Monday, Jan 12
Editing continues on the book, and we seem to have reached the portion of January where we’ve done away with the pretense of soups and stews and hearty fare and are mostly subsisting on various kinds of toast, whether avocado or beans on.
Having noted that the Roundhouse Winter Craft Beer Festival is on February 21st this year, I get in touch with TK Palermo at Steam Whistle and see if I can cadge tickets. I’ve worked with TK as a publicist for Collective Arts and Steam Whistle for years, but I’ve got no idea what TK actually stands for. Since it’s far too late in our acquaintance to ask, I periodically email her a guess. So far, I have gone with Thrill Kill Palermo, Tsarina Katerina Palermo, Tele-Kinesis Palermo and in this instance, Ticket Komp Palermo. Tickets in hand, I’m sure to send an email to Thanks Kindly Palermo.
Some mysteries are better left unsolved if only for the joy they bring.
After a meeting downtown at Cafe Landwer with Larry (who has aspirations for high end bespoke Toronto Tourism during the World Cup year), I pop my head into Everyside Brewing to see if Jamie Morris is around. He is decidedly not, and I’m beginning to wonder if he exists at all. It’s worth noting that Everyside has a generous happy hour and a fine lineup of other people’s beers just in case you should find yourself in the Financial District.
From there, it’s on to The Only Cafe. On the subway, I get in touch with people who might want to work for Larry and refer them to him. Why not bring the tribe with you?
Speaking of the tribe, two of my graduated students from the George Brown program, Gord and Steve, had been in touch in December to say they were coming to Toronto for a pub crawl and would I like to meet up with them for a beverage? I’ve never actually met them, since they were part of an online cohort. They are both retired, making The Only a really suitable option for them as I seem to recall a yen for maltier beers, and sure enough when I get there they’re drinking a GoodLot Amber Ale. Alice, who is for once not putting out fires, turns up and we get to have a brief chat before the group decamps to Godspeed.
At some point Chris Schryer gets in touch to ask if I have copy for the Spent Grains Zine about Dry January. I respond that I’m out having a beer. Out on the tiles on a Monday. So much for Dry January.
Tuesday, Jan 13
Larry has follow up questions about routes and timing, which I’m happy to answer.
Ashok Argent-Katwala gets in touch to ask if I might consult briefly on a beer list for a pub that his friend is opening in Brockton.
OMAFRA’s wonderfully named Kristy Grigg-McGuffin wants to know if I’d like to judge cider in February in Niagara Falls. It must be the tenth year running for the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Convention cider judging. It’s a nice day out and usually the days are long enough that you get some sun.
Elections Canada wants me to fill out forms for the sake of employee readiness, although all indications are that people are mostly happy with Carney, and I feel we’re unlikely to see a Federal election in 2026. Statistics Canada would like me to prove I have a diploma and fill out some forms. That makes three instances since graduation where I have used the diploma.
Much of this activity requires that PDFs be filled out. Is there anything more hateful than the Adobe corporation? No, I’m probably not going to pay a monthly subscription to fill out a form. The bureaucracy is not so hard on you as the ferreting about online for an alternate PDF filler that won’t leave a watermark or charge you for additional features. The enshittification of end user experience is real.
Robin has given me the video game American Truck Simulator as a Christmas present, so I spend some downtime on a very cold night hauling farming equipment to Napa. It might be snowing, but you can think Mojave thoughts.
Wednesday, Jan 14
First pass editing basically requires coffee and probably limits itself to 3000 words a session, and we’re nearing completion of the submitted text. The fact that there is going to be a snow day is also helpful in that it limits outside distractions. This is good because there are other projects to work on.
Charlene, my editor at Food and Drink, would like me to confirm the outline for a short piece for the summer issue. The way this works is that they have sent a layout with some Lorem Ipsum and a word count alongside a spreadsheet with products that will be available during the period in which the magazine comes out. They’d like to know which products I’m likely to use. While the text isn’t due until next Friday, it’s good to have these milestones as it embeds the puzzle in your head and lets your subconscious work away at it.
Writing copy is a change from what I usually do. It’s a challenge to land product recommendations on a dime from six months out, but it’s nice to gently steer the customers towards higher quality options to which they might not otherwise be exposed.
Thursday, Jan 15
Very snowy, and approaching minus twenty with the wind chill. Stepping out on the balcony, the wind will rip the air from your lungs. Nearly 5000 words edited and we’re well and truly caught up to Ron’s output. This means that next week will be largely about shaping the text before punching up the various chapters and correcting detail.
Having finished editing, and with the psychic weight of impending war with Greenland looming, I taste two versions of La Fin Du Monde side by side for instagram. It doesn’t help the existential dread, but it does smooth out the evening.
Friday, Jan 16
With the snow lying deep and crisp and even, I get in touch with JENKINSON at Burdock and ask if he’d like to reschedule and since he’s got Japan next week, he accedes. This leaves me with the morning free to continue editing.
Mike Sawchuck gets in touch to ask if I would like to host a tasting of Tripels at the Granite at the end of February. Knowing that there’s a non-zero chance I would be there anyway, I agree. Another small puzzle to ruminate on during these winter months.
By 3:00 PM, I’m on my way to Brockton to a new bar called Bad Angel going in on Dundas West down the street from Swan Dive. Corey, the owner, is nattily attired but had a slip on the ice the other day, so he is moving as though the rack is still stuck in his coat. They are having the soft launch for friends and family and his incapacitation means his partner is taking out the garbage in a party dress as the mood lighting is installed overhead. Bar ownership is a glamour profession.
We chat about options for small, local craft beers and what kind of margins he’s projecting. Apparently just the application for the license is enough to bring reps running in this economy and he’s had some interest. I suggest that he may as well serve things he likes to begin with, and he has a captive group who participate in a pub night to run options by. We decide to check in after a couple of weeks, which means I get to hang out with Ashok, who typically radiates bemusement and who is probably the first person to have twigged that the project will get mentioned here, thus sending additional reps running.
I take the opportunity of being in a part of the city I rarely visit to make my way through Steadfast Brewing to Thirsty and Miserable where the bar is mostly people who used to work for Rainhard, and Katie, who’s recovering from a winter bicycle mishap; Pretty tough lady. The Fairweather Pirate Smile IPA is a little stone fruit forward for my taste, leaning sour and therefore nectarine, although I do like the Elton reference. The Short Finger Helles is the bottom of the keg, but straight down the middle of the style.
Living alone sometimes means you don’t want to go home, especially after you’ve been snowed in for a few days. Jeremy Sachedina and I have a good conversation about John Carpenter films while talking a little synth. This is the kind of badinage that you simply can’t get from the cat and is one of the reasons errand runs get expensive; I like a natter.
Saturday, Jan 17
Among the various hats I wear, I’m historian for the Ontario Craft Brewers and I get to update their timeline on a yearly basis. Since I’m updating the spreadsheet with news throughout the year, this gives me the opportunity to get paid something for the information I’m collating. How do you quote for paying more or less constant attention? Watcher of the skies is not typically a paid gig. I suppose that if I kept a ledger of important happenings on the side of my desk it would be easier to collate annually, but for this year at least I have to work from the spreadsheet.
This means going through and noting openings, closings, changes of ownership, realty listings, rumour, and hearsay. You want to be accurate, and this means a whip round of the spreadsheet checking on all the brewing entities in Ontario. While I did one of these in November, the end of the year has been brutal on breweries. Both Goose Island and Blue Moon have decided Toronto has beaten them. If the corporate guys are out, you know things are bad.
It looks like 30 physical breweries closed in Ontario in 2025 and something like four contract breweries, but who cares? Some physical breweries switched to contract status and some ownership structures are more or less impossible to parse. Can you really say Indie isn’t a contract brand because of Birroteca at Eataly?
The day is basically eight hours of fact checking and the sheer number of 2025 closures is bumming me out. I’m meant to go to Samara Brewing to see Sam Brown’s Oatmeal Stout Collab, but the slush and the hour and a half commute seems daunting after the data crunching. Sammy’s going to have to wait, but I’ll get to it eventually.
Sunday, Jan 18
Awoken by a malfunctioning smoke detector just before the alarm on the phone, I spend ten minutes googling how to disable the clearly faulty unit, fighting loud beeps every sixty seconds. It requires a screwdriver, which is naturally missing, so I employ a fork after briefly considering a hammer. The unit has a ten year battery and would probably have beeped for another eight years if left to its own devices. It had to die, and all it cost me was a bent fork.
Nick Pashley has sent an early morning email lamenting dental complications that have forced him to non-alcoholic beer through a course of antibiotics. Some choose Dry January while others have it thrust upon them. The poor fellow has already discovered Guinness 0.0% so I recommend Harmon’s Jack Pine and Bellwoods Jelly King, but I caution him that most of the flavours of lager tend to have the wrong texture.
I think if I had to drink Non-Alcoholic beer I would go with Peroni; It tastes the most like itself. That is a ludicrous argument, by the way. It’s like saying you would drink Diet Dr. Pepper because it tastes the most like Dr. Pepper. It’s like saying you wouldn’t drink Diet Coke because it has a pronounced vanilla character compared to Coca Cola Classic. These are conditional arguments since no one is forcing you to drink either version. It’s not a bargain if you didn’t want it in the first place.
I leave him with the suggestion that SOBR Market over next to Summerhill LCBO has a wide selection, all at prices that will make him want something stronger than beer.
The CBC has had a piece about brewery closures and sure enough, radio stations begin getting in touch to see whether I could be interviewed. I respond that I actually have updated figures, which is not exactly coincidence. Sometimes you can feel the tension in the air. Morning talk radio on a Monday. Still got it.
It’s Darryl Newbury’s 60th birthday, so we hie along to Godspeed. It’s good to see John Tyler and David Chang-Sang and Sandeep Ronghe out and about. For a long time, about 2019 to 2022, being a local beer man was not a lot of fun. During the pandemic especially, Robin and I had been doing the podcast, but it was not as though you were seeing people when you went out. A lot of the time, it felt like I was checking on folks rather than visiting with them. The industry had a lot of attrition of personnel and people moved on. Besides, I had always tried to keep a little professional distance, which made that era lonely.
It’s fairly hard to make friends as you get older, especially if you’re a guy. I’m really lucky to have fallen in with a crowd that includes so many well adjusted, relatively responsible, somewhat goofy people. Beer is about people, after all.