Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddamites NooBroo” beer now available in LCBOs

Atwood’s collaboration with Beau’s Brewery is a summer-suited effervescent ale, made with a bouquet of botanical ingredients inspired by her “MaddAddam” trilogy

VANKLEEK HILL – (July 7, 2015) Beau’s Brewery will launch gruit ale “MaddAddamites NooBroo” into LCBO stores across the province, starting this week. The local craft brewery teamed up with award-winning Canadian writers and long-time environmental activists Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson to collaborate on the recipe for MaddAddamites NooBroo. Sales of the beer will raise funds for the Pelee Island Bird Observatory (PIBO); Gibson chairs its Board of Directors, and Atwood is an Advisor to the Board.

Gruits are beers brewed with herbs and other botanicals in lieu of hops. The beer’s recipe is inspired by many of the botanicals noted in Atwood’s novel MaddAddam, the third book in her trilogy of speculative fiction that also includes Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Within the context of MaddAddam there is much foraging and harvesting of plants and botanicals, and Atwood calls this collaboration “The beer Gods Gardeners [characters from the book] would have made.”

Atwood personally tasted and selected the bouquet of botanicals used in the beer, which include red clover flower, rosehips, elderberries, and wild cherry bark. The 5.2% ABV creation is delicate in body, with berry notes, a tea-like herbal character, and a pleasantly tart finish. Lively effervescence adds to the thirst-quenching nature of this summer-suited gruit.

Atwood also penned the tasting notes for the beer, which appear on the hang tag of each bottle: “From its elusive, intriguing aroma to its subtle yet celebratory aftertaste, this light but substantial beer has mysterious undertones of rosehips, elderberries, and mountain herbs, with a deeper tone of roots and woodsy bark. Fresh and spring-like, confident and down-to-earth yet inspirational, rooted in the wild world of foraging and gathering, NooBroo is everything the MaddAddamites would wish an all-natural beer to be. Saint Euell Gibbons himself would applaud it!”

Twenty-four cents from each bottle of MaddAddamites NooBroo sold will be donated to PIBO. PIBO is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to collect and contribute information about migratory birds and their populations. Pelee Island is the southernmost populated point in Canada, and has a unique microclimate that sustains a rich diversity of plants and wildlife. A significant stopover site for many species of migratory birds, it has been designated a globally Important Bird Area (IBA) by the Canadian partners of BirdLife.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction, but is best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Ms. Atwood’s work has been published in more than forty languages, and she is a companion of the Order of Canada.

Graeme Gibson is the acclaimed author of Five Legs, Perpetual Motion, and Gentleman Death. He is a past president of PEN Canada and the recipient of both the Harbourfront Festival Prize and the Toronto Arts Award, and is a member of the Order of Canada.

MaddAddamites NooBroo is available now in Beau’s signature 600 mL bottles at LCBOs across the province, as well as directly from the brewery’s retail store. The beer can be home-delivered in the City of Ottawa by social enterprise BYBO, and a select number of restaurants, pubs and summer beer festivals will also have the beer available to enjoy over the summer.