If there was a thematic element to this edition of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide, it is probably to do with the life cycle of the startup brewery. Mark Murphy from Left Field asked me back in the summer if we were going to go back and revisit the breweries […]
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The Background Sometimes, it takes a while to write about things that people send me. It seems that as you get to the portion of a beer writing career where books enter the equation that you spend a lot less time actually writing and a lot more time arranging travel […]
Review: Ernest Cider
When we write the Ontario Craft Beer Guide, the hardest part is coming up with interesting things to say about newly founded breweries. In some cases, we’re lucky and the personnel involved takes care of that for us. Take Second Wedge in Uxbridge: They hired Doug Warren as a brewmaster […]
Breweries and Hard Won Identity
2 (Ed. Note: This is a deeper dive than I intended on Root Beer. I am now sick to death of bloody wintergreen.) I always find alcohol trends fascinating. I remember the 90’s when Mike’s Hard Lemonade came out and engendered an entire wave of alcopop coolers that people enjoyed during […]
That’s Quite Enough Of Your Sassafras
22 Contract brewing has proved to be a grueling, merciless, low margin, joyless and difficult way to make your way in the beer industry. Consider how hard it is to operate as a physical brewery in Ontario. You’ve got to fight for shelf space in the LCBO and grocery chains or […]
Ace Hill, Lost Craft and Contract Brewing in Ontario
When we were coming up with a rating system for the Ontario Craft Beer Guide, we had a lot of material to work with. We’re familiar with BJCP style guidelines, but the simple fact is that they don’t actually reflect reality terribly well. They are good guidelines for competition because […]
The Ontario Craft Beer Guide: Ratings and Expectation Management
5 About two weeks ago I got an email suggesting that a package was being sent to me with a variety of ciders inside. Yesterday a package full of cider showed up at my door with the Strongbow branding on a hamper. I had forgotten entirely about the email by this […]
Macro Cider Reviews and a Stunning Conclusion
1 A couple of weeks ago I was sent a few of Sawdust City’s one offs to review. This was, by and large, a good thing. I like having new beers around to try and that can be a hard thing to do at this point. While there are a lot […]
Sawdust City Spring Seasonals Redux
1 I was sitting in the tasting room at Amsterdam’s Leaside location on a Friday afternoon with Iain McOustra. I had asked him for 15 minutes of his time to talk about Starke Pils (about which I wrote over here). A tasting more or less turned into a drinking and we […]
So You Want To Be A Brewer: Amsterdam/St.John’s Wort Revelator ...
The best Ontario made beverage that I tasted over the course of the last three years wasn’t a beer. It was a cider. I had been signing copies of Lost Breweries of Toronto at the Only Café’s Winter Beer Fest in 2015 and I’d been sat next to the cider […]