition, putting Labatt and co in a perfect position to get some IPA smuggled across the border.

The IPAs of the 1930s would have been fairly mild, bitter but not aggressive, and somewhat malty. Today’s IPAs are, of course, a different beast. I have sampled three Canadian IPAs here: Juxtaposition from Four Winds in Delta, BC; Trash Panda from Parallel 49 in Vancouver; and Ultra Deluxe from Boombox, also of Vancouver. Some had travelled better than others. My favourite was the Ultra Deluxe: sweeter than I’d like maybe, but super lush and juicy. I did not even have to defrost an icicle to get at it.