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Over the course of a long winter, I wrote about the brewery strike in Toronto in 1904 because people I know within the industry had become interested in organizing labour in Ontario’s small breweries. Although I didn’t write about it in Lost Breweries of Toronto, which was designed to be […]

1904 Brewery Strike – What Can We Learn?

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Ed. Note: Sometimes paid work gets in the way of skylarking like this. Apologies to anyone who was waiting for a conclusion. We’ll get there eventually. When last we stepped in the Wayback Machine, the labour situation in Toronto’s breweries had come to a head, although in the early days […]

The 1904 Brewery Strike – Part Three

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Having written the history of Toronto’s breweries, I’m frequently struck by how little things change over time. Watching the development of the Craft Brewery Workers Alliance of Canada over the last couple of months has caused bells to ring in the back of my mind.  Brewing is a generational business. […]

The 1904 Brewery Strike – Part One

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Hop Water is better than Non-Alcoholic Beer for a simple reason: Non-Alc Beer is less than the sum of its parts.  As we established last week, Non-Alc beer can just about hit the high points of a style without being sweetened in order to add texture, complexity, and nuance. Whether […]

… And All Beautiful Yellow Flowers

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Recently, I was tasked with tasting a number of gluten free beers in order to accommodate a student with Celiac disease. This was an exercise with interesting parameters. In addition to the substitution of ingredients for wheat and barley, there’s the problem of texture. Alcohol makes up a certain amount […]

In Which I Drink No Alcohol

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“The main obligation is to amuse yourself.” – S.J. Perelman I was standing, not that long ago, in The Only Cafe talking to Sam Corbeil and Dave Lee about the new hop variety that they were using in the beers that were featured at the Sawdust City 10th Anniversary Tap […]

Yeah, I’ve Tried Most Hops

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