As we established in Rule 1, beer is a luxury good that contains small amounts of recreational poison which people really enjoy. For that reason, it hits people’s desire button. The difficulty is that since the audience for beer does not have uniform desires (since desire is somewhat ephemeral) and […]
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3 (Ed. Note: I’ve been writing about beer for 15 years now, and I feel as though it’s time to see if we can’t condense this knowledge down into useful information that might help explain how we got to this point. We’ve been through a boom, we’re going through some pretty […]
Rule #1: Beer Is Almost Never About Beer
16 2024 has been an interesting year for Ontario’s beer market. We’ve had closures, although not quite as many as you might imagine. We’ve had mergers and acquisitions, some of which make no sense. We’ve had the odd brewery open in the province of Ontario, which is not as ludicrous as […]
Ontario Beer: The International Problem
A couple years back, people would joke that they were tired of living in unprecedented times. Well, we’re still there and I don’t really see anyone laughing. Inflation is a real problem and it comes at a time when the beer industry in Ontario is being shaken up by serious […]
Fun With Numbers: How Much Is That Lager In The ...
5 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
8 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
2 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
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
3 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
2 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 […]