Monday, Jan 26th

The deep freeze is well and truly upon us, and looking at the forecast for the next couple of weeks, it looks like we’re in four-layer territory. If your primary mode of transport and exercise is walking, then -25 with the wind chill does you no favours. Besides, the sidewalks are not shovelled in any meaningful way. Dry and cold is a great combination to ensure you’re reminded of the various injuries you’ve had over the years. Sometimes I get the unprompted sense memory of an ankle ligament rolling. 

Charlene gets in touch with minor revisions for Food & Drink while I’m distracting myself from the American news with American Truck Simulator and points out that if I get them done today, we can both invoice. I can take a hint. Ogden, UT is going to have to wait for their load of recreational sports vehicles. 

One of the downsides of working in a number of different capacities is that I have to deal with a large number of bureaucratic processes on an irregular basis. Who’s in charge of getting purchase order numbers? Who am I actually meant to be corresponding with? It must be going well enough. I find out later in the week that they’ve extended my contract option. 

I’m preparing for a meeting with Ron now that we’ve got more or less all the material needed for a first draft. I can’t say my method is efficient. I find that physically writing information down lets it stick in my head; that is to say that creation in physical space seems to make mental space in the way that a tracking spreadsheet doesn’t. I update the tracking spreadsheet anyway, but eventually writing is re-reading. Ticking a box only signifies a completed step. 

Tuesday, Jan 27th

Having gone to bed early, the cat wakes me at 5:00 for treats and I get to work on separating the book into narrative segments in an attempt to figure out flow and suggest where we need additional material or some pruning. As I said to Ron, “They say that sculpture is easy. You start with a block of marble and chip away everything that isn’t an Elephant.” Writing is like that, but first you have to create the block of marble. 

Having separated the various sections we’ve got into narratively related segments, I identify a few places that need work before our meeting. The Granite seems to have been ground zero for nearly every beer related fight for additional regulatory change in Ontario for the majority of its existence, and for that reason, we need to talk about the retail store and the decision to use Growlers. The Growler as a packaging format was only really popular for a decade, but The Granite still use them. 

The walk to Ron’s is terrible. The sidewalks have not been cleared in any significant way and it’s a little like a pilates session in that you have to clench everything in your core so as not to end up flailing about. It is also four-layer territory and we have resorted mostly to woolens, so looking doofier than usual. The meeting goes well and we’re in pretty good shape. He has some appointments, so scheduling punch up sessions is dependent on that. The sessions in the MRI have required a shaved head for a halo device, and it actually looks pretty good on him. I think guys worry about shaving their heads, but having grown out my hair for the first time at 41, I mostly think he’s saving a lot of money on conditioner. 

I’m a little late for Lunch with Oliver Dawson, who has asked whether I would like his library of beer books. Oliver was with Upper Canada Brewing from 1985 until their closure and has been an opera singer, educator, and tour guide over the years. He’s a man of some substance and turns up with three large shopping bags of books. We discuss his career and the vague possibility of an Oral History of Upper Canada Brewing, which I have always thought is a good idea. A 1985-1996 slice of life would capture one of Toronto’s most interesting decades of nightlife. 

The real reason I’m at The Granite is to take photos of the brewers’ recipes so that I can make sure I’m describing them correctly when I’m writing about them. Coming out of the brewhouse with an open two inch binder full of badly water damaged, stiffened looseleaf sheets invites comment from the next table. 

“What’s the screwdriver for?”

“I think it’s a bookmark.”

I spend the afternoon going through the bags of brewing ephemera and narrating the contents for the guys at the next table who somehow find this fascinating. To be fair to them, it’s cold enough that I didn’t want to go back outside either. 

Wednesday, January 28th

Dad used to say that most of the problems in life that really annoyed you on a day to day basis could be solved for a buck, buck and a half. Of course, he said that having rebuilt the same homemade dog door with polyfilla a dozen times. It speaks to a can-do attitude, a certain amount of stubbornness. Sometimes you need a new approach.

Having realized the mouse wheel no longer works and the keyboard’s most frequently used keys no longer have characters on them, I had ordered a new set from Amazon. When you consider the dust, cat dander, spilled coffee and water and beer, crumbs, the fact that one of the legs is broken, and the general scrofulousness of a five year old wireless keyboard, it makes sense to start fresh if you’re working on a project. Some problems no amount of rubbing alcohol wipes will fix. 

Amazon has also delivered the Super Value Size box of Cat Treats, which should keep the alarm clock functioning. 

If you really want to write, I find it’s best to read over the notes you have before you go to bed and to avoid complicating your thought process with other material. This is harder in an era with so much news, but if you have some kind of relatively engaging but not particularly challenging activity like Balatro or some light reading, that will probably allow your subconscious to chip away at the problem. I read over the notes for Keefe’s Irish Stout.

Thursday, January 29th

Here’s the good thing about writing: If you prepare correctly, you can launch into a flow state from the starting block. There’s no such thing as an empty page staring at you. You don’t write with a pen or a keyboard. You write all the time in your head, even when you don’t know you’re doing it. A new keyboard helps. A functioning nib helps. But essentially you’re downloading ideas you’ve already had. 

You re-write it as you download it. Am I repeating words in concurrent sentences? Does the order of the sentences and paragraphs provide maximum impact? Does the cadence work? This comes down mostly to style. The key thing is feeding your subconscious correctly so that you can build the core you’re starting from. In this case, the research portion was significant and since it’s ancillary material for a book, the book needed to be mostly written before it was possible to complement it. 

Started at dawn, done by 8:30. Turns out Grace Slick was right. Feed your head. 

You do run into problems with this method. Sometimes thoughts take a long time to come together. Sometimes, especially if you’re feeling down, you might not input anything. Sometimes, you have to write things just to get them out of there. When in doubt, read an improving book. 

With some chapters re-read and notes pored over, I schedule a fingerprinting appointment for some of the several Elections Canada stand by positions I’ve been submitted for. I RSVP for an Innis & Gunn beer dinner at Patois later in the month and consider the travel that needs to happen in February. Uxbridge. Niagara. Go Transit. Ugh. 

Friday, January 30th

With a section on Ringwood Ale complete, I pop over to Amsterdam Brewing for the release of their Barrel Aged Double Tempest, which is in very good form. It’s 11.5% and perfectly balanced with top notes of toasted coconut and roasted marshmallow. It is not being canned this year, so if you want to try it, it’s going to have to be on tap. 

It’s interesting to watch the public perception of breweries change over time. Amsterdam’s purchase by Royal Unibrew from Denmark means that they produce Faxe for North America. You may have noticed the larger cans. This has resulted in a reduction in the number of Adventure Brews that they come up with, but that reduction coincides with public perception of the brewery post purchase. Double Tempest is one of the best Super Heavyweight Imperial Stouts on the planet, and people clamour for it, so I find it odd that something like Sticke Alt doesn’t bring people running. I can understand that a batch of Rauchbier might sit on shelves for a while, but Starke Pilsner is great and doesn’t seem to have much cachet in the public imagination. 

People have funny ideas about Craft Beer. One upside of having spent a lot of time reading materials from the 1990’s and 2000’s recently is that there was a time when no one was using that term. There was just good beer. When I think about the amount of time, energy, and brainpower that was used between 2007 and 2020 to mentally equivocate for an in-group based mostly on Brewer’s Association lobbying, it’s deeply sad. There are still people doing it. There was a year in the mid 2010’s when the BA expanded the meaning of Craft Beer to include traditional adjunct lagers and they got a big statistical bump out of it for market share. That alteration really should have been the proof that the concept was bullshit. 

The only question should have been, “is it any good?” but the novelty of the segment and the adamance of the consumer for more and more rendered even that moot. You can only play that trick once, and that’s why the new audience doesn’t care very much; the breadth of material is impenetrably large and they have neither the money nor time to parse it. 

Saturday, January 31st

If it’s too cold to go out, you can change your sheets and stay in bed, emerging in time for a late breakfast and The Wrecking Crew on Amazon Prime. The cast works together pretty well, and the action is pretty good, but they could have shaved 20 minutes off the film. 100 minutes would have been plenty, and left some unchewed scenery in Waikiki. Momoa is going to be good as Lobo. 

Sadly, the doom scroll takes hold in the afternoon and I read more of the Epstein Files than is really good for me. Corruption is part and parcel of neoliberal politics, and while you’d have to be staggeringly naive to be surprised that bribes, kickbacks, and collusion are frequently a part of doing business, I’m always shocked by how people will sell their souls for so little. Even that level of cynicism on my part seems unfit to purpose for the current situation. We’re well into True Detective Pulp Fiction Penny Dreadful territory at this point, and it seems like many of the people in the American administration have ties to it. 

I have difficulty not thinking of potential outcomes to calamity, but here I can’t imagine what comes next. It’s one of the reasons I found the pandemic calming; it was already happening.

I think of something my old boss, Andrew Johnson, said to me one day when he saw I had the stock ticker open during a significant 2019 down cycle: “Do you have any money in there?”

“No.”

“So what do you care?”

Smart guy. Also turned me on to Money Jungle. 

Sunday, February 1st

Laundry, dishes, general upkeep. Peculiar and Best Bitter Special up next.