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Tag Archives: Toronto Beer Week

Toronto Beer Week – LADIES NIGHT

September 24, 2010 11:47 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

There are, of course, certain topics that it’s difficult to touch on if you’re a white male upper-middle class beer blogger between the ages of 18-35. That’s a demographic that has historically dictated taste (Nuts and Gum; Together at last), but which is almost unilateral in its consumption of fizzy lagers. The advertising campaign did not call it the Carlsberg years for nothing.

One of the issues which I’ve wanted to address for a while is women and beer. It seems like dangerous territory if only for the reason that there are actual female bloggers out there whose entire mission statement is to talk about the issue and they seem a good deal more qualified than I am to do so. Please understand, I’m not attempting to be overtly misogynistic; if anything, I’m slightly misanthropic by nature. I have a healthy distrust of people of any gender amassed in large groups. In a large enough group, people will eventually start dancing.

That said, I’m going to talk about the TORONTO BEER WEEK LADIES NIGHT PUB CRAWL.

Now it has to be said that such an event has a lot of potential for humour, but it would be untoward to cheapen the occasion by belittling it with crass comedic nonsense. For that reason, I will not be using the following jokes:

-          I like my women like I like my Imperial Stout: Russian, and ordered off the internet

-          I like my women like I like my Double IPAs: Bitter, floral and full of alcohol

I will also suggest that the following modified traditional pick-up line will never work, even on an all female pub crawl:

-          Damn, girl. Your feet must be tired because you’ve been standing around drinking for several hours.

Let’s talk seriously about this issue. A caveat, first. Much of the information I’m basing this on is anecdotal.

Women make up more than half of the population, but for the most part they’re not beer drinkers.  All you have to do is look at the culture that exists around beer to see why that might be the case. Just look at the Coors Mansion and Bikini Teams as advertising platforms. It’s exclusionary marketing. Large brewers have traditionally attempted to appeal to some very stereotypical  male urges in order to sell mass produced lagers. It’s not just in the states, either. Look at any large beer festival. There will be women promoting beers dressed in 18th century Bavarian beer wench costumes: sort of low cut, pushed up numbers with flowing skirts. Keith’s is guilty of using this marketing concept, as was Unibroue at Mondial this year.

It’s not even a question of advertising. The entire culture is skewed towards men. Even at beerbistro, which is a pretty high end beer bar, the waitstaff is almost exclusively made up of attractive young women. At least it was during the Brew Dog dinner. There’s a significant portion of my thought process that can’t legitimately complain about the fact, either.  I’m not made of stone.

But, it has to be said that there are traditional gender roles within pub culture: Men drinking beer, women serving it. Even a cursory look at Orwell’s essay The Moon Under Water spells out that the servers in an ideal pub will be female. That may have been 1946, but even at that point Orwell seems to have recognized the divide in clientele:

“And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children —and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.”

It seems to me to be the case that if the children are only allowed in the garden, then it follows that women would also be likely to have to remain in the garden especially given the contemporary mores. Initially, it looks like Orwell is being inclusionary, but there is a distinct physical barrier between men and women in this scenario: The exterior wall of the building.

I do see a number of women at Bar Volo, but I would say that a large percentage of them are sort of along on a night out that someone else has planned. Sometimes I’ll observe a particularly long suffering person order a Fruli on the recommendation of the server, and I suspect that more than half the time it’s because the word STRAWBERRY is prominently figured in the sales pitch. I always find it a little embarrassing that there’s an unspoken understanding between server and customer there that since the customer is female, they should probably want something light and fruity.

I’ve also noticed a not insubstantial amount of condescension on the part of male beer nerds when proffering samples to women at the bar. The idea that someone’s opinion should be less valuable because of their sex is ridiculous.

The thing is this: any attempt to market a beer exclusively to women is going to come off as either condescending or completely misjudged. The question “How can we increase the number of women drinking beer?” is the kind of question that I can see causing advertising executives to call in sick.

Go ahead and try to think of a way to do it. I’ll wait.

There isn’t one; at least not one that doesn’t have the potential to backfire.  This is one of the reasons that I suspect craft beer marketing in Ontario of being especially clever in this regard: They don’t attempt to exploit traditional gender roles specifically. Take a look at the Ontario Craft Brewers video, or at any of their marketing. They are pushing the idea that craft beer is flavourful and local. 100 mile diet. Drink Local. Artisanal beer. It’s about the product and not about a presumed audience. They have a mission statement rather than a flashy sales pitch. I think that’s doing a lot of good for increasing interest in beer amongst women, and although I have no data to back the assertion up I think you’ll agree with me that it’s an elegant solution to a long term marketing problem and indeed a method that’s a great deal more respectful to the intelligence of everyone involved.

LADIES NIGHT was kind of an interesting thing to observe, if only because it took the traditional concept and subverted it nicely. A traditional ladies night is really for the benefit of men. Pubs throw them in order to attract a female client base which in turn ensures that men will turn up and drink. The Toronto Beer Week Ladies Night Pub Crawl was mostly attended by women in the beer industry and their friends. If anything, it seemed to be more about networking amongst these industry professionals than anything else.

I talked with a couple of the ladies to see what they thought about the event and the impression was overwhelmingly positive. It succeeded in helping to establish a sense of the presence of women involved in the beer community, surely a good thing in a male dominated industry. And everyone looked like they were having fun, which is a truly important part of the equation.

Getting women to drink more beer is a thing that you can’t rush. You can’t force it. There are people working on it. Melissa Cole is doing some interesting work in the UK. Mirella Amato is working towards the same thing right here in Ontario. I’m sure it’s a phenomenon that is going to expand in coming years. With the Niagara College program, we may even end up with female brewers, which is no bad thing.

I’m all for beer drinking women. Everyone should be able to derive an equal amount of pleasure from a nice pint without feeling pressured to fulfill some kind of stereotype. Also, I’m honest enough to admit that there is some purely selfish motivation: Toronto Beer Week contains not only literal sausagefests, but also figurative ones. It’s always nice to meet intelligent women with good taste with whom you share an interest.

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Toronto Beer Week – Sunday & Monday

September 21, 2010 12:28 pm ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

DAY ZERO

Like I mentioned earlier, I came home from the Canadian Brewing Awards with a large number of relatively interesting beers. I’ve noticed that some people have the ability to keep rare and interesting beers in their cellar for long periods of time. I marvel sometimes when people mention that they’re drinking a four year old bottle of something. While I’m sure that I could probably stow away some Thomas Hardy in the closet and leave it untouched, I’m not particularly suited to cellaring things. It’s a small apartment and my curiousity inevitably outweighs my ability to ignore quality beers. If you open the hall closet to get the ironing board out and are suddenly confronted by a bottle of Three Floyds Dark Lord, it’s a sure bet that the Dark Lord is going to win out over removing creases in a Brooks Brothers button down.

As such, I decided to kick off Toronto Beer Week on Sunday night, hosting my own event for a handful of industry professionals and dudes I know from Volo. The St.John’s Wort Toronto Beer Week Humourless Trudge Towards Inebriation was a rousing success; Mostly in the sense that it cleared out my cellar so that I can finally iron in peace.

I had a number of interesting beers on offer, but they were predominantly high alcohol Barleywines, IPAs and Stouts. People will tell you that the hallmark of a successful tasting is a small number of quality beverages served at the proper temperatures with food that pairs nicely and proper lighting.  In the case of the SJWTBWHTTI, we had issues with the small number of beverages part. Midway through the evening we had to call in more people to help out.

The Aftermath of the SJWTBWHTTI

The highlights of the evening were some of the rare beers that Troy Burtch managed to slip me after the judging was over. Hart and Thistle’s Hop Rock Candy Mountain is a good example of the kind of thing that you’d be hard pressed to find a bottle of in Ontario if you weren’t a quasi-legitimate beer journalist. Unfortunately, it was one of the beers that was in a smaller bottle and it went early in the proceedings. When people talk about appreciating beer, there’s talk of hop bitterness and this had Citra in such quantities (65 IBU in this case) that it created a noticeable pong as soon as the bottle was opened. For all that you can swirl a sample of beer in your mouth or make copious notes, I think that the true sign of beer appreciation is when a silence falls over the room in the wake of the first sip. In the case of Greg Nash’s Hop Rock Candy Mountain, this silence lasted nearly ten seconds until people started laughing.

There were other highlights as well: Phillips Deadhead Barleywine was a nice surprise, with slightly more aroma than body. Bilboquet’s Corriveau Oatmeal Stout was a lovely companion to the chocolate cake brought to the party by my Super Junior Custom Correspondent Deluxe, Catherine Strotmann. Perhaps the highlight of the evening was what I assume was one of possibly three bottles of Central City Red Racer Imperial India Pale Ale that made it to Ontario.

We opened the bottle and we sat there discussing it with our designated BJCP and we came to some conclusions. It’s a little vegetal and they’ve maybe scaled up the alcohol more than they scaled up the hop bitterness. We wondered exactly how alcoholic it was and attempted to look it up on the internet. There are no reviews on ratebeer. Beer Advocate claims that it`s about 9%; It certainly doesn’t taste like it. It’s a lot like a scaled up version of the Red Racer IPA and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s brightly, tropically fruity, yet substantial in a way that the regular version can’t be. It’s an exciting beer and it’s a shame that I can’t think of a way to make the comparison more compellingly visceral. Normally for a comparison of two such high octane properties, you’d want a Jeremy Clarkson voiceover and a white suited racing driver.

For me, the highlight of the evening was being able to unveil the St. John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA, which everyone seemed to like, or at least managed to choke down without outwardly visible distress. It’s a beer that I’m relatively proud of if only for the reason that it`s about my fifth attempt at brewing, and it is actually drinkable in a way that most previous attempts haven`t been.

DAY ONE

Possibly as a result of the previous night’s tasting, I missed the opening cask tapping for Toronto Beer Week. I forgot to set the alarm and as a result, had to watch the video of Bill White and Steve Peters on Youtube and then subsequently on Global TV’s nightly news. Judging by the amount of coverage that resulted from it I think that it was actually a safe bet not to have to report on it. The fact that Ten Bitter Years was featured on the nightly news probably means that the next batch will sell out in slightly less than a day once it’s announced, so you’re going to want to be on the lookout for that. Maybe you can bribe Ken and Adrian to hold on to a case.

For me, the highlight of Monday was the fact that my homebrew actually managed to come in third in the American IPA category of the homebrew competition for Toronto Beer Week. It was a hotly contested category of thirteen and I managed to acquit myself rather well. The truth is that I would have been content not coming in last, but being near the top of the category is a proud moment. The winner of the category was Biergotter, with their Hopocalypse. In amateur brewing terms, entering a category with Biergotter is a little like challenging Brock Lesnar to step into a steel cage. Even if there are only two of you in there, you`ll be lucky to finish in seventh place. They’ve been brewing in collaboration with Charlevoix and Dieu Du Ciel and they consult Volo on their Cask beers. Not only is there no shame in losing to them, just the fact that my beer was apparently competitive is reassuring in that I might have some idea what I`m doing.

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Toronto Beer Week – Beer Culture Events

September 14, 2010 11:13 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

One of the best things about the events listing for Toronto Beer Week is the fact that there are a lot of events that are taking place that otherwise wouldn’t. Just the fact that there is likely to be an influx of interest in the subject tends to mean that there’s a lot of leeway for trying out new things to gauge the level of public interest; While it’s not particularly difficult to get people to drink beer, it’s more difficult to get them to attend an event that’s tangentially related to beer:  Beer and history, beer and music, beer and writing. There are also events that challenge the presumed knowledge of beer nerds.

These are, after all, events that have to do with the ephemera of beer culture. Because they’re all so different, it’s as well to just dive in to the previews.

MONDAY SEPT 20

Highway 61 Southern BBQ

1620 Bayview Ave

First Annual Lager Taste Challenge-  $25/ TICKET

Come out and join us for our first annual Craft Beer Lager Taste Challenge! Where we put your beer palate to the test with 5 different brews. The Top 5 connoisseurs will each be rewarded with great prizes – not to mention that every participant gets a bite and a pint to start! So give us a

shout if you’re feeling lucky at 416-489-RIBS (7427)

Now this looks like it might be fun. I’m not entirely sure how they’re going to go about it, but I suspect that you’ll be given five sample sized glasses of beer and a list of what they MIGHT be. The best part is that because they’re lagers, which beer nerds tend famously to eschew, anybody might have a shot at winning this. Maybe they’ll cover the tap handles with paper bags to give it more of an air of mystery. All I know is that you should try a side order of their baked beans since they’re superbly molasses-y, (which may not be a word).

Accessibility:  4/5

Price: 4/5

TUESDAY SEPT 21

C’est What

67 Front Street East

10:00 – 11:30 pm

Not Always In Good Taste – a beer writers-in-the-round, Free admission.

Writers include: Stephen Beaumont, Greg Clow, Nick Pashley, Ian Coutts, Steve Cameron, Troy Burtch, Robert Hughey, Aonghus Kealy, Josh Rubin

This should be interesting if only for the amount of personality present in the room. You’ve got Stephen Beaumont, who’s about as legitimate as beer writers get. You’ve got Aonghus and Josh from newspapers. Ian and Nick have published books this year. Troy and Greg are bloggers in the process of making good. (I don’t actually know Robert Hughey or Steve Cameron, so I’m loathe to try and sum them up in slightly less than a sentence. Seems dismissive.)  You’ve got people representing all levels of beer journalism. I have no idea what they’ll talk about, but I get the feeling that whatever it is, it’ll be amusing. I hope they field questions. Maybe I should prepare a list. “This question is for the panel: If you were a beer, what kind of beer would you be?”

Accessibility:  2/5 It covers a lot of different readerships, but you’d need to want to know about it.

Price:  5/5 You can’t beat free.

SUNDAY, SEPT 26

Toronto Beer Quest

brought to you by Beerology and Camaraderie

Toronto Beer Quest is an urban adventure where teams of two solve clues about beer, photograph themselves together at the clue location, and reach the finish line to qualify for prizes. The event has one goal: provide a fun way for Torontonians to experience beer through fun, history, and strategy. Prizes, sponsors, and other event developments will be announced on the Toronto Beer Quest Facebook page at http://bit.ly/TorontoBeerQuest.

Event details:

Check-in at 11:00am, event starts at 12:00pm

Tickets are $30 (earlybird) or $40 for a team of two participants at http://torontobeerquest1.eventbrite.com/

I’ve got to say that originally, I didn’t quite get the concept for this one, but I was talking to Mirella Amato  from Beerology on Saturday and she makes an interesting case for it. We’ve all been on guided tours, and I think I’m right in saying that attention tends to wander after a certain amount of time. You might be on the Maid of the Mist, overcome by the majesty and power of Niagara Falls and then twenty minutes later, you just want to take off the poncho and go get a coffee and maybe check your email. In this instance, where there are prizes involved for guiding yourself through the tour, your attention can’t afford to wander. Plus, in order to get a photo at each checkpoint, you actually have to learn things about the brewing history of Toronto. She’s managed to make the guided tour interactive and competitive. Deuced clever and you get some exercise before hitting the bar at the finish line.

Accessibility :  3/5 You need some special equipment and an interest in history.

Price: 3/5

Finally, I’d like to talk about a number of events that are cropping up which fall under this category if only because they are of the “have a beer with…” variety. Meet the brewer. Meet the journalist. It makes it sound as though they should be standing on a pedestal in the corner surrounded by velvet ropes, guarded by large men in black suits.

Ken and Adrian from Black Oak are hitting The Only Cafe on Tuesday and Bar Volo on Thursday. Those events should be fun, not only because they’re approachable and interesting guys, but also because they make some really tasty beers. Please take very small sips in front of Ken; it will save him from thinking about the next inevitable wave of deliveries.

Michael Hancock is going to be at the Monk’s Table on Thursday talking about his favourite subject: Weissbier. He’s a truly interesting guy and one of the most dedicated and exacting brewers I’ve ever met. You could learn a thing or six from Michael Hancock.

Bar Volo has the founder of Trois Mousquetaires  on Saturday and they’ll be launching 8 beers from that brewery. If you’ve ever wanted to see whether your French holds up while drinking a 12% beer, this is your opportunity.

The Local on Roncesvalles has representatives from Great Lakes in on Tuesday to discuss their Pumpkin Beer. Every year the Halloween treats go on sale earlier. There will also be live music, so this will be a good night out even if you don’t want to talk to a brewer.

Next time, I’m going to talk about events that are about beer as a standalone entity.

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Toronto Beer Week – Food Pairing Events Preview

September 9, 2010 3:39 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

Today I’m going to try and point you in the right direction when it comes to food pairing events. There are an ever increasing number of them being announced for Toronto Beer Week and they run the gamut from the relatively simple to the extremely complex, but there are only a couple of things that you need to know in terms of deciding which ones to try out.

The first and potentially most important thing is that some of these events are going to involve cooks at local venues showing off. Picture being in charge of a pub menu on a day to day basis. At most places, the total amount of creative input is whether or not to put a garlic aioli on the sandwich of the day or whether the lunch crowd is going to be willing to drop fifteen bucks on a rib special. Beer pairing dinners are usually a chance for the cooks to design a menu and throw their skills at something. The quality of the food is likely to be pretty high because they’ll be trying to match dishes to beverages, and for that reason this is a good opportunity to go out to a new place and see what they’re capable of accomplishing beyond the poutine of the day.

Fair warning though: No matter how good the beer is likely to be, if you’re not a fan of the style of cuisine being served, you’re not going to enjoy yourself. Fortunately, there’s quite a variety on offer.

Monday, September 20th

The Monk’s Table

1276 Yonge Street – (416) 920-9074

7:00pm

Belgium Beer Fest with the White Knight - Please Reserve Seating Limited

Bill White Hosts a Five Course Extravaganza of Belgium Beer and Food Pairings

The Monk’s Table is doing beer and food pairing events all week long, but this is the one that I want to call your attention to, because it combines everything you could possibly want: Exceptionally high quality Belgian beers, with an imaginative menu and a guide to take you through the whole thing. Not just any guide, either. Bill White is a Knight of the Confederation of Belgian Brewers (the hazing process may have involved a mash paddle) and he’s able to tell you all about the things you’re drinking in a way that removes a lot of the mystery.

Newbie Accessibility: 3/5 (mostly because of the guidance)

Price: 2/5 (very good value for money, though)

Wednesday, September 22nd

Cowbell

1564 Queen Street West – (416) 849-1095

Muskoka Beer Dinner: A four course beer dinner featuring four beers from the Muskoka Cottage Brewery, including their new batch of Harvest Ale. Four courses, four beers, all paired for only $40. Call to make reservations.

I’ve got to say that I’ve never been to Cowbell, but if you hit up their website and take a look at their menu, it’s solid French bistro fare. They even do their own charcuterie, apparently.  Veal sweetbreads are on the menu, for those of you who have watched No Reservations and wondered what Anthony Bourdain is going on about.  Still, it’s a four course prix fixe with beverages included, and at forty bucks  it sounds good to me. I only wonder whether they’ll have to dial the menu back a little to pair with some of the lighter Muskoka beers.

Newbie Accessibility: 3/5 (I bumped it up one because the Muskoka beers are largely accessible)

Price:  3/5

Saturday, September 25th

Trevor Kitchen and Bar

38 Wellington Street East

6 Course Dinner with Beers from Duggan’s Brewery – 6pm

A beer pairing dinner with Michael Duggan of Duggan’s Brewery.  6 courses paired around various beers produced by Duggan. Tickets are $79 and can be purchased by calling (416) 941 9410.

I’ll be honest with you: This sort of snuck up on me. Not only is Trevor doing a week of featured sandwich pairings at the bar (Salt Cured Foie Gras Club Sandwich. Sure it’s the moral equivalent of punching a gander in the face while his helpless goslings look on, but that don’t mean it ain’t tasty) but they’re also doing this dinner. I suspect the price is mostly because of the quality of the food, which in turn makes you wonder why Michael Duggan isn’t doing it at his own place. Sources suggest that it’s because the chef at Trevor is a long time beer nerd. If only for that reason, this has the potential to be a bit of a show stealer.

Newbie Accessibility: 2/5 (Some of the food pairings might get really elaborate.)

Price: 1/5 (Nearly as expensive as the dinner with a dude who came all the way from Scotland.)

ALL WEEK LONG

What’s that I hear you say? “But Jordan, I’m a total neophyte when it comes to beer and food pairing and I don’t want to risk spending a lot on something I might not like and besides I don’t want to punch a goose in the face.” Well, those are all valid concerns except for the last part. Here are a couple of events that are about as accessible as food pairing gets, and they cost less than twenty bucks.

Bier Markt

600 King Street Wes & 58 The Esplanade

Big Bier & Ze Big Brat – $19 plus HST

Oktoberfest comes a little bit earlier – Enjoy a 10 inch Thüringer bratwurst with all ze trimmings (Bavarian bread dumplings, Weissbier kraut) paired to your choice of (22 oz) Erdinger Weissbier or (22 oz)  Weihenstephan Hefeweissbier.

This is nicely accessible, unless you’re the type of guy who finds spaetzle challenging: A choice of two really nice wheat beers and a bratwurst with fixings for less than twenty bucks. Slip into your lederhosen and let your inner Bavarian out. Please refrain from annexing the Old Spaghetti Factory.

Burger Bar

319 Augusta Ave – Kensington Market

Oktoberfest Celebration! We will be serving a variety of sausages, Marzen styled beers, and some freshly hopped beers made with local hops.

In the words of Tobias Funke, there’s nothing like a banger in the mouth. It’s a basic pairing, given that you get the sweet malty flavour of a Marzen and the salty, porky, fatty goodness of sausage. It’s a combination that has worked for ze Germans since time immemorial. It’s a good start if you don’t have any knowledge going in.

Join me next time as I’ll be looking at some of the more gimmicky events going on during beer week. If you’ll excuse me the Beau’s Sticke Alt is calling my name and I’ve got a 30th birthday to celebrate.

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Toronto Beer Week – A Rough Guide

September 8, 2010 1:55 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

As a teenager, I collected LPs. It was after the advent of the CD so people would look at me askance, because they claimed that digital quality was so much better. In truth, I was never much interested in the quality of the sound that was coming out of the stereo, but rather the content of the songs coming out of the stereo. Think about it like this: If you wanted to jump into Bob Dylan’s back catalogue, you could either afford to buy two greatest hits compilation volumes on CD or you could get everything he recorded up to Planet Waves on vinyl.

To me, there was nothing more infuriating than trying to jump into an artist’s back catalogue, especially since if you’re like me you don’t know what you like until you hear it. This leads periodically to purchasing things that you hate. By the time my record player wore down and I had to switch to a discman, I was still trying to amass huge amounts of knowledge about individual artists. It’s time consuming and eventually you end up with something like Elvis Costello’s Goodbye Cruel World on which the reissue liner notes start with the phrase “Congratulations! You just bought the worst album of my career.” which is just annoying enough to make you want to give up and listen to CBC Radio 2.

Fortunately, with the internet providing the services that it does now, It’s now possible to condense everything you need to know. For instance, if you liked “Gimme Shelter” on the radio, you can punch a half remembered lyric into Google, figure out that it’s on Let It Bleed and then download the album from iTunes (or, for you scofflaws, some disreputable torrent site) in the amount of time it would actually take to listen to the song. You might decide to just dip your toe in the Stones’ back catalogue by getting the Hot Rocks compilation.  iTunes even has the genius feature that tells you what you might like based on what you already have.

It’s never been easier to have your tastes catered to in what is essentially an entirely subjective medium. While there are dozens of top hundred album lists available, your personal tastes are being catered to as a matter of course. You don’t need to know anything more than you feel like knowing. I’m something of a completist myself, but who am I to tell you that you absolutely need to know the backstory of Peter Gabriel’s split with Genesis to enjoy Solsbury Hill? It’s catchy and toe tapping, and sometimes that’s enough.

With something like beer, though, which is equally subjective, you run into issues of accessibility pretty quickly. No one has figured out how to get beer radio play, and downloading pirated beer is equally difficult. You actually have to go out and find various beers to drink in order to discover what you like. It’s not as though you can hire a beer nerd to follow you around and point out things about various beverages that are on offer (and would you want to even if you could? You would probably end up staggering out of a pub in the early morning hours muttering about IBUs and dark malt.)

Even if you’ve tried a large number of beers and know what you like, something like Toronto Beer Week can be daunting. There are going to be special one-off brews and unreplicatable events taking place. The difficulty here is figuring out how not to miss the good bits while finding your level of comfort. There’s a huge range of activities and events on offer, so my intention over the next week is to provide some guidance for those of you who don’t know where to start.

I don’t pretend to know which events will be the most fun. There’s no way to judge that without going to them yourself. I do have a pretty good idea of how accessible each event is going to be on a scale of no experience necessary to die-hard beer nerd, though. I also know how expensive they’re likely to be and whether you’re likely to have to buy in for an entire evening or if you can just turn up. There will also be a certain amount of editorializing, just to keep myself amused.

As an example of the kind of range that exists, I’ll show you two food pairing events that are happening concurrently:

BQM

Ossington & Diner on Queen West

Burger and Beer Promotion – For the entire week, at both BQM locations, you can enjoy a Bacon and Blue Cheese Burger with a Blanche de Chambly for $10.

This is nicely accessible. You get a solid beer from Unibroue and a burger. The charm of the thing is that it’s a very straightforward pairing with high quality components. Even if you end up not liking the beer, you’ve almost certainly paid more than that for a tasty burger before anyway.

Accessibility: 5/5 (no experience necessary) ; Price: 5/5 (ten bucks or less)

beerbistro

BrewDog Beer Dinner - 6 course dinner, paired with beers from Scotland’s most progressive brewery.  Hosted by James Watt from BrewDog. Tickets are $90, and on sale Wednesday Sept 8th: Call (416) 861-9872

This event exists essentially for the hardcore, even down to the likely inclusion of the brewery’s Hardcore IPA. In order to really get the most out of it you need to know who BrewDog are: That they are a sort of DIY punk rock brewery from Aberdeen who recently released a beer with its own cozy (a taxidermied stoat) and that you’re probably going to sample a beer that’s stronger than most liquors before the night is over. That doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t have fun if you don’t know the backstory. Tickets go on sale this morning. Operators are standing by.

Accessibility: 1/5 (hardcore beer nerds) ; Price: 1/5 (most expensive ticket of the week)

Leading up to Toronto Beer Week itself, I’ll be breaking down the events like this in order to give you enough information to find one that will work for you. I hope to be able to do it without displaying too much personal bias, or at least by making it slightly less obvious than usual.

Next time I’ll be looking at food pairing events in earnest.

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Toronto Beer Week

August 30, 2010 11:47 am ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

Finally, an excuse to drink beer.

There are, of course, two things that people claim that they don’t want to see being made: law and sausage. One contains a lot of grease , pork and leftover trimmings and the other is delicious sausage.

That being said, no one ever claimed that events planning shouldn’t be open to public consumption, so I thought that it might be fun to talk about Toronto Beer Week, how it’s coming together and why you (yes you, gentle consumer/bored guy looking for something to do) should be excited.

A lot of North American cities have been having beer weeks recently, and  it makes a huge amount of sense that this should be the case since the advent of the organic and locavore movements. Beer is, after all, an agrarian product and it makes sense to celebrate the best of what’s local. Seattle had one. San Diego had one. Philadelphia had one as well, and while I know just enough about the beer scene in Pennsylvania to appreciate how good an idea that is, I still have a mental picture of the cast of It’s Always Sunny flipping cups and getting involved in a cheesesteak eating contest.

Now, I can hear the cogs turning in your head. I understand that you’re thinking to yourself, “But Jordan, isn’t this just another in an increasingly desperate series of bids by Toronto to be taken seriously as a world class city? Isn’t this the same kind of thing that leads us to send Mel Lastman to try and bid for the Summer Olympics? Remember that time we built the CN Tower and that escalator to nowhere? Where did that get us? It still takes me an hour and a half to get to the airport and my feet hurt and it’s too hot out and I’m surrounded by Canada geese.” I hear your concerns, polite but almost cripplingly neurotic citizen, and feel like I should point out a couple of things that will serve to put your mind at ease.

First of all, I’ve talked to a number of people on the organizational committee for Toronto Beer Week and I can tell you flat out that I have never heard anyone utter the phrase “World Class City” even in jest. Toronto Beer Week seems to be content to focus on the realities of what is actually possible given the beer culture in the city, and that approach has served them well. They’ve managed to get over 45 venues and 15 breweries involved during the inaugural edition of Beer Week through hard work and planning. The events list continues to grow and there’s a lot of focus on making sure that everyone who attends an event has the best time possible. The watchword is accessibility and hopefully bringing attention to products that are available locally will produce converts to small, independent brewers located around the Greater Toronto Area. That’s basically the only goal: getting you to drink a nice pint of locally brewed beer.

It’s a grass roots movement, and the Toronto Beer Week team is comprised of local brewers, pub owners and enthusiasts who are there because they want to be there. This is not some cynical cash grab perpetrated by international macrobreweries. Toronto Beer Week started as the product of nine people with a good understanding of the beer scene in Toronto. That’s not how it’s going to end up though: The fact of the matter is that I see a lot of industry professionals rallying to the cause.

I was at a media dinner for the event at The Monk’s Table the other day and while I was sitting there making copious notes I realized something interesting. They’ve somehow managed to get everyone on board. Bill White was there to guide us through the dinner, which he managed in a thoroughly entertaining  and engaging manner. Stephen Beaumont was there, lending both his credibility and wealth of knowledge to the proceedings. Mirella Amato from Beerology, who is hosting the TORONTO BEER QUEST during Beer Week was there. They had a number of legitimate journalists and some completely illegitimate bloggers like myself.

The best part is that everyone was excited about the direction that Toronto Beer Week was going in.

Now, maybe I’m just the new guy on the scene, brimming with the kind of wide eyed optimism and naivete that can only be instilled by gift bags and a developing sense of belonging, but it occurs to me that none of this has to happen: The reason that Toronto Beer Week exists is because a lot of talented people who are extraordinarily passionate about beer have banded together to share their interest and expertise. The best part is that this is not some ragtag bunch of misfits trying amateurishly to pull off a coup: These are professionals who are essentially volunteering their time to ensure that people who go out to an event are going to have a good time. There’s very little in the way of self aggrandizement. Everyone is on message and in the coming weeks you’re going to see a lot of promotion and enthusiasm and a lot of people are going to work very long hours to get the word out. Never in Toronto have so few done so much to convince so many to drink a nice pint of beer.

Starting this week, you’re going to be able to pick up the Toronto Beer Week passport at participating locations and you’d do well to check the events calendar periodically to see what those locations are going to be able to come up with. There are already some absolute corkers lined up through Bar Volo, beerbistro, C’est What and The Monk’s Table. I get the feeling that the tickets for the BrewDog dinner are going to go very quickly indeed, what with the recent press that they’ve been given.

To my mind the question is no longer “Is this going to be any good?” Currently the question is “Which events should I hit first?”

It’ll give me something to think about as I trudge humourlessly along delivering passports and coasters.

Posted in: Toronto Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

St. John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA – Brew Day

August 17, 2010 4:44 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Many people, when they write about brewing beer, start at the very beginning: A theoretical brewer somewhere in Egypt or Sumeria who discovered nearly eight millennia ago that by some miracle of nature, wet barley would ferment given exposure to wild yeast. It’s a relatively nonsensical place to start because you have to assume that Imhotep or Enkidu or whatever you want to call the jammy bastard who suddenly discovered that it was possible to create beer didn’t really do anything other than stumble along at an opportune moment. I feel relatively certain that the public school system in Ur didn’t have courses in microbiology and that the Tigris-Euphrates Polytechnic Institute (The Fighting Agrarians!) did not explicitly understand that millions of tiny eukaryotes were in there eating sugars and pooping booze.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; You can bet though that shortly after this discovery, early man, with an imperfect understanding of exactly what was happening, was in there trying to replicate the results. I don’t mean to belittle this ostensible pioneer: he or she demonstrated the spirit of discovery and the sheer bloody mindedness of human endeavor. It must have been frustrating to have very little idea of what was actually going on. Brewing is, after all, a relatively complex process involving a certain amount of subtle chemistry. It would have been basically impossible to control the results. They would have been lucky to produce something similar in quality to a stale forty of Olde English. Early man must have spent a lot of time quietly whimpering in a corner with a crippling hangover and a sense that whatever sacrifice had been made to Sneddon, the God of good harvest, it must have really ticked him off.

The good news is that we’ve come a long way since then: We have all sorts of things that make brewing easier. We have sterilizing solution. We’ve got hundreds of kinds of barley and dozens of kinds of hops. You can buy millions of little dormant yeast cells for less than a lunch out. We’ve got glass carboys and plastic buckets and indoor plumbing and refrigeration and air conditioning. We don’t have to break down maize starches with our saliva anymore. Perhaps most importantly, we’ve got the internet, which will provide you with all of the information you could possibly need in order to get started with homebrewing and then just enough information to confuse you utterly. Fortunately for you, there’s also the library. I say give it a shot. You’re at least as clever as a prehistoric Sumerian and probably more hygienic to boot.

St. John's Wort. Literally.

I have no intention of walking you through the homebrewing process. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that this is my fifth or sixth batch and I don’t want the blame for your inevitable misadventure. Suffice it to say that at some point, you’re going to screw up. Probably badly. You might pitch the yeast at the wrong temperature, killing off half of the population resulting in a half fermented batch of undrinkable liquid. You might decide to clean your bottling bucket with Sunlight and end up with an unintentional lemon tang. Probably, you will follow all of the instructions precisely, but your first attempt at creating your own recipe will just result in something you don’t like a great deal and which you will drink five gallons of slowly over the course of months because you can’t bring yourself to pour it out.

I will share some minor pointers, though:

Nylon Mesh Grain Bag/Ladieswear

First off, if you’re brewing an extract recipe like the one that I came up with that has a number of specialty grains involved, you’re going to need a nylon mesh bag for the grains. You’re going to want to steep the grains at about 150 degrees farenheit and you’re going to want to be able to get them out of the wort in fairly short order. Boiled grains can create off flavours. If you’re like me and you forget you need a nylon mesh bag, you can always go down to the drugstore and purchase a pair of pantyhose. They’re nearly ideally suited for the purpose, and with a decent pair of scissors, you can convert one leg into a grain bag and use the other one for dry hopping. If the clerk gives you a strange look at the checkout counter, feel free to make an offhand remark about the fact that they don’t seem to carry junior miss sizes.

Secondly, you’re going to want to calibrate your hydrometer prior to taking your original gravity measurement. The paper scale on the inside of mine has managed to slide down inside the tube over the course of several batches of beer. If you get to the end of the boil and you’ve aerated your wort and it seems like the original gravity is impossibly low, it probably means that you’re going to need to compensate. If you forget about calibration you’re liable to stand there with your mouth agape wondering how it’s remotely possible that the fermentables in the liquid don’t seem to be registering properly. As it stands, my beer came out to approximately the gravity that it should have, but there was a moment of mind bending panic where it seemed as though something had gone horribly wrong.

Hops!

Finally, if you have created a recipe that you think is going to work, don’t deviate from the recipe. You’ll get to the point where there’s 15 minutes left in the boil and there are lots of hops left to go in. Follow the hopping schedule that you decided on originally. You may be tempted to put aside an ounce of hops for dry hopping, but let’s face it: You’re an amateur and you have no idea what you’re doing. There are many situations where that extemporaneous creative instinct will serve you well. This is probably not one of them.

This also includes the fermentation process. Don’t open the carboy. Don’t futz with the airlock. If it’s bubbling away, you’re probably going to be alright. It’s a process that will take a couple of weeks and there’s very little benefit to compulsively worrying whether a yeast krausen has formed and whether or not there’s anything you can do about it. Leave it alone. Go about your business. Put the fermenting vessel somewhere that’s not in your direct line of sight. You’ll just drive yourself crazy.

At the end of your brew day, you may be worried: About your yeast. About your badly misaligned hydrometer. About the rumors now circulating the neighbourhood about your possible transvestitism. About the possibility of poisoning several accredited beer judges at the end of the process. It’s best not to think about it.

Besides. You can always blame it on Sneddon. It’s a time honored Sumerian tradition.

Posted in: Ongoing Projects ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

St. John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA – Preparation

August 12, 2010 9:43 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

Charlie Papazian is famous in song and story for having written, in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, the phrase “Relax. Have a homebrew.” If you read any edition of his book it becomes clear fairly quickly that this is a mantra of sorts for Charlie, and it’s a good one. It’s just that I’m not sure it applies to my current situation. In announcing my entry in to the Toronto Beer Week Homebrewing Competition, I have created two problems:

Firstly, I have to actually do it. If ever there was a significant motivator, it’s the idea that there are a huge number (read couple of dozen) people reading your blog who are likely to laugh at you if you don’t carry through with your stated goal of brewing a beer to subject the judges to. I don’t want to walk in to Volo at some point in the near future and have folks ask “how’s that going for you” while tittering under their breath. It’s a reality of the situation that I’m now committed to actually doing the thing, and if nothing else I have to brew a beer in order to avoid the mockery of the Biergotter fellows and other local enthusiasts.

Secondly, there’s the preparation. As I see it, there are a number of things that you need to do in order to prepare to brew a beer. You need ingredients, equipment, some kind of plan and a sterile working environment.

Some of these things are more time consuming than others. Getting ingredients for homebrewing can be difficult in Toronto if you don’t have a car. It seems to me that the best supplier in the area is Canadian Homebrew Supplies. They have a huge number of products for homebrewers both experienced and just starting out. The main problem seems to be the fact that they’re in Brampton. If you’ve got a car, this is not worth commenting on, but if you’re like me and you have to order the products online and have them shipped using Canada Post, there’s a significant niggle at the back of your mind. The Wyeast Activator packs, (basically a package of yeast and nutrients that activates upon being hit hard enough to release the yeast into the nutrients) are meant to be refrigerated until they’re used. If you’re in the middle of a particularly hot stretch of the summer, do you really want to risk having your yeast sit in an unrefrigerated warehouse for two or three days? I mean, ideally Canada Post will deliver within 48 hours, but if you miss the initial delivery, it could be longer. It won’t kill the yeast dead, but it might stop them performing to the best of their ability. You don’t want to drink an under attenuated beer just because there was a mishap with a scanner.

Fortunately, I was in Buffalo anyway, and I was able to visit Niagara Traditions Homebrew Supply. I’ve got to say that it’s a very different experience standing in an actual store while shopping for homebrew ingredients. If you’re shopping online, you need to know exactly what you’re going to do before hand and you’ve got a checklist that you’re working from. If you’re on the ground in a store, you’ve got people who know what they’re doing to help you. The guy who helped me was pretty well informed and even suggested a couple of kinds of specialty malts for use in my beer. I had a loose idea of what I was going to do, but it’s always good to have a professional opinion backing you up. Plus, because the yeast was refrigerated, or at least unceremoniously dumped in a cooler with an ice pack during transit, I don’t have the option of claiming that it was the yeast’s fault if I end up with an undrinkable mass of hops and pure evil.

If you’re going to brew beer, you also need a recipe. If you’re just starting out, it’s excusable to buy a kit, but this is Toronto Beer Week, so I needed to put together something that’ll actually make an impression if it comes off. One of the strictures of the Toronto Beer Week Homebrewing Competition is that your beer has to conform to BJCP judging criteria for the style that you’re creating. Fortunately for hacks like me, there’s a website called Hopville that allows you to design recipes that will conform to those criteria. All you have to do is choose a style and then plug your information into the recipe form in order to avoid looking like a complete doofus.

I have chosen to compete in style 14B: American IPA. Partly this is because I’m curious about the Ontario market and how hard it can possibly be to create a drinkable American IPA, and partly it’s because I haven’t seen anyone else announce that they’re aiming for this category on Bar Towel. I figure that in a category of one, I should at least be able to come in third. After playing around with the recipe generator for a while (and getting some advice from Russ from Biergotter) I have decided on a title for my brew: St.John’s Wort Shameless Publicity Grab IPA. The recipe is over here. It contains both of the hops of the moment: Citra and Sorachi Ace, so it should contain slightly more citrus aroma than Florida.

Finally, and most importantly, if you’re going to brew a beer at home you want everything to be sterile. My attitude to housekeeping can most charitably be described as somewhat Laissez-faire. Given that the state of my kitchen is usually somewhere between “health code violation” and “AGH! KILL IT WITH FIRE!” it seems that I’m going to be forced to spend this afternoon in a hazmat suit scrubbing violently away with bleach and steel wool.

I kid. It’s not really that bad, but I do have to get all the equipment ready and break out the Star San and get ready to explain to the neighbours why the hallway smells funny.

Posted in: Ongoing Projects ⋅ Tagged: , , , , , ,

So You Want To Be A Brewer – The Toronto Beer Week Homebrew Competition

August 3, 2010 1:59 pm ⋅ 4 Comments ⋅

One of the best things about being a beer drinker in Toronto this year is the fact that the number of events keeps increasing. There was Ontario Craft Beer Week, the Hart House Craft Beer Festival and starting on Thursday of this week, we’re going to have the Toronto Festival of Beer which will be interesting if for no other reason than the ability to watch a large of number of people staggering about complaining about the price of a sample of light beer.

On the horizon though is Toronto Beer Week, which is starting to differentiate itself from the other events this summer in the variety of events that it’s going to include. As I understand it, a fairly large number of pubs will be involved and they’ll all be playing to their strengths, which is as it should be. According to the website there are going to be neighbourhood pub crawls, beer dinners, cask tastings, meet the brewer nights and even beer trivia nights for those of you who have amassed a wealth of comparatively useless knowledge over the years.

The most interesting development was announced last week, which is the introduction of a Toronto Beer Week Homebrew Competition. It’s a great idea because it not only creates discussion about Toronto Beer Week in lead up to the events, it also allows people to take part in an activity instead of having all of the events for the week determined by pub owners and the governing committee. It’s a great event in that it creates recognition for those talented amateur brewers from around the city who would normally only be able to show off their skills when people come over for a drink.

It’s especially interesting to me because I’m a closet homebrewer. I don’t mean to say that I’m ashamed of my homebrewing; I mean that I’m literally forced to brew in a closet. I live in a one bedroom apartment so small that the clichéd jokes are hunchbacked. Periodically I think about getting a cat or a dog and I realize that keeping an animal in a space this confined would be cruel, which inevitably prompts the thought that while it is probably also cruel to keep myself here I am at least spared having to take monthly heartworm medication.

I have made a number of attempts at homebrewing over the years, starting back during university. Fortunately we currently live in an age when online homebrewing resources are extremely accessible and there are very well illustrated, easy to follow guides for those who are attempting to do it for the first time. They walk you through all of the steps of both all grain and extract brewing. There are even videos on youtube available for those of you what don’t read good. In university, though, we didn’t really have the same number of resources and there weren’t really a huge number of instructional sources. We were pretty much limited to the information on the back of the can of hopped malt extract.

Theoretically, brewing beer as a university student is a fantastic idea. It’ll save money and you’ll be able to list it as a hobby. Realistically, however, you end up with wort stains on the stovetop, exploding bottles in the closet and, if you’re trying to brew a coffee stout, grounds in your teeth. I wish that I could claim that this was in the days before cheesecloth, but the better claim is that it was in the days before common sense. We didn’t understand any of the chemistry behind brewing and the results were so disappointing that the second batch of beer never got bottled and may still be sitting at the back of a closet somewhere a decade later having developed sentience.

In the last couple of years, there have been more successful attempts and while nothing that I have made is anything to write home about, it has at least been drinkable. They’ve all been ales, and at least at this point I understand the process. It’s frustrating attempting to brew in a one bedroom apartment, though. I have a window air conditioner, so temperature control is a problem. Last august I ended up trying to brew an American style wheat beer that had to be poured out due to a heat wave. It was no great loss at that point because it had begun to smell like soy sauce. When it’s not unbearably hot out, though, I’ve done pretty well. There was a mild bitter that was pretty drinkable and an American IPA that was good enough that I never quite got around to sharing it with anyone. Truly, the only beer that I was disappointed in was the ESB that I tried to create a recipe for; I seriously misjudged the amount of crystal malt. You know that you’ve done badly when you’d rather have a nice mug of cocoa.

Over the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot about brewing and have even completed grade 12 biology, so I think it’s time to dust off the ol’ carboy. I’m relatively sure that I can come up with something that, while unlikely to win any prizes, will probably not rank with the Hindenburg in terms of man-made disasters. In truth, I’m aiming to do slightly better. Possibly between “unfortunate train derailment” and “collapsed overpass.”

After all, I’ve got all the equipment already and it’ll give me an excuse to give the kitchen a good cleaning. All I need is some decent bottles, a recipe and the ingredients and I’m good to go. Sure, there’ll be a lot of Star-San rinsing and a certain amount of obsessively checking to make sure that the yeast is forming a krausen (which is slightly more compulsive than Farmville). I’m willing to go to these lengths for two reasons: Firstly, there’s an entire closet which is essentially unusable since it’s full of brewing equipment anyway. Secondly, the rules for the contest on the Toronto Beer Week blog suggest that anyone who provides an email address will receive feedback on their submission and I’ve always wanted to see how many times a BJCP certified individual can use the word travesty in a review.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon poring over the beer section of my library in an attempt to develop a recipe that is unlikely to result in a mob of pitchfork wielding beer judges chasing after me.

Posted in: Ongoing Projects ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Ontario Craft Beer Week – An Epilogue OR “Look Back Hungover”

June 28, 2010 2:58 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Now that the booths have been packed up at the Sunnyside Pavilion and the events of the week have come to an end, it’s a good opportunity to take a look back and see exactly what Ontario Craft Beer Week accomplished. For me, there were high spots and low spots evident throughout the week, but since I’ve already covered my opinions pretty thoroughly (even I’m tired of listening to my prattle), I’ve decided to abide by a new metric: How successful was Ontario Craft Beer Week in spreading the word about Ontario Craft Beer?

One of the problems in sponsoring a week-long series of beer events in Toronto seems to be the fact that preaching to the choir is unavoidable. Without the ability to provide for large media buys and television spots, promotion is available through a relatively limited series of channels. Bar Towel is a good example of this phenomenon. It operates as a good channel of information and the forums are full of people, both registered and lurking, who are definitely interested in going out to the pub and seeing what’s available. There are thirty thousand registered users, which is a pretty good group. The problem is that in order to have heard about Ontario Craft Beer Week through Bar Towel, you would have had to visit the site; you’d already have to be seeking out information about it. The same can essentially be said for TAPS, which has a fairly devoted online following both at their website, but also on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You’d already need to be following a national beer magazine in order to hear about the events.

Josh Rubin had a nice piece over at the Toronto Star, which was published five days before the events started. It included a limited list of the events taking place throughout Toronto. I’m googling my spacebar off over here, and that’s about all the mainstream coverage that pops up in the first five pages of results. I know that Jed from the Griffin Gastropub had a Breakfast Television interview scheduled on Tuesday. That may have singlehandedly reached a larger audience than all other attempts combined, but a segment like that is a one shot deal. Once it’s over, it’s not going to get replayed unless it makes the website. I didn’t see it linked anywhere online, so I’m guessing that it didn’t (the BT website is down as of this writing, the servers probably having either been set on fire by the black bloc or bashed by a riot shield). There’s nothing in Eye Weekly and there’s nothing in NOW Magazine. It didn’t even make Torontoist.com. I feel as though it should have been possible to reach a larger audience in the run up to the events.

One of the reasons that this difficulty exists is that Ontario Craft Beer Week was put together in a little under eleven weeks. The initial press release for the event went out on March 31st. The first organizational meeting was apparently in the middle of April, meaning that all of the logistics had to be put together within two months. Given that timeframe, what they were able to put together was beyond impressive. When you consider the number of special brews that were put together for the week and the amount of face time put in by the brewers themselves, it’s easy to see that there is definitely a huge amount of enthusiasm within the industry for an event like this. After all, a high tide raises all boats.

I lack the ability to be objective when I’m out reviewing an event, partially because I’m a complete beer nerd and partially because the notes tend to become illegible after a certain number of samples, but let’s have a bit of a think about who actually attended the events that I covered.

Granite Brewery Taste of All Ontario: Father’s Day crowd, but mostly people who are already visiting the Granite.

Bar Volo Belgontario: Young people who are willing to learn about beer and try new things, and a smattering of die hard beer nerds.

Harbord House Beer Dinner: Mostly people who go to Harbord House (based on the ease with which they launched into conversation with each other.)

Cass and Troy’s Pub Crawl: Bartowelers, industry people.

Project XXXX: They got over 150 people out, many of whom you have to assume hadn’t been there before since it was their largest ever turnout.

Session Festival: For the most part, twenty somethings with disposable income who are willing to try new things.

Out of six events, three of them managed to target non-industry people or people  not actually physically attending a brewpub. Just based on volume through the doors, Session was the most successful event in terms of reaching a new audience followed by Belgontario and Project XXXX. I don’t want to guess at the actual numbers.

Ontario Craft Beer Week didn’t misstep. It did the majority of things right when you take into account the fact that nothing like this had ever been tried on this scale. It used the promotional avenues available, even going so far as to put together a video to drum up online interest. It managed to schedule a number of events of different kinds province wide, allowing for peoples’ differing tastes and comfort levels. It was an incredibly important step forward for the Ontario Craft Brewing industry if only because there is now a frame of reference for events of this magnitude. This was a solid program, and hopefully it will encourage fuller participation from Ontario brewers for the next festival. If they’d had more time to prepare, it would have been better.

Speaking of which, Toronto Beer Week will potentially be the first festival to benefit from this testing of the waters. Here are the lessons they need to take away from Ontario Craft Beer Week: If the goal of the event is to raise awareness and reach new audiences, it is simply not enough to use online, industry friendly media outlets. In order to expand the brand of craft brewing generally, there needs to be mainstream media attention. Additionally, you need to get a combination of the larger beer bars in Toronto, and it wouldn’t hurt to get licensees on board that don’t already cater to your existing audience; maybe some kind of Toronto Beer Week “Craft Beer Challenge,” where you get bars that don’t usually serve craft beer to try it out with their clientele. Maybe get the attention of the Firkin group or something. All I know is that there has to be a certain amount of spectacle to get the general public involved.

Feel free, incidentally, to take advantage of the relative anonymity of the comment section to spitball ideas for Toronto Beer Week either based on what you saw this week or just generally.

I am now going go to take advantage of the fact that Ontario Craft Beer Week is over by giving my liver a well deserved hiatus.

There, there, little liver. You’ll be ok.

Posted in: Ontario Craft Beer Week ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,