There’s a whole lot of cool stuff going on beer-wise in Canada these days. I recently finished up a roundup of grisettes—a wheaty, near-extinct style originating around Belgium’s Hainaut province (the style’s been seeing a whole lot of brewing activity lately)—for my column over at All About Beer. I’ll typically reach out to breweries for maybe a dozenish samples to try and get a sense of the substyle’s terrain, and these grisettes tended to be pretty darn tasty overall.

A key challenge is always sourcing beers from afar. One standout, a delicious take on grisette entitled Ping Pong Wizard—with perfect balance of spice, citrus and honey—was brewed at Brasserie Dunham in Quebec (in collaboration with the fine folks at Cambridge Brewing Co. in Massachusetts). Given the surprisingly diverse number of issues one can have shipping in beer internationally—breakage, unexpected custom fees, leakage, no-explanation returns, any number of tedious middle-man calls to the effect of “Is this yeast samples, or something?”—we’d opted to source that grisette via handoff at the recent RateBeer Best Fest in Santa Rosa.

Brasserie Dunham (RateBeer Best’s 2016 top Canada brewery) and Bellwoods Brewery (the year’s top Ontario brewery) were both in attendance—pouring delicious sours, strong beers and hop vessels—and I swung by on media passes with our mag’s managing editor Jon Page. My long, complicated, so-not-for-this-column history with RateBeer aside, they did a heck of a job (again!) curating, especially showcasing international creatives: Beavertown, Cloudwater and Buxton from England; De Struise (from Belgium), Kiuchi (from Japan), Omnipollo (via Sweden)—plus some breweries I got to hang with down in Brazil: Dum Cervejaria and Way Beer. As I try to regularly remind myself: there’s so much creative stuff happening elsewhere in the world—even if it isn’t the easiest to track down. Make a point to remind yourself, too.

I tend to avoid annual predictions because they tend to sound like they could have been true last year, at least in beer. Every brewery’s done an imperial stout, double IPA, an oaked beer, some form of questionable sour, and (soon!) a series of hazy IPAs. Most ingredients that are even remotely acceptable in brewing have been used. Every non-technical hop pun has been taken. Things doing well get piggybacked quickly. Exhibit A: fruit IPA. Exhibit B: hard soda.

But! In the spirit of the new year, some looks forward: Hazy IPAs are blowing up, inevitably. Kettle-sour approaches will probably also hit a peak in 2017, with knowledge of the practice spreading to anyone who wants to have a go, though I doubt most are in it for the long haul. These beers have a rough lactic edge more often than not, and complexity usually isn’t there. For producers of more traditional sours: a kettle-sour fallout likely can’t come soon enough. A friend works with South African hops, and (from everything I hear) they’ll be popping up more frequently next year, with strong debuts in beers by folks such as Firestone and Bottle Logic. Interest in newer varieties—and awareness of hop-variety relevance—have probably never been higher. I’d prefer to see hard sodas fizzle. 2017 won’t be the year of the dunkel.

If we haven’t already, we’ll likely reach Peak Tropical in 2017, as we’ve had so many inroads in that direction as of late: lots of breweries with fruit IPAs, tons of interest in new tropical-inclined hop varieties (from New Zealand, Australia, etc.), beers that emphasize ‘tropical’ in their marketing (with or w/o fruit additions), countless new IPAs named via some tweak of the words “juice” and/or “juicy”, etc. We’re all looking for our tropical beach somewhere.