Rule 3 really breaks down into two sections. 3A) Every time you introduce a new beer, it’s going to be someone’s favourite beer. It could be an incredible beverage and a wonderful experience. It could be middling, but suited to the person who is drinking it. It could be objectively […]
1 Sometimes, when I make a Collaboration beer there’s a hidden double meaning. For example, Amsterdam Revelator, Shacklands Golden Mouth, and Granite Fisher King are all secretly St. John beers. John the Revelator, John Chrysostom, John Fisher. They fit the tradition they’re in as well. Bock, Golden Ale, English ESB. I […]
Collab Beer: Rorschach Fancy Lads Peanut Butter Boy
As we established in Rule 1, beer is a luxury good that contains small amounts of recreational poison which people really enjoy. For that reason, it hits people’s desire button. The difficulty is that since the audience for beer does not have uniform desires (since desire is somewhat ephemeral) and […]
Rule #2: Beer Does Not Respect Expertise
3 (Ed. Note: I’ve been writing about beer for 15 years now, and I feel as though it’s time to see if we can’t condense this knowledge down into useful information that might help explain how we got to this point. We’ve been through a boom, we’re going through some pretty […]
Rule #1: Beer Is Almost Never About Beer
16 2024 has been an interesting year for Ontario’s beer market. We’ve had closures, although not quite as many as you might imagine. We’ve had mergers and acquisitions, some of which make no sense. We’ve had the odd brewery open in the province of Ontario, which is not as ludicrous as […]
Ontario Beer: The International Problem
A couple years back, people would joke that they were tired of living in unprecedented times. Well, we’re still there and I don’t really see anyone laughing. Inflation is a real problem and it comes at a time when the beer industry in Ontario is being shaken up by serious […]
Fun With Numbers: How Much Is That Lager In The ...
5 It’s a really interesting time for the brewing industry in Ontario, and it’s one of those moments that prompts some re-evaluation. Josh Rubin called me the other day from the Toronto Star to ask how long I thought The Beer Store would remain in business, pointing out that there are […]
Ontario Beer: The Fifth Wave
8 I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like my Birthday. September 9th has more often than not been the first day of school. Monday, Tuesday. Didn’t matter. Sometimes it would be on the weekend before, but the odds were that my Birthday signalled the first day of school. It always […]
Granite Brewery X St. John’s Wort Fisher King ESB
2 Revelations come in odd places. I had gotten off the St. Clair replacement bus the other month and was walking across Maple Claire park from the Gunns Road streetcar loop. It’s the shortest and least aromatic path to the event space where I pick up the odd shift. Getting to […]
Floral: From the Ground Up
It’s an interesting morning from a task variation standpoint. I’m just about to start teaching this semester’s Beer 1 Online Class (spots still remain) at George Brown College in Toronto. The online class usually has some concessions to distance included. If you have all the students in the same classroom […]