(Ed note: This is longer than usual. There are no pictures. Next time there will be pictures. Promise!) When we talk about beer and food pairing, we try to come up with shorthand rules. I’ve heard Stephen Beaumont suggest you treat Lagers like White Wine and Ales like Red Wine. […]
Ongoing Projects
1 When I started writing about beer, it was because I was trying to establish some credentials in order to get into brewing school. I did manage, subsequently, to get into brewing school, but then there was a book deal. I found that commuting 5 hours a day to Niagara College […]
So You Want To Be A Brewer: St. John Marzen
If you grow up in a house with a pretty decent library, it’s almost a given that you’re going to end up as a reader. My parents are readers, and as they get older, we end up having pretty good discussions about books. Their tastes have diverged wildly over the […]
So You Want To Be An Author: On Writing About ...
When I went to middle school, we used to have week long trips to a property that the school owned out near Georgetown, Ontario. They would attempt to teach us important things about biodiversity and the life cycle and nature photography while we squirmed in our seats, happy for once […]
So You Want To Be A Brewer: St.John’s Wort/Cheshire Valley ...
It will come as a surprise to few frequent readers that one of my best friends passed away last October. I feel that if I am handing out thank-you’s, one of them should be to my friend Tim Mitchell. He inspired the following piece which I submitted to the Oxford […]
St.John’s Wort – Year One – Brothers in Arms
If you’re an amateur brewer, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “Relax! Have a homebrew.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t find this to be the comforting mantra that it is no doubt intended to be. In the back of my head when I’m brewing beer I’m mostly […]
Great Lakes/St.John’s Wort Collaboration #2 – Adequacy Prevails!
(Astute readers will have noticed that this blog has taken a heavy turn towards actually brewing beer recently. I promise you that I will return shortly to making fun of the other facets of the brewing industry and beer drinking generally. There will also be some input from a couple […]
So You Want To Be a Brewer – Great Lakes/St. ...
In the run up to the brew day at Amsterdam, I was pretty nervous. You never know exactly how something like your first all-grain brew day is going to go. There are a lot of considerations: Is my recipe any good? What goes on at an event like this? Does […]
Amsterdam Brew Day
One of the nicest things about being a beer blogger, aside from the fact that there is periodically more free beer than you can shake quite a large bundle of sticks at, is that if you profess that you’re interested in learning to be a brewer, people take you at […]
So You Want To Be a Brewer – Learn 2 ...
In the UK, there are entire websites devoted to the concept of the Pub Crawl, but in Canada it’s something of a lost art. I say “lost art” but the truth of the matter is that it may be a phenomenon that never properly developed. How could it? The layout […]