One of the things that frustrates me when I’m reading a bottle of beer is when there are food pairing suggestions that don’t tell you anything. “Try this with spicy foods,” the label proudly exclaims, as though that conveys any useful information. Usually, when the bottle says something like that […]
Accounting for Taste
I want to suggest something to you, and it may be something that has crossed your mind if you’re a brewer in Ontario. I think that we’re all aware that large brewers are, if not faltering, then experiencing a period of contraction. This is probably as the result of the […]
Hoppy Beers and Monoculture in Ontario
If you’ll recall, I wrote a column early in January about the Hop Mason beer that Keith’s are brewing for pubs in the Prime chain across Canada. The conclusion that I came to was that it was objectively good and that the specs for the beer put it squarely in […]
Keith’s Hop Series
One of the things that has defined the Discount Beer experience for me is the increasingly obvious point that there is a large segment of the market that isn’t drinking beer for flavour. You would think that given 60 products of varying quality that all cost the same amount of […]
Discount Beer February – What Did We Learn?
12 I don’t pretend to understand the Alberta beer scene completely. After all, I was only there for about five days, and there’s only so much information you can process. Fortunately, brewers like to talk. While the column this week is about the unique beer hall scene that Alberta has developed […]
Craft Brewing in Alberta – An Outsider’s Perspective
6 It’s hard to know exactly what to make of Ramblin’ Road Brewery Farm. They’re a new brewery in Norfolk County. Part of the issue here is that there really aren’t all that many farm breweries kicking around and there’s not really a concrete definition of what that might entail, at […]
Ramblin’ Road Brewery Farm
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about the craft beer vs. crafty beer problem. While it has really only sprung up as a discourse over the last week, you would have to have been blind not to see the issue coming. The problem here is that large breweries […]
Craft Vs. Crafty
8 One of the things that I’ve been thinking about over the course of the last week is exactly what to say about the tour of the Sam Adams Brewery I went on last Friday. It’s hard to know what to make of Sam Adams. They are so large in comparison […]
In Which I Tour The Sam Adams Brewery
This morning I was sitting in the lobby of the Park Plaza in Boston, smiling as effusively as the early hour permitted at a waitress in an attempt to get some coffee. Possibly it was because of the lack of caffeine in my system that a blog post from Alan […]
Cents and Sensibility: A Junket Declaration Form
7 It’s fairly easy to take an annual event like Cask Days for granted, but since this is the eighth anniversary, I thought I’d show you something pretty neat about the development of the festival. It’s mostly interesting because it mirrors the development of the Ontario beer scene almost directly. 2005: […]