Last week around this time I was down at the Amsterdam Brewery for a product launch. Now, I know from having been to a number of them that launching a beer is a pretty hard thing to attract people to in Toronto. Imagine how difficult it must be to get […]
Yearly Archives: 2011
Dateline – Weehauken, New Jersey According to his blog, All The Beer In The World, Steve Hackenbush of Weehauken, NJ has today completed his quest to sample and rate all of the beers produced by mankind. This seemingly impossible achievement marks the end of a thirteen year project for Hackenbush, […]
All The Beer In The World
The thing about writing a blog is that you have to keep churning out content, and this essentially means that you’re always on the lookout for something to write about. All beer bloggers are doing this all the time in order to stay relevant. By the same hugely generalized token, […]
The Wreck of The Okanagan Springs Beer Review
Hands down, the most interesting development of the last couple of weeks is that beer now gets delivered to my doorstep. Not a huge amount of beer. It’s not like I won a contest or anything. Usually single bottles in bubble wrap. The beer fairy brings other things as well: […]
Beer Fairy Thursday: Keith’s Tartan Ale, Innis and Gunn Rum ...
An article in the Globe and Mail was recently brought to my attention, titled “If you really loved Ontario families, Mr. McGuinty, you’d kill the LCBO.” It’s essentially an example of how not to be taken seriously and a petulant tantrum on the part of the columnist. He starts out […]
Whiny, Petulant Man-Children
We complain a lot about beer in Ontario. We complain that the LCBO’s monopoly means that we can’t get anything interesting. We complain that The Beer Store is run by huge multinational companies primarily interested in maintaining their control. I am now literally complaining about the fact that we complain, […]
Icelandic Beer Day and Olvisholt Brugghus
Ed. Note: Sometimes, just sometimes, you realize that there are topics other than beer available to you to write about. Periodically, they may show up here. We will almost certainly return you to your regularly scheduled beer blogging in the next couple of days. A couple of years ago, one […]
A Brief Interlude from Writing About Beer
Sometimes, I’ll just flat out over think things. Like, with the Barley’s Angels launch, I ended up over thinking a lot of the questions that I was going to ask in order to put together an article. Initially, my thought process involved questions like “Is the appropriation of the idea […]
Barley’s Angels: The Drinking Habits of the North American Human ...
If you’re new to being a nationally syndicated beer writer, like myself, it’s easy to dramatize things unnecessarily inside your head. Deadlines tend to loom larger in your mind than they have any right to, possibly due to the ominousness of the term. The Sun column is 600 words, after […]
Molson M
One of the hardest things to deal with in life and in beer writing are those moments when you’re legitimately surprised. Surprise seems to be the LCBO’s stock in trade these days. Gone are the underwhelming release schedules of yesterday. For the last four months or so, they’ve been actually […]