I’m Jordan St. John. I have the kind of career that you cannot possibly plan. Having written about beer for 10 years at this point, it’s becoming difficult to sum up.

Semi-Legitimate Beer Guy

I started writing about beer in 2010 order to get into brewing school at Niagara College. When I applied to brewing school, there were something like 500 applicants for 24 positions. I figured that with that many people applying to get into brewing school, it would be a good idea to be able to show them that I knew what I was talking about. Thus was St. John’s Wort born. It is a very bad brewing pun that it is far too late to change. Never change the name of your blog the first week.

By the time I was accepted to brewing school in 2011, I had been writing about beer for 6 months and had landed a job as the National Beer Columnist for QMI/Sun Media. As far as I know, I was Canada’s first (and likely only ever) nationally syndicated beer columnist.

In addition to the blog and the weekly column and the brewing school experience, I have somehow managed to parlay this gig into becoming the co-author of a book on home brewing (How to Make Your Own Brewskis: The Go-To Guide for Craft Brew Enthusiasts) and the leading expert on the history of brewing in Ontario and Toronto through the books Ontario Beer and Lost Breweries of Toronto. I have also co-authored two editions of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide which catalogues and explains the rapidly growing brewing scene here in Ontario.

With my co-host, Robin LeBlanc, we host The Ontario Craft Beer Guide: The Podcast, which we also named the first week.

I am a Certified Cicerone and a Certified BJCP. Along with the brewing experience, I sometimes brew collaboratively. I once helped design a beer with Margaret Atwood. I commissioned polling that helped convince the government of Ontario that grocery store beer sales were going to be popular with the public. I have been on Storage Wars Canada as an expert. As far as I know, I am the only person ever to have been told by Steve Paikin that they won The Agenda on TVO.

I have provided content for CBC Radio, TAPS Magazine, Huffington Post, Quench Magazine, The Growler, Original Gravity, The Ontario Heritage Trust and a number of other publications.

I teach people about beer at George Brown College in Toronto, and have built a three course certificate for the College since 2017. As of spring of 2021, these courses are available for online learning.

I have drunk some very good beer with some very nice people and some very bad beer with very nice people. I have helped break up street fights and served beer to foreign dignitaries. If I’m honest, it has all gone much better than I expected.

If you’d like to get in touch, please use the form below!