Bermuda Triangle Brewing Ltd. does its best to ensure theirs can stand up to even the most discerning of tastes. With beers brewed on the Island, the company is proud of the fact that they are one of the few manufacturers of truly Bermudian-made products. And through a skilful combination of art and science, all recipes have been designed and brewed to meet local tastes.

"There's a lot that goes into making beers,'' explained Mr. Paul Mason, company president and one of its founding shareholders. "Like a great chef, our brewmeister shops the world around for the best ingredients. We bring our grain from Bavaria and we use only the two-row variety. "Our hops come from as far away as the Czech Republic. The area around Zatec in the Czech Republic is known throughout the world for producing the very best hops. They call them noble hops. They are more than ten times the price of some varieties but the aroma is exquisite and they are worth every penny. "Our yeast was obtained from a brewery in Munich that is not far from where our brewmeister used to live and he has spent a few evenings in there enjoying their beers. Our bottles are from England and our kegs are from France. All of our design work was done by local artists and our beer names reflect our Bermudian heritage.

As you can see we shop the world for the best, but I think that's what Bermudians expect -- the best!'' Explaining that real beer consists of only four ingredients -- water, yeast, hops and malted grains such as barley and occasionally wheat -- he said, the trouble begins when people try and use cheaper materials or find a faster way of making beer. "That's it. There's nothing complicated here. In a lot of countries, brewers add corn or rice to their beers because these ingredients are a lot cheaper than malted barley.'' He added that the German Purity Law, the Reinheitsgebot, was passed in 1516 to prevent cheaper ingredients from being used in beer production. "(It) specified the only ingredients that were allowed in beer,'' he said. "These were malted grains, hops and water. Yeast is not mentioned because at the time they didn't know of the existence of yeast. They thought of fermentation as almost a magical reaction! "We follow the German Purity Law in all of our beers. We bring in the best barley and wheat malts from a family-owned malting house in Bavaria that has been making specialty brewers malts since 1879. We also use a special yeast from a small brewery in Munich. Each of our beers are individually crafted in small batches. We follow that batch right through until it gets to the bottle with frequent quality checks on the beer's progress.'' Because all their beer is produced in Bermuda, the company can safely assert that theirs is the freshest on the island; an important point as beer does not get better with age as wine does. "Alcohol itself has a preservative effect,'' said Mr. Mason. "Spirits will last virtually forever.

Certain wines can last for years. Beer however, with its lower alcohol content, is meant to be drunk immediately.'' He said that light, heat and oxygen are the three things which destroy beer. "Light reacts with beer to produce a smelly `skunky' aroma a lot like boiled cabbage. While there may be some people out there who like boiled cabbage, nobody likes it in their beer! The only way to avoid this is to keep your beer away from light.'' Brown bottles block most of the light form reaching the beer while green bottles provide about 65 percent protection, he said. An experiment which can successfully show these results is if a clear bottle of beer is placed in a window for an hour and then moved to a fridge until it's nice and cold. "Once it's cool, go ahead and open it,'' he said. "Smell it and you will see why people call the beer `skunky' and what the damaging effect of sunlight on beer is. Clear bottles are useless and should be used for sodas not beer.'' Oxygen, or air, which comes into contact with beer gives it a cardboard or flat, paper flavour, and unfortunately cannot be entirely avoided, Mr. Mason said. "It is always present in bottles and cans and even to a very small extent in kegs.

The higher the temperature, the quicker this oxidation process will happen.

That's why our beer tastes so much fresher than imported beer. Our beer is anywhere from a few hours old to a couple of weeks. Imported beer may take months before it gets to your glass. It has to travel by truck from the brewery, wherever it is in the world, to the nearest port. "There it sits in the container waiting to be loaded onto a ship where it will take weeks to cross the ocean to get to Bermuda. After it arrives on the docks in Bermuda it gets trucked to another warehouse here where it will be unloaded and stored for some time until it is delivered to the bar or supermart. Taste one of our beers and see what a difference freshness makes. Remember, life's too short to drink bad beer!'' PHOTO BREW CONTROL -- Assistant brewer Andrew MacKay draws off some beer and ensures that the quality of the product is up to Bermuda Triangle Brewing Ltd.'s high standards.