Walking down Manning as the November light fades reveals that the Annex likes its period authentic gloom. Sodium lights didn’t come in until the 1960’s, and it’s called the Annex because Toronto absorbed the neighbourhood in the 1880’s. I grant you, we’re a little further over than that. Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster met down the street at Harbord Collegiate; a Toronto bona fide that can’t be beat.

Point being, there’s gloom all around as you come down Manning, just puddles of streetlight on fallen leaves until Harbord, and as I turn right I nearly miss Bickford looking for it despite the illuminated bike lane. Last time I walked along this stretch of Harbord I was going to see Folly Brewing under its original ownership. At that time, Bickford was a laundromat adjacent to a store that seemed to specialize in lifted bicycles. Since then the exterior has been painted black, which has helped it fade away from the streetscape. I pulled up google maps about the same time the glaring Open sign caught me. 

I take a minute trying to figure out how to reduce the glare in the photo and by the time I get through the door, one of the lads at the bar raises his chin towards me as if to say, “it happens to all of us.” I perch on a stool and the lady working the bar says to let her know when I decide what I want. Kid gloves. It’s my first day back in a while. Maybe that’s just in my head. 

Notebook and pen out, I text McCready. 

The pandemic wasn’t kind to Craft Beer. In 2023, 43 brewing properties closed in Ontario, 30 of which were physically located and actually producing beer. That’s about a tenth of the inventory in a year. I think my first interaction with him must have been to say something like, “For God’s sake, don’t open a brewery.” It was at David Chang-Sang’s Cask Event at Common Good, and Andrew McCready had just come out with a pretty decent Pale Ale. 

It wasn’t the kind of optimism you need in the situation if you’re starting out, and probably not my best moment. It was merely, I think, concern for what looked like a decent fellow entering a collapsing market without much in the way of capitalization. Here stands a genial man behind a cask of Brown Ale, ready to take on the world, or at least Bickford Park. 

In 2025, he’s awarded Best New Brewery in Canada by what might be the final iteration of the Canadian Brewing Awards.

You never know. 

At 42, Andrew McCready has left behind a career as an Audio Engineer. Don’t most Craft Brewers come from another job that they’ve grown out of? It’s the preferred route to the industry. Standing just short of six feet tall, at least a foot of which seems to be beard, he’s put on a little size through the shoulders since the last time I saw him, probably from hefting bags of malt and rudimentary equipment around. 

At Bickford, what you see is what they have. The space, whose colour palette includes a lot of orange, can’t sit more than 30 people at a time and one assumes that on nights when Dungeons and Dragons groups come in, the only place for drinkers must be at the bar. The main space is not quite as large as a midtown one bedroom, but has been retrofitted as one of Toronto’s smallest breweries.

Usually I have to guess at the size of brewing equipment, but everything is labeled. Andrew is brewing 250 litres at a time. He points out that Radical Road’s in-house system is smaller. Larger batches for LCBO sales go through Common Good in Scarborough. The majority of the beers brewed on site use hops from Canada, which, if the scale were larger, might be considered a manifesto, but at this size is probably just a decision.

His story should be familiar, but it feels displaced in time; He’s late to the party. He had been a whiskey drinker until 2016, but got into beer. At the market’s peak around 2018 and decided to start brewing all grain after three disappointing batches of extract. He started brewing Gose after learning that wife likes sour beer and began splitting batches in order to play around with fruit additions, sometimes winning more than one award in homebrew competitions with what was functionally the same batch of beer. After five years and ample time to adjust recipes during the pandemic, he launched Dog Park Pale Ale in 2023.

Day to day, Andrew doesn’t travel more than a few blocks. He brews. He takes care of his kids. His commute is measured in seconds. It’s perhaps this anchorite tendency that allows total mastery of the space.

Dog Park is a throwback. If it weren’t for the slightly lower strength, you’d call it a West Coast IPA. I don’t mean the hazy version that seems to have usurped the original. This has the distinct clarity and orange hue that means crystal malt. It’s C-hop heavy, with a little Quebecois El Dorado providing an accent of lemon and lime at the top end. He may have to revise that since the spot contracts have dried up. The edges could be a little more defined, but the style is rough and this is right down the center of the style; an unmistakable quantity.

Buried Bridge Pilsner pours through a Lukr tap, which tends to mean that you’re getting the aroma bolstering benefit of Czech engineering. It’s not Czech. Not quite bitter enough, and it doesn’t have that pat of diacetyl on the palate. It’s not quite Northern German either; not quite hard enough on the attack for Friesia. It comes across instead as light orchard fruit with a gentle Saaz bitterness. Approachable beer for anyone who’s not sold on these new fangled microbrews after 40 years.

The Blood Orange Gose is extremely clever. A co-ferment of lactobacillus and Kveik that ferments somewhere around body temperature practically overnight. The current collaboration beer, Cherry Eclipse (with Common Good and Her Hoppy Life) is a chocolate cherry dark sour that is more of a statement of flavour than a sessionable pint, but which meets its brief completely. 

The food menu is small, pizza and empanadas, but has something that will appeal. The retail fridge contains Bick’s Seltzers that sold well in the summer and a large number of non-alcoholic beers made by other breweries, fruited Jelly King having pride of place. He’s considering using that Angram cask engine behind the bar more frequently. He’s considering switching out the stout for a porter, thinking that the stout doesn’t sell well in summer. He’s considering cranberry and rosemary for the next batch of Gose. 

If it ever expands, Bickford would need a second location to act as a production facility, but I wonder whether the constraining bounds of the neighbourhood act as a guardrail. If your jurisdiction ends at Ossington, you can fulfill that urge to create without worrying too much about where the beer is going to go. If Andrew expanded his mash tun and brewed every week, he might get to 130 hL a year. 

More importantly, he’s enjoying himself. I think you can taste it.