St. John's Wort Beery Musings and Amusing Beers

Discount Beer February – James Ready

February 5, 2013 5:34 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

WHOSE BABY IS THAT?

The first thing that you have to know in order to understand why the James Ready brand exists is that the Oland family, scions of Maritime brewing, had extraordinarily bad luck with their breweries based in Halifax. The brewery burned down in 1878 when fire from a kiln sparked some timbers and the whole place went up. They recovered from that brewery disaster just in time for another fire to gut the building less than a decade later. Everything went along tolerably well until 1917 when the Mont Blanc exploded in Halifax harbour and levelled basically everything. Not only was there no brewery, there was no city.

Since building a new brewery was out of the question, they purchased a few. In 1918, it was the Red Ball brewery in Saint John, NB. Then, in 1928, they purchased both the Alexander Keith and Son brewery in Halifax and the James Ready brewery in Saint John. As far as I’m aware, none of these breweries ever burnt down or fell over.

If you take over a brewery, you’re disinclined to continue using their brands, especially if you’re a family of brewers well into its third generation. The James Ready company had registered Moosehead as a trademark and it had never been used. A brand new brand for a new province.

The James Ready brand came out of mothballs in 2003, 75 years after the purchase. While some of the brands are available in New Brunswick, the majority of them exist only within Ontario.

WHAT’S THEIR ANGLE?

The nice thing about James Ready is that what marketing there is, is supremely basic. The website provides a relatively minimal amount of information about the actual product, but it does so in a relatively entertaining way. This is a good thing, because the target audience for the discount beer section doesn’t really care all that much. It gives you a sense of the lineup and has some attractive graphic design that persists throughout the lineup of products.

This is basically targeted at young beer drinkers, probably between 19 -25. It’s got “THE BUTTON OF AWESOMENESS” which links to pictures of tolerably diverting stuff (which would probably be more diverting after a couple of cold James Ready products) and, inexplicably, a short youtube clip from Caddyshack. This probably suggests that if the beer is good enough for Carl Spackler and his ball washer, it’s good enough for you.

It’s a pretty good example of Resource to Efficacy in marketing. The website never has to change and  most of the effort goes into social media through Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook presence is especially impressive because people send in content and whoever is running the thing is swift on their feet. They updated to crowdsource content on the Super Bowl power outage for pity’s sake.

I can’t imagine that it costs much to maintain the brand, but it looks good and is handled well.

WOULD I BUY THAT?

Being as this is the first actual review of DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY, I don’t know whether I’m starting out lenient and will eventually become somewhat more stringent. Will the sameness of the category eventually drive me to use increasingly gimmicky ways to describe very similar flavours? Will I do one in Homeric couplets just to entertain myself? We shall see. Either way, the nice people at James Ready got their samples in first, which is a bit risky.

James Ready 5.5% is a lager of some variety or other, but the website doesn’t specify. The Beer Store website says Lager comma Pale. The aroma, typical of an adjunct lager is grain and corn, but there is a hint of floral noble hop in there.  While it’s relatively sweet, it’s actually fairly soft on the palate and there is some noticeable hop bitterness in the mid palate and on the finish. I think it’s a little dark in colour for a Pale Lager, and the mouthfeel is actually not entirely unlike a Munich Helles if you discount the adjunct.

VERDICT: For the money, this is a deal better than you might expect. I have had beer that I liked a lot less than this. Not only did I finish the can, but I had a second one while watching Monday Night Raw.

James Ready Lager has less to recommend it. There’s no real hop presence here and this falls pretty squarely into the American Adjunct Lager style. It has a slightly sour finish to it that I don’t find appealing. It’s a little like Gertrude Stein’s opinion on Oakland: “There is no there there.” Now, typically, for the people who will be buying and drinking this, that’s not a problem.

VERDICT: I can’t really recommend this one, but that’s because it doesn’t really do anything except contain alcohol. Since I’m trying to remain positive for the month ahead, I will point out that it laced nicely in the glass and retained its head well.

However, doing something is sometimes worse than doing nothing, and that brings us to James Ready 6.0%. It displays every bit of its alcoholic content in the aroma and it’s worlds too sweet. The finish is vaguely medicinal while remaining cloying. It lingers on the palate like smoke in a hallway. I know that I’m not the target audience for this one, but I can’t see what would recommend it even to the layman except of course for the extra 0.5% alcohol. In university, sometimes the ol’ wobbly pop is enough of a sales pitch.

VERDICT: A world of no. A whole solar system of no. Nice looking cans.

Finally, there’s good news. James Ready Original Ale is actually interesting!

The Beer Store suggests that it’s a Blonde Ale, but it’s closer to a cross between English Pale and ESB. The aroma has some toasted whole grain bread, toffee and some roast character like coffee. There’s maybe a hint of diacetyl, but it’s low and probably stylistically appropriate. If it had slightly more bitterness and body, I think you would have been hard pressed to differentiate between this and Ontario Pale Ales ca. 2007.

VERDICT: If this were coming out of a craft brewery, I would be inclined to turn my nose up at it. Given its provenance and price point, it’s actually kind of awesome. The only real downside is that it only comes in two-fours, meaning that I shall have to begin looking for recipients for some of the remaining bottles.

Posted in: DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

DISCOUNT BEER FEBRUARY

January 31, 2013 9:47 pm ⋅ 8 Comments ⋅

I have currently been writing professionally about beer for two and a half years. Next week will be the beginning of my third year with Sun Media. I’ve discovered that if you write about beer all the time, you run into a few small problems that nag at you.

The first is that you end up with fatigue. It’s not exactly palate fatigue. It’s not like hops have a cumulative effect and the alpha-acids aggregate in your cerebrospinal fluid. At least, not as far as I’m aware. It’s more like novelty fatigue. There are truly great and interesting things happening in Ontario as far as the development of new flavours go. Lackey’s doing good things. McOustra’s doing good things. Volo, Nickel Brook, Bellwoods, Indie Alehouse, Beaus… The envelope push is a constant in the craft beer scene at the moment. That’s a good thing, but familiarity with that breeds contempt for it.

At its purest, this kind of brewing is about innovation and it’s incredibly personal. This, when you strip away the marketability of the thing, is about a man and a conceptual vision of a product. The first batch might not make it. The third batch might not make it. It’s about honing a beer to make it adhere to a vision. This is part of what gives craft beer its wonderful appeal. The finished beer is the result of hours and hours of thought and inspiration and effort.

But it’s still, what, like, 60 litres of pilot batch? That’s like… 110 pints when you count spillage. If it’s 4oz glasses, it’s still not that many of them and probably less than the number you’d come up with because of more spillage in service. I have a national audience at Sun Media. I can’t write about a beer which, if it is any good and people come back for another sample, will get tried by maybe 80 people. By the time I write about it, it’s gone and it may never come back.

Because it’s not utile, I am thence forced to look at something that should be intellectually thrilling because it’s out there in bleeding edge, Chuck Yeager Stick Of Beeman’s territory with some amount of detachment.

It’s the detachment that’s fatiguing. I feel like I should be just tickled as all hell that I get invited to try this wild, wacky stuff, but instead it’s like “Uh… What can I write about this?” I can’t write about everything: Microsoft Word has a file size limit. I don’t want to offend people by not writing about them, especially if their only sin is being middle of the road. The end result is that I sit here in a deep blue funk, drinking too much coffee, afraid to go to events that I would probably enjoy.

Potentially the worst part of this is that when you’re talking about the entirety of craft and import sales in Ontario, and this is the bread and butter of every single one of us writing about beer, these market segments make up 20% of the beer market in Canada. There are just a huge number of people who are not drinking this stuff, and whose interest in reading about it is therefore pretty minimal.

This is why, for the month of February, St.John’s Wort will be hovering gently in the DISCOUNT BEER Category of The Beer Store.

You may consider it something of a busman’s holiday. The great thing about discount beers is that, as far as I’m aware, no one has ever bothered to cover them. These are brands which do not necessarily merit a PR representative. Let me tell you how I know: I have written to all of the producers (or will in the coming days) in order to request the standard two bottles of beer for review (In case one breaks in transit or there are off flavours or it’s any good and I’d kind of like a second one). There are 60 beers in the discount section. It is not worth the time of the producers of these beers to open a case and pick out two beers. They seem hell-bent on sending the minimum size of packaged beers.

They care enough to get some free publicity, but not so much that honest evaluation of the product will lead to tears in some delicate soul’s mash-tun. They know that it’s the discount section. Believe me. They know.

A friend of mine, Andrew Walsh (who judging by the photographic evidence in TAPS magazine is no stranger to the aftereffects of cheap beer) once claimed that his favorite beer was Brava. “What do you want for 30 bucks,” I am paraphrasing him as saying. In some sense, he’s right. These are utility beers, not really designed for maximum flavour. They aren’t hip. They aren’t trendy. The only way they’re getting near a barrel is if Donkey Kong throws one at the display. They are more or less likely to be consumed in great volume by people who think that a 24 is worth $29.95 and who are primarily concerned with the mood altering effect.

I’m not one of those people. I haven’t bought a 24 since student life in New Brunswick. I’m a prospective beer judge. I’m Cicerone Certified Beer Server and with any luck a Certified Cicerone by the end of the month. I went to brewing school (for a while). I’ve designed (in collaboration) some pretty well regarded stuff and I read voraciously on the subject of beer.  I’m decided to take this seriously.

Evaluations will be completed on all 60 beers listed in The Beer Store’s discount category. The samples will consist of 4-6 ounces. The notes will be honest, but will reflect the fact that these are not products intended to stand up to significant overthinking. Marks will not be deducted for the fact that the brewery has sent me 48 times the amount of beer I require and therefore forced me to find creative ways to get rid of it.

Look: Lager makes up something like 90% of the total beer market. Discount lager probably makes up something like 30% of that, which makes it larger than the entirety of craft beer. Intellectual honesty therefore demands that someone actually look at the Gorgon. If nothing else, by the end of the month, we will be able to crown a champion and we may have ushered in the era of the discount category beer snob. Even a trailer park beauty pageant has a winner.

I have the feeling that by March, I’m really going to be looking forward to a barrel aged something or other with six kinds of hops and 78 well chosen IBUs and a grain bill the size of Venezuela.

Posted in: The Beer Store ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Ramblin’ Road Brewery Farm

January 26, 2013 7:59 pm ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅


It’s hard to know exactly what to make of Ramblin’ Road Brewery Farm. They’re a new brewery in Norfolk County. Part of the issue here is that there really aren’t all that many farm breweries kicking around and there’s not really a concrete definition of what that might entail, at least in Ontario. Is it “we grow some of our own ingredients” or “we produce farmhouse style beers” or “this brewery is actually, physically located on a farm” or some or none of the above.

This image came from Canadian Beer News, partially because I made notes on the Pilsner so long ago that I don't even remember if I took pictures.

This image came from Canadian Beer News, partially because I made notes on the Pilsner so long ago that I don’t even remember if I took pictures.

The concept is a little sketchy. To give you an idea, there was a law passed in New York State in 2012 that suggests that it has less to do with whether the brewery grows its own ingredients and more to do with whether they come from that agricultural area. The percentage of material grown in New York State that must be included in a “farm brewery” beer will increase from 20% (currently) to 90% by 2024. The actual beer that is produced seems of comparatively little consequence in terms of designation. In Ontario, there’s no such guideline.

There is, I think, a mental association that people have developed with a few farm producers in the states that created a certain amount of excitement before the products coming out of Ramblin’ Road were announced. I know that I initially thought, “Oh, so what? Like Hill Farmstead? That’ll be great.”

Ramblin’ Road has sidestepped rusticity in their beers, preferring to start with some easily accessible beer styles. There’s a Pale Lager, a Cream Ale and a Pilsner. Of these, I’ve only tried the Pilsner. It’s not quite saazy enough to be a Czech jobbie and it doesn’t quite have the cracker grain character of a northern German Pilsner. By process of elimination, it’s sort of an American Pilsner and therefore a touch less exciting than I was hoping for, although still pleasingly floral in a mild way.

It is certainly well made. I can’t fault the brewers there. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at having it again in the future. I sat there staring at the glass for a while trying to figure out why you would start out with that range of beers if you were in Ontario of all places where there are now similarly named breweries launching with a shot across the bow like Canny Man.

Then I remembered two things:

1)      Ramblin’ Road is in La Salette and not Toronto.

2)      I’ve seen this work just across the lake in Chautauqua County, NY

I don’t know that if they had started with more interesting beers, people would have gone out of their way to visit Ramblin’ Road. In terms of drawing power, it’s probably better to brew solid popular mainstays and get people to visit from nearby than to bet the brewery farm that people will drive in for barrel aged thingummies. That works in Toronto, but we’ve got semi functioning public transit and something like five million people. La Salette has a post office and a general store and I would bet you that they are both closed on Sunday.

It’s actually a pretty clever idea. Unlike, say, Toronto, where you’ve got a number of craft brewery lagers competing for space on tap with every new thing that comes out, Southwestern Ontario is more or less Lager country and comparatively unchanging. This is kind of clever. If you draw a 150 km radius from the brewery (about two hours of country driving), you’re equidistant to Toronto and the Huron coast. You have the ability to sell all over the place (although making inroads within Labatt heavy London might be a bit of a bear.)

Combine this with the fact that the owner of the brewery, John Picard, has been distributing his fresh roasted, salty nuts all over the province for 30 years, and you probably take a lot of the guesswork out of sales and distribution. I would imagine that also highlights for the brewery the importance of food safety and sanitation, so you don’t get rookie mistakes. Also, consider the overhead on a brewery outside of Delhi. Peanuts.

Now, that’s a wide catchment area; a huge radius. You probably don’t have to go that far afield to sell a lot of well made accessible beer. Southern Tier in Lakewood, NY, makes a beer called Chautauqua Brew that does more or less the same thing: Provides a locally made accessible alternative to macro beers. If I remember the conversation with the brewers correctly, the only thing that outsells it locally is Busch Light.

They are actually growing a wide variety of hops at Ramblin’ Road. According to their representative in a thread on Bartowel, the farm that it’s located on has been growing them for five years. This suggests to me that by the time August rolls around you might start seeing some more esoteric products. Apparently, Norfolk County produces Ginger, Hazelnuts and Lavender. If it were me, I’d take advantage of that in addition to the hops. Plus, by that point, they’ll have had a brisk summer of sales.

The sales will come partly because the beer is solid and accessible, but mostly because they’ve invested wisely in social media and online presence. The logo and design are solid and that, combined with concept that this is a rural Ontario kind of farm thing makes for just a dynamite brand. Plus, whoever is manning their twitter account is doing a bang up job.

I don’t know that their beer will ever catch on with the craft beer wonks in Toronto, but the branding is strong enough that it might actually get on tap in more mainstream environments where tastes aren’t as rarified.  I think that they will probably do exceptionally well in smaller Ontario markets because there’s not a brewery that’s more conceptually representative of rural route, concession road Ontario.

Chances are, if you’re reading my blog, it’s probably not going to knock your socks off. That said, if you want a textbook brewery opening strategy, these guys are good. Hopefully, someday they’ll get around to using the hops they’ve been growing.

Posted in: Accounting for Taste, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Amsterdam Tap Takeover @ Bar Volo

January 23, 2013 10:59 am ⋅ 5 Comments ⋅


I want to point something out to you, and it will seem obvious in retrospect: Toronto’s Amsterdam Brewery is running a tap takeover at Bar Volo on February 2nd. It sold out completely in about 4 hours. The first rating on Boneshaker IPA on Ratebeer.com is May 2010. That was the first beer they produced that you could point to and say “Oh hey. That’s not Amsterdam Blonde at all.”

This means that in the span of about 33 months, Amsterdam brewery has gotten to the point where they feel comfortable releasing 32 beers to the public at the same time. That’s about a beer a month. Many of these beers are aged in wine or bourbon barrels and will have been sitting there for quite a while. This all happened at the same time that they were moving their brewery across the city.

It’s not exactly like the organization has done a 180. They still produce a whole lot of Amsterdam Blonde, which is… y’know… wet. That’s ok. People like liquids.

The Amsterdam retail store, viewed from the Brewhouse.

The Amsterdam retail store, viewed from the Brewhouse.

Possibly, it’s because of the changes that have been taking place over there that I tend to criticize one man more frequently than anyone else in the Ontario brewing scene. His name is Iain McOustra. He works for Amsterdam as Head Brewer and he has been experimenting with varying beer styles for a while now. One time, I suggested that he danced on the head of a pin, trying to satisfy the tastes of Toronto beer drinkers. I may have suggested that he did it in a tutu. I am still sorry for putting that image in your head, because even two years on, no one needs that.

I digress.

His methods are a little odd. If you look at the way that pilot brews and the development of differing styles works in Ontario, it’s easy to see some examples of systematic progress. I mean, we didn’t get Great Lakes Karma Citra without Mike Lackey brewing literally dozens of batches of different IPAs in a sort of research capacity. I think that Iain’s approach is a little more scattershot, but this is probably because he gets excited about so many different ideas. I’m not saying there’s not progression, but it doesn’t always end up being in a consistent direction.

Most of your Amsterdam one-off beers are coming out of this system these days. It's an improvement over the Keggles they started out with.

Most of your Amsterdam one-off beers are coming out of this system these days. It’s an improvement over the Keggles they started out with.

I haven’t ever really publicly criticized the stuff he’s done. I’ll mostly just give him feedback to his face. Now, to be fair, I’ve never intentionally downrated anything that he has done just to annoy him. When he has done well, I’ve told him so. When he has not done as well as he hoped, I have periodically embellished slightly after his first burst of profanity, because he’s just so easy to rile up.

It’ll sometimes go like this, as it did in 2011:

J: I really don’t like this Hulk Hogan thing. Is it a Kolsch? It’s a little catty.

IM: What? MotherF***er? That S**t is the bomb.

J: No, man. It tastes like an ocelot peed next to it and the pee seeped in there.

The point is this: I have, for the last… let’s say year or so, given Iain a batting average for his beers at any single event.  At the 2011 Movember Bash, he hit about .400. This is not bad if you’re Ted Williams. It meant that about 2 of 5 brews that he made for the occasion were good. Good is maybe underselling it. The thing is that if you’re going to have your own event, if you know you’re going to be serving beer to people, you want to do the best you can. Experimental brews have the potential to bring your average down. Nature of the beast. You aren’t going to come out a hero the first time all the time.

Then there was a night at Volo when he had a few beers on. Night Train, I think the specialty was called. That was an .800 night. 4/5. The man did good. People liked this. It was a funkifized brown ale on a wine barrel tip. I liked it. Hell, I told him so.

At the Hart House festival, there was Sleeping Giant Barley Wine, which made really solid use of the barrel character. At Cask Days this year, everything the man touched turned to gold. Full City Tempest? A proper coffee Imperial Stout as good as anything in that style that has been brewed in this province?

The special event space is packed full of barrels. I guess if you own that many barrels, you gotta stash 'em somewhere. Green Flash does the same thing.

The special event space is packed full of barrels. I guess if you own that many barrels, you gotta stash ‘em somewhere. Green Flash does the same thing.

Between all of this stuff, I was down at Amsterdam periodically, to fill up a ridiculous wooden keg or on a beer tour of Toronto when Iain was dodging the host and I didn’t really want to pretend I didn’t know about how lager was made. He showed me something in a Golden Ale in a Pinot barrel. I might have been the first to taste that one. It was, at that point, mellow and a skooch mango-y. I still gave him a going over for “what market is there for this and who’s going to drink it?”

So when the Amsterdam night at Volo sold completely out in about four hours, I wasn’t all that surprised that there was a market. The only problem is that there are 32 taps. That’s a lot of taps. There will be misses. No one bats a thousand. It just doesn’t happen. Name a brewery that does everything perfectly. Go on. Do it. You can’t. I’d say a .500 performance would be a good deal on 32 taps.

Here is Iain McOustra looking respectable. He does not like having his photo taken, even when he is wearing a jacket.

Here is Iain McOustra looking respectable. He does not like having his photo taken, even when he is wearing a jacket.

Either way, this is something of a landmark in terms of Amsterdam’s development, in the dichotomy between the easily approachable, slightly pedestrian fare in their core lineup and the new, exciting, more sophisticated stuff of the last three years. Will Iain McOustra be able to bring the recent standard of quality one-offs to bare on the new brewpub? Will they finally scrap the KLB zombie brands? Will Jamie Mistry show up wearing his Lederhosen?

The answer to all these questions is “probably.”

Edit: Some readers seem to be of the opinion that I am somehow anti-McOustra. This is not the case. I am very much pro-McOustra, even if I needle him periodically. He gives as good as he gets. The point of the article here is to showcase the fact that his development as a brewer has been interesting to watch and is more and more frequently resulting in excellent one-off beers. While I have made it clear that 16/32 really good beers would be a respectable outing for a tap takeover of this magnitude, I have little doubt that he’ll surpass that mark, especially when you take the collaborations into account. That said, I don’t think anyone is going to completely dominate on 32 taps. To ascribe that likelihood to any brewer would be to engender potential disappointment. If you try to do a difficult thing well, you will sometimes fail.

Posted in: Bar Volo, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

They Send Me Beer: Grand River Brewing

January 11, 2013 9:02 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

I’m always happy to receive beer from Grand River Brewing. I got to know Bob Hannenberg a little bit during a stopover in Philadelphia on the way to the craft brewing conference in San Diego last year. I like Bob, and generally speaking, I like much of the beer that he produces. I like the grainy heft of Galt Knife Lager and I think that if I could only choose one Ontario beer to drink in perpetuity, it would probably be the Mill Race Mild. Part of the attraction there is that it is a beer that you can have two of and then go do something afterwards. Welsh style Dark Mild. Gotta love it.

This time around, they have sent me two beers, which are sort of outside the brewery’s mission statement of lower alcohol beers. They have sent the Jubilation Winter Warmer and the Russian Gun Imperial Stout.

While the beer itself is very tasty indeed, you can't actually read the entire label without turning the bottle. I had not noticed that before.

While the beer itself is very tasty indeed, you can’t actually read the entire label without turning the bottle. I had not noticed that before.

Jay Burnett, who dropped the beers off for me, has thoughtfully provided a fact sheet. I would like to share with you the story of Russian Gun.

The Russian gun, (or Gun as we call it) is named after the Queens square cannon that sits in downtown Galt, Cambridge. The cannon was awarded to the town of Galt for its support of the English troops during the Crimean war which ended in 1856.

That year, to celebrate the victory during Victoria Day, the Cannon was fired at noon. The men firing the cannon successfully fired three shots. However, during the fourth, the powder prematurely exploded, killing both men, charring their upper bodies beyond human recognition and dismembering the arms and hands of both men; Two children were lightly scratched.

That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the darkest backstory on any beer in Ontario. I mean, I considered calling a sumac beer Wendigo which refers to a psychosis in which people come to believe they’re possessed and turn to cannibalism.  I thought better of it, since no one is ordering Sweeny Todd’s Red Ale.

Still, Russian Gun is a good name conceptually for a Russian Imperial Stout. It’s got the Sevastopol connection from the Crimea and it represents a local history that helps define the brewery. That’s something. Plus, those two children got away comparatively unscathed.

The beer itself pours a completely opaque black with a resilient tan head that laces nicely. The aroma contains more smoke than I remember from previous years. One of the strengths of Grand River is that they can alter recipes from year to year on their seasonal beers without causing too much fuss. I think the 2010 version had more cocoa character to it. It’s a solid Imperial Stout with quite a bit of character.

The bottle I have here was packaged on the 19th of December and it’s my impression that this could do with a little bit of time to round out the rougher edges. I’m getting a lot of roast character off of it ranging from chocolate to coffee to a small amount of char, which is not entirely unappealing given the small amount of smoke in the aroma. There’s a note of drying fruit in the middle of the aroma; Like apples drying out in a root cellar. It’s in LCBOs at the moment. If you pick some up now, it will probably be in even better shape by the end of February. The fact sheet says it’s 9.0% alcohol, but the bottle says 8.0%. I’d be inclined to believe the fact sheet, based on the slight heat.

See? You've got to turn the bottle. Me, I would narrow the thing and put "Imperial Stout" in a smaller font, but what do I know? I'm shortsighted and partially colourblind.

See? You’ve got to turn the bottle. Me, I would narrow the thing and put “Imperial Stout” in a smaller font, but what do I know? I’m shortsighted and partially colourblind.

I know people who set aside bottles of Russian Gun for vertical tastings, which seems weird to me because the recipe seems to tweak annually, thus defeating the purpose somewhat, but it probably makes for a nice evening.

Jubilation Winter Warmer is available at the brewery this year, and you’re going to have to go down to Galt to get it. It’s 7.0% and it is, for my taste, cinnamon heavy. It contains too much cinnamon for its own good, becoming unbalanced. I think that the Highballer Pumpkin Ale did that this year as well. Like I mentioned earlier, since the recipe on the Jubilation Winter Warmer changes from year to year, this is not really a condemnation. Next year it will probably not contain so much cinnamon.

The thing that Jubilation represents is a switch in packaging. For the first time since I can remember, the bottle is not a 500ml bottle with the typical Grand River labeling. It’s a 650ml bomber with a much improved label that speaks to the fact that there are changes occurring at Grand River. I don’t doubt that just about every blogger or journalist that has talked to them over the last few years has mentioned that they needed new labels. That’s happening.

Of course I’ve thrown out the bottle, so I don’t have a picture of it. Trust me, it’s a marked improvement. It’s interesting to see how Grand River is evolving, and one of the things I like about them is that the change is comparatively unhurried. Some breweries, if told that their labels were sort of hokey looking, would panic and try to change things immediately. Grand River is content to change things slowly, and I suspect that’s partially because they know they have a good product and that their clientele are not going anywhere.

Posted in: LCBO Releases, Reviews, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

They Send Me Beer: Radical Road Brewing Canny Man

January 6, 2013 4:47 pm ⋅ 7 Comments ⋅

I’m always interested when something I’m not expecting happens. For instance, I didn’t expect the brewers at Black Oak to start up their own label. They’ve been a bit cagey about it as the thing has developed and I don’t think that anyone knew quite what to expect. It was probably last winter I was talking to Simon Da Costa about this development. It must have been, because the pub next to Volo was still Local 4 and we were in there discussing it.

He said he was going to brew a Scotch Ale, that he was going to barrel age it. I looked at him and said something to the effect of “And that’s going to be your only beer? Are you crazy?” He looked at me and shrugged. When he did so, the sleeves of his well loved motorcycle jacket looked like they would probably fall off. He explained that he had worked in Scotland and he thought it would work.

Months later, dozens and dozens of Scotch barrels arrived at Black Oak. Mostly mainland, speyside barrels, if I’m remembering correctly. You’d have been forgiven, based on the number, for putting on your best welsh regimental accent and muttering to yourself “There’s thousands of them.” One week I walked into the brewery and the entire back wall was taken up with barrels.

At one point, I told Simon and Jon Hodd, who worked with him on this, that I thought they were maniacs. Who the hell imports scotch barrels in order to launch a beer? Were all the beers out of their label going to be barrel aged? Were they crazy?

Now, understand that I like both of these people. Simon is talented and funny and unassuming and gets on with the difficult job of brewing. Jon, who I tend to refer to as “Jon Boy” after the Waltons, since he’s so wholesome, is a good brewer in his own right, having come up through Volo. I really wanted to get a sense of what they were doing. I wanted to try their beer.

It was tantalizing. It was a secret project. As far as I know, no one had really tried the thing. At some point in the last couple of months, I wrote an article on Scotch Ales for The Sun and I called around to see if they’d let me try some. It wasn’t ready. Rather than attempt to get national promotion, they wanted the product to be as they envisioned it before anyone got to try it.

Today, I finally got my hands on a bottle. Now, my understanding is that they’ve spent most of the morning packaging the bottles. When you see the following photos, I have no doubt that you’ll understand why.

There’s the brewery label.

It's a Rad enough label to save the President.

It’s a Rad enough label to save the President.

And the beer label.

It's a coaster! It's a promotional gimmick! It's a coaster and a promotional gimmick!

It’s a coaster! It’s a promotional gimmick! It’s a coaster and a promotional gimmick!

And the tissue wrapping.

I'm saving this for Christmas next year.

I’m saving this for Christmas next year.

And the actual cork and cage bottle.

The actual label is sort of austere and impressive. I have liked fancy labels a lot less than this.

The actual label is sort of austere and impressive. I have liked fancy labels a lot less than this.

I suppose if you’re going to make a splash on shelves in Ontario LCBOs, this is not such a bad way to do it. It’s eye catching. It’s a bit like Rod Stewart’s hair. It’s hypnotic, and then, once you realize that he’s got your attention, it’s too late to stop singing along to Young Turks.

Knowing what I know about Simon and Jon, I’m a little surprised by the beer.  Canny Man is 9.1% and comes in what is essentially a champagne bottle. It has apparently been matured for 71 days in the barrels. I don’t know how you decide when enough is enough. I guess you have a sacrificial guinea pig barrel with a draw pipe.

It pours a sort of chestnut brown, relatively aggressively carbonated for the style. The interesting thing to me is that usually when North American brewers do Scotch Ales or Wee Heavies, they build the smoke in. I’ve confirmed with Jon that they used a tiny amount of smoked malt here, so most of the smoke comes from the barrels. The reason that’s interesting to me is that this is sort of what I remember McEwan’s being like. There’s that malt caramel/toffee/fruity middle. That’s what the beer would probably have been like without the barrel aging. It’s a proper wee heavy, which has been subsequently introduced to the barrel.

You can tell that’s what happened because the smoky notes from the barrel linger on the roof of the palate. It sort of separates into a toffee dark fruit middle while smoke wisps over top. It’s odd because it means that it is simultaneously as close to being a real wee heavy as anything I’ve tried in the last year while playing into the North American predilection for adding smoke to Scotch Ales. The effort that must have gone into getting the beer exactly right and locating the right barrels to make it happen is a little staggering, especially for two maniacs in Etobicoke.

I should have listened to Simon when he said that he knew it would work. There are only two criticisms that I can see being leveled at this beer. One is that the packaging is… well, it’s ostentatious. I understand that there is a sweatshop over at Black Oak working into the night on tissue paper wrapping. That’s easily fixed after the first edition makes a splash. It would do just fine with only the bottle. The labeling is pretty enough to sell the thing.

The other criticism I can see is that the molasses seems to have fermented out quite a bit and that it may not be sweet enough for some palates. It’s not like an Innis & Gunn barrel aged beer. It’s drier than that, but not so dry that you don’t get the body.

The impressive thing to me is that all of this activity has closed around Robbie Burns day. Theoretically, it’ll be available in the LCBO sometime this week and it should make an appearance at some Robbie Burns dinners this year.

Canny men, more like.

Posted in: Reviews, Shameless Plugs, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Beer and Food: Belgium and Lancashire, Together At Last

January 3, 2013 7:48 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Alright. Let’s say that you got up at O Dark Thirty on December 12th and you went out and stood in the line at the LCBO with a bunch of other poor bewildered sods who hadn’t ingested enough coffee to qualify as anything other than “shambling horde.” You stood in line in temperatures that would normally make you get a second pair of woolen socks and you managed to get a ticket for the Westvleteren XII at the liquor store only to find that you were probably going to have to wait another hour before the heavens parted and the manager saw fit to open the store so that you can get your monastic zymurgy on.

Good for you. You just purchased an excellent beer! Well done on remembering to bring your mittens.

If you were one of the happy go lucky folks balancing your eighty dollar purchase in one hand on the way to the car, I’m betting that you’re probably not suffering from any kind of apprehension about what to do with those beers now that you’ve got them. Maybe you were in line for someone who had to go in to work. Maybe you had a really expensive night in front of the TV. The point is that these are your beers and you can do whatever you want with them. Once you’ve actually purchased the thing, you can do the world’s most expensive beer bong for all I care.

For some of the beer nerds over in the Bartowel.com thread, there was actual panic involved in the situation. They didn’t know how they were possibly going to get their hands on the thing. There was a sense, I think, of unfairness that people who had been waiting for this beer to come to the LCBO since July might not be able to get any of it, being that the release really didn’t provide enough information to guarantee that you could show up at the right time at the right place. Sure, an afternoon of phone calls and pooled resources would help with that, but once that information is posted on a public board, you’re really no better off than any schmuck with a search engine.

I think that for some people who actually managed to get their hands on the Westvleteren XII, there will be a certain amount of agonizing over how best to enjoy it. You know: whether a situation is special enough to break out some of the secret stash. For some, just the fact that it is Tuesday will suffice. For others, the Leafs actually winning the Stanley Cup might not.

Regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, the fact remains that opening a thirteen dollar bottle of a beer that you will probably never be able to buy legitimately at retail again constitutes AN EVENT. For that reason, I’m going to go so far as to suggest that you should probably have it with friends. And that you should probably have it with food. For that reason, I’ve come up with what I think is a pretty good pairing for Westvleteren XII, and having now tested it during one of Brock Shepherd’s last nights at Burger Bar (to a diminutive but captive audience), I’m ready to share it with you.

One of the really great things about the XII at the moment is the fact that it’s pretty aggressively carbonated because it’s still young. This means that it has the ability to scour fat right off the palate. It’s a little bit rustic at the moment since the flavours haven’t come together yet. You get dried fruit that changes with every sip. It’s raisin, it’s cherry, it’s date or fig depending on how that sip attacks you. Mostly it’s raisin, but there’s some variability in there. There’s also a certain amount of toffee and a significant Belgian yeast character.

For that reason, I decided to try it out with a fairly rustic raisin pastry originally from Lancashire called Eccles Cake. You might think it odd to pair an teatime specialty with a Trappist beer, but I think it makes sense, not merely because of the filling, but because of the butter and sugar content in the pastry. Michael Jackson suggested that the XII was all pale malt with the majority of the other flavour coming from candi sugars. This way, you match not only the dried fruit character with the raisins, but it matches the sweetness of the non fermentable stuff from the candi sugar. The carbonation is aggressive enough to lift the fat from the butter.

Of course, that’s not all that interesting by itself. It merely compliments the factors already in play. If you serve the Eccles cake with a small amount of Stilton, you end up with an additional element that provides two important things: salt content, which contrasts the sweetness in both the beer and the cake, and a small amount of that blue mold character. Now, the yeast in the Westvleteren XII isn’t cheesy or butyric, but the mold in the stilton serves to heighten very slightly the yeast character in the beer. It’s not something that you would necessarily think that you want, but it works very nicely.

My feeling, as per usual, is that if you’re going to borrow a recipe in order to do beer and food pairing, you may as well steal from the best. In this case, I’ve lifted the recipe from Heston Blumenthal in the attached link. He suggests a potted stilton, and I think that might be a better idea if you are saving the beer for a little while. Once it ages slightly and the rougher edges come off it, you might not want the full flavour of stilton by itself.

At any rate, this is the kind of thing that will help to make a couple of the bottles of your stash of Westvleteren XII special, if only because the recipe provides so many Eccles cakes that you’ll need to share.

I'm sure that this is not the proper glassware for this beer. However, it did make me feel a little like John Steed on The Avengers

I’m sure that this is not the proper glassware for this beer. However, it did make me feel a little like John Steed on The Avengers

Posted in: Beer and Food ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

Set up a brewery in Kingston, already!

December 31, 2012 12:23 am ⋅ 6 Comments ⋅

Although I grew up in Toronto, I spent a year after university living in Kingston. I like Kingston, but I never really felt as though I understood it. The downtown is laid out as a sort of Triangle, and the bar scene at the time was more or less based on the fact that Queen’s students enjoy cheap beer. The pleasant limestone construction can impose itself on your imagination as you make your way through streets blasted by winter wind. I am comparatively pleased that I wasn’t there for the Ice Storm, since I have seen the six foot icicles that hang off those roofs during the best of winters.

I don’t mean to hold forth on the character of the city overmuch, as that is clearly the bailiwick of Alan McLeod. I will content myself with having my column appear periodically in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

One of the things that always struck me is that this is a city of over a hundred thousand, halfway between Toronto and Ottawa and that no one has seen fit to build a brewery there. It’s more or less ripe for the picking, but without some investment of time or effort, there will not be a brewery there. I think that a proper brewery in Kingston is something of an inevitability.

I’m not entirely discounting the presence of the Kingston Brewing Company, which has a very nice pub, but I’m of the opinion that the shot they took at Ontario market might not work in the current climate. The Dragon’s Breath Pale Ale was a well made and thoroughly satisfying beer back at the turn of the century, but I can’t see anyone with the space to bring it back as a contract brew as Hart Brewing once did. It is still a nice place to spend a couple of hours.

The fact of the matter is that Kingston has incredible potential for a craft brewery, and not just for the reason that there is an annual influx of student loan money and enthusiasm for going out on a Friday night. The city has changed somewhat in terms of appreciating what’s around from a culinary perspective. It can lay claim to some of the best charcuterie in the country in the forms of Luke’s Gastronomy and Seed To Sausage (Up Highway 38 near Sharbot Lake). There’s some very nice cheese being made in Wilton. There are some excellent dairies and organic vegetable farms. This is a city where it’s now possible to buy local everything if you know where to shop.

In addition, the pubs that I remember are not the pubs that people are talking about. There was the Tir Na N’og, which benefited massively from the influx of Belgian beers under the Oland company in the mid 90’s. There was the Toucan, which was where bartenders would call their orders in from other pubs when it was time to close down.

It’s something of an amazement to me that less than a decade on, there are a number of pretty decent places serving craft beers, but no brewery.

As a for instance, there’s The Alibi, which, judging by their facebook presence, may as well be in Toronto. They have Spearhead and Boneshaker and even had a Great Lakes one-off in the form of Audrey Hopburn just before Christmas. Of course there are the more locally based breweries in the form of Barley Days and Church Key. This looks to me to be a step in the right direction.

There’s the Iron Duke, which had Muskoka Mad Tom last time I visited. There’s Sir John’s Public House, which is decorated in the manner of an early 19th century public house replete with haggis fritters (I believe it to be a city by-law that there must be at least one drinking establishment in Kingston which features the likeness of Sir John A. MacDonald. Unlike in America where it is “Washington slept here,” in Kingston it’s “MacDonald drank a fifth of gin, passed out, fell down the stairs, got up without a scratch on him and proceeded to debate a portrait of Thomas D’arcy McGee.”) Sir John’s is a marked improvement on the previous incarnation, Johnny Mac’s, which is now a bridal shop.

The place I had heard the most good things about was The Red House. Before I went to Kingston for Christmas, I found that they had a cask of Pinot Noir barrel aged imperial stout from Nickel Brook. Apparently Ryan Morrow visits the area occasionally and brings beer. I wanted to try it because their Bourbon Barrel Aged Imperial Stout “Kentucky Bastard” is a freakin’ monster.

By the time I got to The Red House on Boxing Day, they had run out of that beer, but that turned out to be something of a blessing in disguise. It’s hard to enjoy your dinner if you start out with the imperial stout. Their tap lineup was suffering somewhat as a result of it being the Christmas season. They were even out of Pilsner Urquell, which is something you don’t see much. I take this to mean that patrons are blowing through good beer in Kingston at a decent clip. Encouraging.

This is more or less what I want. Quality and simplicity, rather than a wider variety.

This is more or less what I want. Quality and simplicity, rather than a wider variety.

Not as encouraging as the food. It’s the sort of upscale down home cooking that makes any beer you order better.  My Brother had the leek, potato and bacon soup and the fried chicken sandwich. I had the burger and Caesar salad. We split a side of lentils because… well, how often do you see a side of lentils? (They were delicious if a tad dijon mustard heavy.)

Skipping dessert, we had the charcuterie platter, which the menu doesn’t really do justice to. In addition to what’s described, there was pepperoncini and marinated artichoke and what I think must have been eggplant. It came with local cheese and meat, which must have come from within a hundred kilometers.

All of this was reasonably priced, especially when you consider the effort the care that has gone into creating the menu. The most expensive thing on there is the cassoulet, and I bet it’s excellent. McLeod, who I mentioned earlier, reported having to restrain himself from licking a plate on one visit. If that’s not an overwhelming endorsement, I don’t know what is. If they had more uniform access to really good beer, this would potentially be one of the best pubs in the country.

At some point, there’ll be a brewery in Kingston to take advantage of this new crop of pubs. The stage exists and only needs an actor to make it work. Then again, I thought more or less the same thing three years ago and nothing has happened yet. Eventually, some second year bio-chem student will take up a hobby. There is definitely room to expand your brewery in Kingston. Probably for cheap.

Posted in: Beer and Food, The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Craft Vs. Crafty

December 14, 2012 11:18 pm ⋅ 10 Comments ⋅

For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about the craft beer vs. crafty beer problem. While it has really only sprung up as a discourse over the last week, you would have to have been blind not to see the issue coming.

The problem here is that large breweries are putting together craft brands like Ten and Blake and Six Pints and they’re making beer that falls pretty solidly in the craft category. It puts people in an odd position where they have to ask questions about authenticity and it makes everyone involved in the discussion look like ridiculous scenesters quibbling over detail.

The problem is that this debate about whether something is a craft beer is more or less inevitable. Look at something like Goose Island or Granville Island. The people who founded the breweries wanted to go and do other things and they sold their companies. On some level it must have been heartbreaking to do. You put your entire career into building something and then at the end you have all of this capital and time sunk into something that has been helped along by a community that enjoys your product. You have to sell it in order to retire.

The odd part is semantic. Say it was a potato chip factory instead of a brewery. You’d never blame a potato chip magnate for selling out. Beer has taken on some kind of emotional significance to a portion of the population and this kind of thing feels enough like betrayal to promote angry messages on internet forums.

I find myself wondering whether the problem is essentially economic. Until the 1980’s there weren’t many small breweries. Since prohibition, large breweries had simply consolidated breweries that they purchased and reduced the number of brands available in order to become more profitable. Brewing is a business, never forget, and that model is a really good model. Not for beer drinkers, necessarily, but if you’re a huge corporation and you want to maximize profit, being the only game in town is a good way to go about it.

The craft breweries are a response as much to a global business model as they are a response to bland macro beer. In the face of huge multinational brands like Budweiser, which represent a global trend towards a single monolithic product, craft beers made locally are a response to unsated demand. Not only do they promote local business, provide employment and a sense of place, they reinforce the idea that manufacture is not dead within North America. If you look at the 2000 microbreweries in the US and the 150-200 in Canada, there is a lot of tertiary economic activity that surrounds them. You need equipment and chemicals and packaging and design and social media and advertising and…. Well, you get the idea.

There’s an economic theory that states that the health of an economy can be determined by the flow of capital through the marketplace. Given the pressures of the 2008 recession and peoples’ fondness for a refreshing beverage during hard times, this probably explains why the craft brewing industry has done relatively well during the last few years.  It’s very difficult to know where your money would end up if you bought a case of Budweiser. When you buy a craft beer, you know that you’re supporting a locally owned business. Craft beer supports local economies.

(It would be disingenuous to say that macro beer doesn’t support local economies. Imagine what would happen if the plant in Golden, Colorado shut down. If the Molson Downsview plant shut down there would be a lot of people out of work. What I’m suggesting is that not ALL of the purchase price of a macro brew goes to support local economies. There are huge parent companies to be considered.)

“Crafty” beer is the price that Craft Beer inevitably pays for its success. It is, however, at a significant disadvantage. It frequently does not have a sense of place associated with it. It almost never has a face associated with the brand.

The thing that I am continually baffled by is that people are drawing a line in the sand based on some aesthetic or intangible principle as to what craft beer is. This is an inefficient and, to be honest, downright silly way of going about the problem. Consider THIS letter from the August Schell brewery to the Brewers Association. I can certainly appreciate that the BA guidelines are fairly stringent when it comes to the use of adjunct in brewing. However, given the larger atmosphere at the moment, a situation in which “crafty” beers are going to continue coming down the pipe inexorably, there are other angles to be considered.

The problem here is that with multinationally owned brewers attempting to produce “crafty” beers that consumers may not be educated enough to differentiate from their Brewer’s Association approved “craft” counterparts, the delineation between the two products based on flavour ceases to be a reliable indicator of authenticity.

If you look at Yuengling or August Schell or say, Moosehead, these are all independently owned breweries that contribute massively to their local economies. They have a sense of place. They have representative faces and visibility and every single one of them is branching out into more interesting products. Aside from the adjunct issue, they fulfill basically every requirement for craft breweries. Perhaps most importantly, they contribute to the local or national economy in a nearly identical way to a craft brewery.

I would venture that the real battle here is not flavour based, but rather a struggle between economic forces and corporations that are globally relevant and locally relevant respectively. People like the idea that their beer is identifiably brewed by someone; that it supports the local economy in a demonstrable and tangible way.

The simple fact of the matter is that eventually, large multinational breweries and their subsidiaries will be able to produce beer that tastes like craft beer. They cannot, however, reproduce independent ownership. If this is the battle line that is currently being drawn, would the Brewer’s Association not re-examine their guidelines and allow large regional brewers like Yuengling a place within their ranks?

It seems to me that an alliance of independent brewers rather than craft brewers within a single nation has one very definite strength: We can discuss for hours the various nuances of what makes something craft. Ownership resides indelibly on a balance sheet.

Posted in: Accounting for Taste ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Every Six Months…

December 8, 2012 3:38 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

It seems like every six months we get a spate of articles about privatization of liquor, wine and beer sales in Ontario. Currently, it’s in the press again because Tim Hudak is theoretically in favour of selling off the LCBO. Now, personally, I think that privatization of sales is a shiny bauble that gets waved in front of the electorate. There are so many factors that would go into privatization that simply mentioning it is never going to accomplish anything. I don’t believe that it will happen in the short term, and that a number of stars would have to align in order to make it happen in the long term.

The reason that the discussion is frustrating is that the status quo for the organizations that would be involved in the discussion never seem to change sufficiently in a six month period to bring any new information to bear on the situation.

It’s like a campus demonstration on social equality. The actual rate at which change takes place on a societal level is glacial. It’s the result of many small changes over a lengthy period. Sure, having placards and megaphones for an afternoon is cathartic, but it accomplishes relatively little. It also promotes a cognitive dissonance between people who think that change ought to be instantaneous and the reality of the situation. Small vocal groups tend not to represent the majority.

When these articles are written, they tend towards being somewhat exploratory while ignoring the fact that there was a similar article in the recent past. Personally, I hate this because the situation exists on a continuum and not as a single instance of reporting as you would be led to believe.

Rather than looking at it from the perspective of the consumer, you have to look at it from the point of view of the revenue stream for the province. The consumer wants change because they can’t find a certain variety of sherry or port, or because the craft beer selection is not expanding quickly enough. The consumer essentially wants to be satisfied on a basic, short term level. I have some sympathy for this, since “more good beer” is probably not a bad thing.

The problem is that that desire simply doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you’ve read an article on the subject in the last year or so, you know that the LCBO generated a dividend of about 1.55 billion dollars for the province in the 2010-2011 period and about 1.63 billion in the 2011-2012 period. Keep in mind that the total amount of revenue for the province of Ontario in 2011-2012 is about 109.25 billion dollars.

This means that the LCBO dividend to the province is worth approximately 1% of the total provincial revenue. It will be slightly higher than that in coming years due to the sale of the LCBO headquarters and adjacent properties. Also, the dividend has been ticking steadily up for the last decade, meaning that there is some significant optimization of profitability going on.

The difficulty is that privatization is not an overnight process. It’s fine to spitball the concept that tax revenue might remain the same or even increase were sales of liquor, beer and wine permitted in convenience and grocery stores. The issue is that this is not magic. There are transitions to be made in order to allow for that situation.

Folks point at Alberta as a shining beacon of privatization. Sherbrooke Liquor, with its thousand beer selection gets mentioned a lot as the kind of thing that might appeal. The thing that tends not to get discussed in re Sherbrooke Liquor is that Alberta was privatized in 1993, meaning that it has taken approximately 20 years to get to the point where there are a thousand beers on the shelf.

I think one of two conditions has to be met amongst the players in the market before privatization can be considered anything more than a pipe dream.

In the case of political will, I suspect that it is unlikely that we will see privatization prior to a year in which there is a budget surplus in the province of Ontario. Ontario’s economic recovery plan suggests  that this will not happen until 2017-18 barring any catastrophe. Until such a time, it would be folly to play with the LCBO dividend that results in 1% of the provincial revenue stream. I would like to think that politicians of all stripes recognize that a guaranteed amount of income in a period of financial hardship is a better choice than an unproven alternative. Once there is money to play around with, you might see change.

The other possibility in the situation has to do with market share. There’s the possibility that the large brewers who own The Beer Store might be quite interested in privatized sales. While they currently control a de facto monopoly on 80% of beer sales within the province, the market share for their products is eroding at a relatively slow drip. This is a bad thing for large brewers, and you can see how there might be some resentment of the fact that they are forced to provide logistics and shelf space (however minimal) for their competition.

I mean, they’re not quite as resentful as the small brewers who are forced to pay for listings and shelf space, but they are probably mildly resentful.

The question of privatization may well hinge on whether the large brewers are willing to forego a sales monopoly in order to take advantage of wider distribution through supermarkets and convenience stores. After all, they are in an advantageous position in terms of economy of scale. Small breweries don’t have the ability to leverage deals with large chains. Large breweries do.

The difficulty is the additional outlay required to make this happen. This requires sales and negotiation, distribution, lobbying, additional and possibly alternative packaging for various chains. It requires more labour. It is an expensive proposition, and a strategy which would not see immediate profit due to the capital expenditure required to make it work.

Should large brewers see a series of poor financial quarters, this might begin to look appealing to them. It assumes, however, that the additional convenience provided to the consumer would result in the growth of the market. Given overall trends we’ve seen for sales of large brewers’ products, this is probably more risk than they are willing to sign on for at the moment.

What might well occur is a concatenation of circumstances whereby a provincial budget surplus and a shrinking market share pronounced enough for large brewers to take such a risk exist at the same time. Say, about… 2016-17.

In the meantime, I think Tim Hudak is performing the time tested political trick of “being seen to be looking into,” which probably doesn’t hurt.

Posted in: The Ontario Beer Revolution ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,