Monday, February 2nd
For as long as I can remember, Groundhog Day has been marked by the change of my profile picture on Facebook to one of Bill Murray in the truck with the rodent. Bill Murray traded Ghostbusters in order to make an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, which would be more appreciated as a classic of secular Buddhism if Maugham were a little less dense. Groundhog Day makes the same point in a more digestible way, but I’d say the audience splits about 70/30 on the message.
Phil Connors sucks, but he manages to improve his inner life through effort; Harold Ramis probably meant you to come away with the idea that you can and should do the same and that it doesn’t really require sermonizing to achieve. Wherever you go, there you are so why not brighten up the place? Unfortunately, the thirty or so percent of society who look at the early part of the movie where he’s trying to figure out what he can get away with if he’s immortal and reliving the same day without consequences and think that would be cool seem to be in charge at the moment.
It doesn’t mean that you get to stop trying, but it surely does make it more difficult.
While I’m continuing to write sections about individual beers at The Granite, I’m coping with time passing in the text and trying to figure out exactly where they go. Five down, five to go, but lots of work to be done.
I make the mistake of actually reading some of the leaked documents from the Epstein files, and it would seem that he’s responsible for 75% of Bitcoin’s initial funding. Over three weeks, the Crypto market tanked by a Trillion dollars. Since I’m pretty good at reading consequences, I realize that all of the stupidity surrounding cryptocurrency over the last fifteen years is pretty much an Op. People’s entire personalities are dependent on that situation.
I disassociate for 15 minutes and then decide that beer and pizza might help. They do, but not a whole hell of a lot.
Tuesday, February 3rd
Toni Davies gets in touch from George Brown, referring a journalism student who has questions about Craft Beer vs. Natural Wine.
It’s interesting to see people on the outside of Craft Beer deal with the subject matter. In this case the young person thinks that Natural Wine has sort of supplanted Craft Beer as a trend. I have to point out that Craft Beer is just a subset of Beer and not actually separated by processes very much. It’s more political and more to do with the size of the producers. Craft Beer might be 15% of the market if we’re really generous and broad in interpretation. I have to imagine that Natural Wine might make up 1% of the wine market. Sort of plonk>small producers>natural wine. It would be like saying Saison had replaced the VQA.
It’s pretty clear that not constantly explaining the product and educating the audience and the inability to do so for three years except online probably reduced whatever popular understanding there was of the subject.
It means that, as always, we have to go back to the drawing board. I’d love to actually research terpenoid structures and create new material about hops and how they relate to different parts of the natural world from a sensory perspective, but it seems to me we’re always stuck on “what’s a hop?” Left to my own devices, I’d try to elaborate on that, but the survival of the subject matter depends more on enthusiasm than perfection.
Wednesday, February 4th
While it’s still cold, the sidewalks are at least navigable and the weekly meeting with Ron about the book goes pretty well. We sit down to talk about editing a few chapters and the discussion more or less ends with the decision that as long as the material is intact, I’m free to move it around and augment it as long as it doesn’t mess with the flow. This after explaining the more tedious bits of copy editing in a real time example. I leave him with a couple of assignments for minor sections of the text and quote the end of the month for the final portion of editing.
I’ve got my work cut out for me. The lack of an entertainment budget and the cold have the benefit of keeping me at home and focused. At least most of the time.
Mary Beth pops her head in at the end of the meeting to ask if we’d heard that Martin Long had passed away in December. I had met Martin as part of the group of English people who congregated at Bar Volo on Mondays back in 2007, when it was still on Dundonald Street. This was when cask beer was still in its comparative infancy and they would sell pints for five dollars to clear out the stock. Eventually it got to the point where Ralph would have to add a cask on Mondays to keep up.
Martin had come from Bournemouth and was certainly more dapper than some of the people in that set. Usually he would have come from work, which was in labour relations for the Elementary Teachers of the province. Looking him up now, he had apparently been quite accomplished, which makes sense. He was observant and drily funny and got along with Roger Pettet who was of the same era, but a bit more of a London geezer, so I think there was probably more steel to him than met the eye. I suppose he would have retired some time ago. I think he was a thoroughly decent bloke who I probably didn’t chat to enough, but I wasn’t a teacher yet so the conversational topics were limited.
Apparently there’s a memorial in May, so I shall have to keep an eye out.
Thursday, February 5th
Up betimes and to Union Station to catch the Go Bus to Uxbridge.
Mike Lounds at The Second Wedge is brewing a double batch of Zivotni this year. It turns out that The Second Wedge’s lagers are quite popular during the summer months, so it makes sense to produce more of them on an annual basis. It also means that they’ll be introducing a couple of them later in the season so the bicyclists and farmer’s market attendees can have something to drink.
After a two and a half hour commute, it turns out that I’m the only person on the bus to Uxbridge. At one point in the 1840’s and 1850’s, the St. John family seemed to own most of the land surrounding Uxbridge. We have a cemetery in Sunderland to the North East. Currently my holdings have been reduced to 500 sq. ft. junior one bedroom, but at least we still have the Sideroad named after us.
Having recurring collaboration brews is very gratifying. Zivotni at The Second Wedge continues to develop a little bit over time depending on what ingredients are available. This time around, it’s a combination of Weyermann Bohemian Floor Malt, Bohemian Malt, and a touch of flaked rice. We initially envisioned it as a Czech Specialni/Cold IPA hybrid and the rice tends to dry it out a little and allow the floral sweetness of the Vital to come through on the nose. It comes across as a spring beer, and I guess the closest analog is a Maibock.
It’s also nice to see Mike’s beers develop over time. He had taken over from Doug Warren, who was at Upper Canada Brewing and Olde Stone in Peterborough. Doug’s stuff is traditional. Mike’s stuff is a little more experimental, but with a grounding in tradition. Mike’s also a Niagara College grad, so he thinks in terms of processes, which results in some interesting stuff. What did Gord say? “You teach your children some fashion sense, they fashion some of their own?”
Monday Night Piper is always a solid Scottish 80 Shilling style beer, which is not something that really exists anywhere else. Day Tripper is a SMASH Mosaic Pale Ale at 4%, which reminds a little of something Southern Tier was doing around 2010, but updated. The cleverest thing at the moment is Revel, a Hibiscus and Dragon Fruit Brut Ale. He made a steeped hibiscus tea, so you don’t get the tannin and it dries out completely once the enzymes break the sugars down.
He said, “we like to wait until five years after the trend and then steal the idea.” Just because it wasn’t a good idea when rushed to market doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea in principle.
The trip back is complicated by Go Transit, which had reduced train service from Unionville, so I travelled Uxbridge to Unionville to Vaughan to Wilson to York Mills to Davisville. The entire round trip somehow cost twelve bucks, leading me to re-assess whether GO transit is good, actually. Waiting in minus twenty degree wind chill is made easier by a beautiful sunset.
Friday, February 6th
Fingerprinting for Elections Canada saw me two blocks from the 75 Victoria Street Brewpub. Ron had asked the previous day how many breweries had opened in Toronto in 2025, and the answer was three, but all on the site of other failed breweries.
McGrath’s would make it four, and is the reigning champion for repurpose. Before it was a brewery, it was a Gentleman’s establishment (I am told one of the performers co-wrote Flashdance. What a feeling that must have been!). It was Denison’s, co-owned by Prince Luitpold of Bavaria and operated by Michael Hancock, which made the best Wheat Beer in the world for a half decade. It was briefly Amsterdam affiliated as a pub without brewing anything. Then it was Duggan’s, which briefly made the best Porter and Stout in Ontario before focusing on Number 9 IPA which was quickly supplanted in that arms race. It was the Molson affiliated Beer Academy where I got to brew a collaboration Marzen before it became Batch by Creemore, which, despite talented brewers in the form of Andrew Bartle and Chloe Lovatt, eventually closed down for the same reason as all the others: The rent was too damn high.
The solution is simply to buy the building. I’m surprised the Wittelsbachs von Bayern didn’t do that in the first place.
Jeff Kurkowski, who I mostly think of as Metal Jeff, has refurbished the equipment and thought seriously about the possibilities of the space. He wants mostly to do lagers and traditional British beers, which is about what the market seems to want most of the time. Jeff has been with Amsterdam, Collective Arts, and Godspeed over the career, but I’m more impressed by the fact that he’s an autodidact and actually willing to do research. There’s an awful lot of received wisdom in brewing, and I’d bet that more often than not the people who succeed are the ones equipped to think for themselves. I’ve been quite lucky to see two of them in two days.
I’m not quite sure when McGrath’s will open, but it seems to be progressing and the rumour is spring.
In the afternoon, I get to interview Alan Pugsley about his involvement in The Granite Halifax. Not only is Alan legend for having had such outsize influence on brewing on the East Coast of North America, but he’s also self-effacing enough to understand that not everyone knows his story. He’s got a good sense of humour and the fact that I’m not having to pry detail out of him helps a great deal. The idea that you can be a freebooting brewery professional and travel the world working while also educating new brewers is something that’s taken for granted now. It must have been wild being a singular figure in the 1980’s coming to North America for the first time. I’m amazed he hasn’t written his own book. He’s erudite enough, and while the audience for this kind of thing is limited, it’s good to get it all down.
Saturday, February 7th
In lieu of actual work, administrative organization of tasks including re-installing the white board for tracking purposes. At a chapter a day, we’ll make it easily to the deadline, but it helps to have a malleable visual representation for purposes of morale.
Late Great Movie: The Running Man starring Glen Powell who seems like this generation’s Guy Pearce, at least by jaw line. Closer to the Stephen King story. Serviceable action film. Mostly, surprised to see a Rich Hall cameo.
Stephen King really saw America pretty plainly, didn’t he?
Sunday, February 8th
Wake up to the news that Des De Moor has passed on. While I met him briefly at a GBBF Trade Day in either 2013 or 2018, I didn’t interact with him very often. He was very kind to me, offering some advice on where to go in London if you had a limited time. My understanding is he was the sort of beer industry all-rounder who operates as a bit of a load bearing pillar of the scene; a writer and tour guide and general keeper of information. Sort of the Local Beer Man for Bermondsey.
This would seem to be the problem with the beer industry writ large. There are all of these pioneering figures to whom you owe some recognition. Partially that’s due to the fact that the pool of subject matter experts was smaller and their influence was outsized. Take Michael Jackson, for example. While you can’t fault the man’s body of work or fanatical work ethic, you do have to acknowledge that some of his success occurred because no one else was doing it. Tim Webb and Joe Stange and Eoghan Walsh do a very good job on Belgium, but they don’t quite have the gravitas that Michael has because they exist alongside contemporaries and have to deal with established Canon that intrinsically involves Michael’s efforts over the years.
I suppose that over time you lose people. Over a long enough time period, you lose everyone. You can’t really replace a Martyn Cornell or a Des De Moor. Their experiences and contributions are unique. You not only lose a human being with all of the emotion that that entails, but their entire set of reference if it’s not set down somewhere. I’m always buoyed by the fact that Martyn snuck his magnum opus in under the wire, but saddened by the fact that I don’t get funny, slightly tetchy email exchanges anymore.
You not only lose friends and acquaintances, but find yourself in a position where you have to step up and help to occupy necessary roles that they filled, which is a hell of a thing to have to attempt for the purpose of continuity of subject matter. That’s grandiose talk for a man with a hundred bucks in chequing. I joke with the students at George Brown that I mostly teach so that I will have people to talk to at beer festivals in ten years’ time (if such things exist).