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It’s a really interesting time for the brewing industry in Ontario, and it’s one of those moments that prompts some re-evaluation. Josh Rubin called me the other day from the Toronto Star to ask how long I thought The Beer Store would remain in business, pointing out that there are […]

Ontario Beer: The Fifth Wave

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I’ll be honest with you.  I don’t like my Birthday. September 9th has more often than not been the first day of school. Monday, Tuesday. Didn’t matter. Sometimes it would be on the weekend before, but the odds were that my Birthday signalled the first day of school. It always […]

Granite Brewery X St. John’s Wort Fisher King ESB

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Revelations come in odd places.  I had gotten off the St. Clair replacement bus the other month and was walking across Maple Claire park from the Gunns Road streetcar loop. It’s the shortest and least aromatic path to the event space where I pick up the odd shift.  Getting to […]

Floral: From the Ground Up

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It’s an interesting morning from a task variation standpoint. I’m just about to start teaching this semester’s Beer 1 Online Class (spots still remain) at George Brown College in Toronto. The online class usually has some concessions to distance included. If you have all the students in the same classroom […]

Fun with Numbers – On the LCBO Strike

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Over the course of the winter, when I was writing about teaching sensory detail for beer, I wrote:  My hope is that by the end of the six week course they’ll learn to slow down a little and appreciate things more, maybe develop more experience, maybe learn to direct that […]

Nothing But Flowers

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It seems odd to write about a beer that’s almost gone.  Usually when I write about a collaboration beer, I do it a couple of weeks before it comes out because the brewing process is complete and I want to drum up some enthusiasm for it.  It turns out that […]

The Second Wedge Životní Czech Style Lager

It comes as a small, pleasant surprise that I get to talk about excise taxes for the alcohol industry in a vaguely positive way for once, given the announcement today that a couple of changes are being made at the federal level that will support small brewers across Canada. After […]

Fun With Numbers: Federal Alcohol Excise in 2024-2025

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I got out over my skis a little.  Part of my plan for the year, just at home, is to read more. I’m aiming for a couple of books a month and so far I’m a little above that. I had been reading Slavoj Zizek’s Living In The End Times. […]

So You Want To Be A Teacher – Regression

In the run up to week five, the first of this year’s completely redeveloped lectures for the Beer Appreciation class at George Brown, I had some problems to contend with. As stated earlier, the sheer volume of imported American Craft Beer that had fallen out of the LCBO chain made […]

So You Want To Be A Teacher – Redevelop

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It’s hard to say exactly why the wheels came off the lecture. It was probably a combination of things. There was news out of the UK last week that Marston’s was going to stop using its Burton Union system for yeast propagation, and having been there just over a decade […]

So You Want To Be a Teacher – Reminisce