Save the trees, crack a cold beer

Raise a toast to the Mountain Pine Beetle – scourge of B.C.’s forests – by settling into the cheapest six-pack in the province. Turns out the nasty little critters are good for something.

Cariboo Genuine Draft

A brewing company in northern B.C. has taken a cue from that old beverage adage, If Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade. But instead of lemons, the Pacific Western Brewing Company has taken inspiration from the devastation of the Mountain Pine Beetle in the launch of its latest beer.

The voracious pest has chomped and chewed its way through millions of hectares of B.C.’s forests, leaving wave upon wave of rust-coloured evergreens in its wake, an economic and environmental emergency that has created huge impacts on the beleaguered forest industry, once the cornerstone of the natural resource-dependent provincial economy.

Enter Cariboo Genuine Draft, a low-cost, surprisingly good-tasting 5.5 percent bargain beer introduced in March. (Pick it up at the government liquor store at just under $8 for a six-pack – that’s as low as she goes, people.)

For every case sold, the Prince George-based company will plant a tree.

“When you fly or drive into Prince George, you can see the mountains have turned red,” company spokesman Paul Mulgrew told CTV news in March.  Partnering with Trees Canada, the brewery hopes to donate 100,000 new trees by September.

According to another source, the tasty budget brew has been flying off the shelves since its debut, with sales up 200 percent over predecessor Pacific Genuine Draft.

The price is nice. But I think it might be the pretty green and gold label, which features the majestic profile of a trophy-worthy cariboo buck, but what do I know?

In essence, Western Canada’s largest, Canadian-owned, independent brewery is saying: there may not be many logging or sawmill jobs anymore, and everyone’s wallets are hurting, but by God, there’ll be beer. Good beer. At the cheapest price possible.

Now that’s a recession-driven initiative everyone can get behind.

So, do your bit for the environment and the economy (as well as the folks of northern B.C., who have been suffering Hard Times about a decade longer than it’s been fashionable) and crack a cold one!

Climate change is thought to have played a major role in the pestilent beetle’s spread. Winters in northern and interior B.C. just haven’t been cold enough – long enough – to kill the teensy, tenacious beasts.

It wasn’t that long ago that the beetle’s advances through our valuable and expansive pine forests were halted each winter with the arrival of the annual cold snap.

The thing is, it takes weeks of -40 C weather to stop them dead in their tracks.

And while the mercury drops well below that from time to time, it just doesn’t stay there very long. The bugs live on to procreate and proliferate for another summer.

Some experts fear we may never see a return of the long winter deep freeze. All I can say is I lived in the north for more than a decade and the glaciers up there are retreating like they’re running scared.

The beetles have destroyed an estimated 13.5 million hectares of lodgepole pine in B.C., but the outbreak isn’t contained to this province. The tiny black beetle is native to North American forests, and it lives under the bark of ponderosa, lodgepole and scots pines, sucking the life right out of them, turning their needles red. The trees eventually die and turn a dull brown, then finally black.

The outbreak has been so massive because efforts to contain them failed. Warmer climate conditions and other factors are to blame.

If you’re based in the Vancouver area and haven’t seen the devastation first-hand, you don’t have to drive very far. (And if you do live in the Lower Mainland, you’re living in about the only beetle-free bubble in B.C.) Drive just a couple of hours east or north and you’ll be surrounded by the swaths of Mountain Pine Beetle devastation.

Patches of red trees are all over the hills in Manning Park. They’re dying. And once they’re dead, they’re dry as kindling. There are bald spots, too. A sign of the ongoing battle against the bug’s advancing armies. One example is the once-arresting stands of pines in Hampton Provincial Campground (10 minutes past the lodge towards East Gate) that have been razed to the ground, leaving a moonscape in the middle of the popular tenting and RVing spot.

Ministry of Forests photo.