Friday, August 14th
The strange part about being a government employee is that you’re not really meant to talk about it. You’re oathed in for life and I’m never quite sure whether it’s simply that I’m meant to be protecting people’s data or whether it extends to processes and procedural issues. Best not to talk about it at all, really, except in the broadest terms. I figure if you could mention it on Linkedin, you’re probably alright.
I was a Field Operations Supervisor for Statistics Canada for five and a half months and didn’t really have time for blogging. The nature of the gig economy means that you have to hang on to all the other jobs that will outlast a contract position, so there I was working what was ostensibly a nine to five position while teaching in the evenings and leading walking tours when they were booked conveniently. For the first couple months I continued to edit and co-write Ron’s new book, Brewed In The Family.
My feeling about government work is generally, “if I don’t do it, who will?” which is not an unreasonable way to feel about a democracy you live in. I don’t know if it’s age or experience, but this time around it felt more that way than usual. I think there are a lot of people under thirty without any kind of professional experience. The gig economy may have put paid to the ability to accrue role specific skills.
Having worked government jobs at the poll worker or field level, I can tell you that they tend to come with a complete set of materials and instructions and on the face of it they ought to be really hard to screw up. This does not stop people from going into business for themselves and inventing processes from whole cloth rather than consulting the instructions. In some ways, this is like crowdsourcing people to put together an IKEA bookshelf. You’re going to have leftover bolts and someone is going to lose the Allen Key.
Every time you introduce variability into a system, the complexity of outcomes increases exponentially. The challenge is reducing the ability of people to introduce additional variables, but when you consider scheduling underemployed gig workers now comes part and parcel, trouble is coming looking for you. I suppose the reason I keep getting work is I’m good at reverse engineering other people’s decision making. Like the man says, trouble is my business.
So, when the final meeting ended at 8:45 AM, I was ready to power off the computer and ship the remaining office supplies back. By 9:03, I was at the post office. By 10:00, I was at Henderson Brewing, picking up a couple of special edition RUSH beers for some tour guests who had been to see the show Thursday night. By 10:15, I had an Ethica Americano in hand, and by 11:00 I was strolling along the Esplanade past Joe Carter’s new statue with a BBQ Pork Banh Mi from Nguyen Huong. I had been dreaming about that sandwich while chairbound in midtown. Having dropped the beers at the hotel, I swung back uptown to enjoy the silence and survey the wreckage that five and a half months of sixty hour weeks inflicts on what could tenuously be called bachelor domesticity.
The floor could use a mop.
Saturday, August 15th
Just because you’re not due at the desk at 8:00 doesn’t mean your body will let you sleep in. Over the summer I had gotten to the point where I could judge the play of the light on the building across the street instead of looking at the clock.
The requests for culinary tourism have been thick on the ground during the summer. In August, I have ten of them so far. The St. Lawrence Market on a Saturday can be a bit of a bear, especially in clement weather. In addition to the regular stops, the nice people from Texas get to try in season Shiro plums from Niagara and a couple of other random maple based throw-ins because I’m delighted to be out of the house.
Having to explain the Great Beaver Quest and its relation to FIFA makes me feel like a bit of a moron. “We do this as a city. In the 2000s, Toronto had moose statues. You can still see them around if you know where to look.” Sure enough the van from Lucky Moose is nearby and that’s a lovely bit of coincidence. If you palaver long enough, you’ll hit some material eventually.
Judging only by my bookings, I think RUSH did more for the city this summer than FIFA did. I’d love to see the numbers. Because I went to the same school as Geddy Lee’s kid, I get to tell the group about the times when he would stand in the back of assembly, presumably before meeting with the administration to discuss donations, and 600 teenage boys would pretend not to be impressed. Stick It Out had been on heavy rotation on Much Music during what must have been a period of reinvention when RUSH was influenced by Trent Reznor. Just hundreds of teen boys, slouching single file past the world’s most recognizable bassist delivering an upward jut of the chin in almost tacit recognition of the fact they’ll never be that cool.
In the evening I went to see Bonnie Raitt at Massey Hall. May we all be so lively at 76. Right up top she won over the Toronto crowd by apologizing for America. She’s not only a great slide player, but I had never considered the quality of her voice. The guitar is just the hook. She can belt or growl or croon, and the Mose Allison encore Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy is a great choice of material. Maia Sharp comes back on for harmony on Angel From Montgomery and for just a minute the audience is completely silent and you get the full effect of the acoustics.
Sunday, August 16th
I’d been out of touch much beyond the creation of the book. While I was included on the correspondence related to formatting, I tapped out sometime around the point where our smallest remaining problems were Canadian vs. American spellings of the odd words. It’s hard to explain to a first time author that even a really close reading isn’t going to reveal every typo. A year from now someone is going to pop their head around a corner and point one out.
The Granite Brewery’s 35th anniversary is an extremely well attended event, and Brewed In The Family is the centerpiece of it. There had been well over a hundred pre-ordered copies for the event and my understanding is that sales are going well in Halifax and PEI. The sheer number of likes the posts about the book got on Instagram suggest that there may actually be a more significant audience for it than we had originally thought. A lot of our early calculation was based on 1000 copies as a nebulous mental figure, but I’m optimistic we might blow past that, especially if we can drum up interest in a few bookstores and events.
My name’s on the book, but it’s Ron’s day. Because of the ALS, Ron’s mobility is somewhat hampered, so wellwishers and people requesting personalized signatures had to come to him over the course of the afternoon. He set up on the banquette nearest the brewhouse and held court for several hours. That can be a lot. Situations in which people will line up to come and talk to you are rare in life and I got the sense that by the end of the afternoon he was ready to go home.
We should all know this because of social media, but situations where you have to perform your own identity can be exhausting. Being an author, especially one from hospitality with regular customers and a cast of people you’ve known forever, is definitely a situation where you have to be your best self and think of something meaningful to inscribe on each book that people hand you. Six books in, I still don’t know what to write when people ask for signed copies. I can’t imagine what Ron, who’s just discovering this in his seventies, must think about the experience. Of course, he’s made a living as a publican for 35 years, but this is a little different.
I sympathize. By contrast to working from home in air conditioning being a cog in a bureaucracy, being “Jordan St.John” can be pretty hard graft. At this point, people don’t even know how to explain my career, hence the Local Beer Man moniker. I’m not a natural extrovert and keeping track of a thousand or so people can be a bit difficult. Standing around drinking small samples of things for five hours catches up to you and sometimes you just want to sit in a corner watching people enjoy themselves.
It’s a sign of my great good luck that I don’t get to sit in the corner very often. Someone always wants a natter, and generally speaking the conversational level is pretty high. I’ve managed to keep the elaborate ruse that I know what I’m doing going for yet another day.
Monday, August 17th
One of three days off I’ve had in the last three months. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from industrious and hustling to indigent and comatose. The sudden deceleration feels like you’re moving through syrup. I manage to at least sort the laundry and a broom makes an appearance.
Tuesday, August 18th
Years ago, Robin LeBlanc and Greg Clow and I were sitting around. I don’t recall the context exactly, but I can guarantee you we weren’t paying for the beer we were drinking. A dinner at the Mill Street Beer Hall? The launch of Craft Adelaide? We were discussing styles of beers that hadn’t quite made it. Cascadian Dark Ale. Kentucky Common. Texas Brown Ale.
“I haven’t had a Texas Brown in a hot minute,” I said.
Greg thought that sounded like a Western Swing combo: Texas Brown and The Hot Minute are somewhere in Austin tonight doing a Bob Wills tribute. Ah-Haaaaaa.
The only Texas Brown I can think of in Toronto was Bellwoods Grizzly Beer, which has made sporadic appearances over the years. It was great. One of those things that is received well, but which would languish on shelves if it was more frequently available. Since I had been wanting to work with Andrew McCready at Bickford Brewing and he gets the importance of West Coast bitterness, it seemed like a natural fit.
Over the previous weeks he had been sending plaintive messages reminding me that we needed a name and a recipe and could there be text for the label? I had also been trying to coordinate with my Mom in Kingston about the Centennial bines she’s been growing out in the yard for the last decade or so. The hops weren’t going to be ready for the 18th, so we’re going to harvest about a pound of them and run the beer through a Randall at service for Bickford’s 2nd Anniversary on September 12th.
I run the recipe by Jonathan Gaytan from El Paso just for authenticity. Brown IPAs really only have two moving parts: Hops and Brown.
Andrew’s setup at Bickford is quite clever. Most brewers set alarms on their phone. He’s gone with a big, easily readable digital clock in the center of the brewery. There’s no HLT, so one of the fermenters does double duty and is in turn sanitized. Graining out is helped by the fact the largest mash you could manage is about three bags of barley. Without floor drains, you’re encouraged to keep it tidy, which I just about manage to do.
We have a lovely chat and I try one of the four coriander inclusive beers he currently has on tap. The witbier is very good, as is the West Coast IPA. On the way home I stop at PAT Mart taking advantage of the flyer for Korean grocery staples. The kitchen is out of everything, but at least there’s soba and gochujang.
Thursday, August 20th
Tourism resumes with two lovely couples from upstate New York and California’s wine country. They had never really been in Toronto previously. The highlight here was the St. Urbain everything bagel with lox and garlic cream cheese (the capers and red onion make it). We actually run long by a half hour or so and I find myself in the Distillery District towards the time Eastbound Brewing opens. Tara has come up with a flaming hot cheetos flavour of chicken wing that goes tremendously well with the jalapeno ranch dip and their Base Camp Saison. I think Dave Lee’s Belgian and German ales are continuously underrated.
Early on during the contract employment, I made an effort to get out of the house and continue popping my head into breweries. In practice, I almost never made it out of my midtown district and the quantity of work was such that I never even really used the balcony. The lack of movement is punishing and even with new shoes my left IT band is feeling it as I walk along towards Avling. I enjoy a very good Bohemian lager and some broccoli and brussels sprouts in order to at least pretend toward virtue.
Friday, August 21st
I awake to a last minute booking. They want two hours of city highlights. I had wanted to do some chores and grocery shopping. Some day the mop will taste the floor.
It turns out BTS is in town at Rogers Stadium and here is a small group of ladies in their mid 50’s from New York City who follow BTS around the planet. They have tickets for both nights. I say, “Oh, you’re into K-Pop,” searching for an explicable genre interest. No. Just BTS. “Do any of you speak Korean?” No. Just BTS lyrics. “Well, I’ve got to look this up. What’s their biggest hit?” Butter or Dynamite.
At City Hall, another fan walks up and hands them homemade bookmarks. In the Eaton Centre, they’re buoyed by a kiosk giving away specialty Nike x BTS swag. By the time we get to Sankofa Square, they’re delighted by the presence of V on a Jinro Soju billboard. Next week they will be in Los Angeles. Two of them are going to South America next month.
I leave them at a steakhouse in Old Town with directions back to their car. After a Pilsner Urquell at Beerbistro, I take the subway uptown listening to Butter and Dynamite.
Hey. It’s got a beat and you can dance to it.