How do you write about Craft Beer at this point?

It seems like idiocy to waste the better part of an afternoon on it when you can feel the immiseration of society happening in real time and you could be making money instead. Being a sensory expert is difficult in this milieu, not just for the reason that you can taste climate change in the product over time, but also because the lived experience of the day to day grind is becoming very difficult.

It’s not just being an expert taster, but an observer of detail. On the walk to school from King Station on Monday afternoon, there was a homeless person on every block, several of whom asked for money, and one of whom showed me their colostomy bag after telling me his girlfriend’s father had kicked him out after a bout with cancer. There must be something about my countenance that invites such confession; big friendly guy.

For the first time I can remember, there were rats crossing King Street in broad daylight, nibbling on the perennials in St. James Park. A couple of young men walked by carrying their terrier in their arms. It had never seen a rat, and the instinct was somewhat muted. 

That’s alright because there were no streetcars running that length of the city that day. They were diverting on Church Street to avoid King, which means that some of the Queen Streetcars (now buses) diverted from Queen to King and thence to Dundas. The King car only runs to Parliament because Broadview Station is closed. Scarborough’s Line 3 was shut down one day without notice, rendering an entire transit line inoperable.

If I want to get to work at St. Clair and Keele, I have to take the Streetcar from St. Clair, which is now a bus. I once had to wait for a replacement bus for a replacement bus for a replacement bus for a streetcar.

The record, incidentally, goes to a Saturday this summer. The Crosstown LRT has functionally meant a replacement bus service between St. Clair and Lawrence every two or three weeks for the last decade. Going downtown is a damned near run thing most weekends. One day it was shut down between York Mills and Bloor, meaning the replacement buses needed to turn down Church street north of Bloor. Coming home, there was a collision at Yonge and Bloor, meaning the buses had to go down Church to Wellesley, across and up Bay Street and allow people to load just north towards Yonge and Church. I was effectively waiting for a replacement bus at a replacement bus stop for a replacement bus stop for a subway.

When the subway is operational, it can be stopped at any point for trespassers on the tracks. One time this summer, the train operator said, “we will be bypassing Bloor Station due to a man with a sword on the platform.” Same day as the previous story.

I never remember to charge my earbuds, so I’m privy to a lot of conversations I wish I wasn’t. Crossing the street into Davisville the other day to go to work, the voice of a boy behind me explaining to his mother in the perfunctory manner kindergarteners have that he needs to go to work so that he can have money so that he can buy food so she won’t starve. On the way back some middle schoolers, a small one with dreads and a larger chubbier one in a hoodie, were exploring the possibility that they might live to the year 2100 if they avoided cancer. The smaller one promised he was never going to smoke again. The twelve year olds talked about people they’d lost to tumours, being real careful to explain the diagnostic difference between cancerous and benign.

Some generic floppy haired St. Mike’s kids got on the 512 without paying and were briefly faced down by a British woman in a fit of pique that wouldn’t have been out of place on Eastenders. Their complete indifference shut her down faster than any cutting remark they could have made. They couldn’t conceive of a delivered consequence. She might as well not be there. They went on to discuss whether they had peanut butter and pretzels and whether shrooms were better than DMT before comparing the joints they had on them.

I can feel the city sliding away on a day to day basis. Not only is it extremely difficult to get anywhere, but the sense I’m getting is that there’s no help coming. I was talking to a member of the city council the other week and he was basically of the opinion that the city was bankrupt. There’s an 80% rise in the use of food banks in Canada since 2019 because people can’t afford food. Students are living eight to a basement in Scarborough because they can’t afford housing.  

It’s a little like driving along the highway in a car while you can feel parts falling off. There goes a wing mirror! Well, we’re going in a straight line, so that’s not much of a problem. There goes a lug nut! Well, there are several more of them on that wheel, so we’ll be fine. The gas gauge still seems to read as being suspiciously full considering we only put twenty bucks in the tank.

If you’ve felt that, you’re not alone. This is where we live: On the brink of something. It’s exactly as hard out there as you think it is.

So, how am I supposed to write about Craft Beer? Hell, in a situation where everyone is strapped, can you ethically ask for samples for review? Am I going to write about trends? What trends? Someone’s going to put hops or puree in one of the remaining unhopped styles?

I figure the only way to do it is as a function of this general situation. That means that some of what I’m going to tell you is going to be grim. We’re going to lose a lot of breweries over the next six months. I had to lock down access to the spreadsheet I use to keep track because I needed columns for “affiliation” for when brewing companies shack up and “rumour and scuttlebutt” because there’s so much that it needs a column.  

I’m going to try to be helpful, analytical, and potentially suggest some courses of action. Occasionally, I may even attempt to verge on optimism, although we have some business to attend to before we get there. Next week I’m going to talk about taxes, and the week after that the slow collapse of social media.