I don’t quite remember who said it to me (maybe Dave Sun Lee on twitter): “why would you go across town for beer at this point?” A decade ago that question was ridiculous; people would cross the country. With nearly 60 breweries in the city of Toronto, you probably have five or six in walking distance. Some of those are probably excellent. Better beer is now commonplace. Over the course of my career, I’ve gone from covering Canada in national syndication to covering Ontario in guide form. You could, theoretically, never leave your house and still have access to much of the best beer in the province by mail. How does that grab you, sweatpants fans?

This comes with problems. At one point, every daily and weekly in Toronto had a beer columnist. This at a time when the province had 40-50 breweries. We now have something like 370 brewing entities (contract included) and a handful of regular columnists. Credible reviews are thin on the ground. 

It struck me at the OBA’s the other week that there are about 12 breweries in the city I haven’t looked seriously at. I am going to try and get to all of them before Christmas. I’m starting with The Aviary and Longslice Brewing.

You need to see The Canary district to believe it. It didn’t exist five years ago, and rose out of Corktown Common in steel and concrete. If you didn’t live there, you’d have had little reason to venture east of the Distillery district. I miss the scrofulous charm of the Canary Restaurant, although, reviews I have read online suggest I’m correct to be nostalgic for the sign as opposed to the food. 

Development is set to continue, and walking along Front Street, crews were encasing cavernous concrete lobbies in plate glass, set for some restaurant or retail opportunity. The area includes student housing and maybe the best YMCA in the city. Someday soon the streetcar loop on Cherry Street will fill up and seem like a great idea in retrospect. 

That’s how development works: latently.

The Aviary is a great example of this principle. Having been there with walking tours last year in the depths of December, it seemed too far away from anything to have much of an impact. The space the Longslice Brewery occupied was cordoned off with a wall of plastic sheeting. My charges were pleased mostly to be in out of the cold, but there were highlights. The Aviary is associated with The Dock Ellis over at Dundas and Dovercourt and the menu shows some of that sports bar influence, with an added level of sophistication considering the neighbourhood.

Jimmy Peat, one of the brothers behind Longslice, is quick to point out that the neighbourhood was designed to be health conscious. The initial development was for the Pan-Am Games, after all. Longslice and The Aviary have pride of place in the neighbourhood. Initially, there was going to be an LCBO location, but with that having fallen through, they are the only place to buy beer in the neighbourhood. Compare this welcoming and slightly eccentric sports bar to the other options. As little as five years ago, this might have been a Boston Pizza or Fionn MacCool’s and the area would have been poorer for it.  

The food menu features children’s options, meaning the venue is family friendly. There are a number of good vegetarian options, and a smaller number of vegan choices. The burger and sandwich menu has a vegetarian option for nearly every treatment. I opted for The Hot Canary, which features a fermented scotch bonnet hot sauce; as I remain alive, the heat level can be described as manageable. I have had the vegan chili on a previous visit, and can confirm it is edifying.

The Brewery is the reason I’m visiting. I’ve received an invitation on facebook to an event I can’t attend. Longslice is relaunching their products on September 30th in the wake of the installation of their brewery. The plastic sheeting is down and the high ceilinged space seems all the bigger for the gleaming steel. The 20 BBL Criveller brewhouse dominates the east side of the bar, dwarfing the pool table, and the 40 BBL tanks for modular double batches stand full of the first versions of their products they’ve brewed on site. 

It has been a long journey for Jimmy and John Peat, who started their careers homebrewing, entering a Toronto Beer Week competition and taking silver in the IPA category. Their flagship, Hopsta La Vista IPA, brought them to market. Five and a half years later, they have contracted with Stratford, Cool, Collective Arts, Common Good, and Junction. It is only the last month that they have started to produce all of their own beers on site, bringing in Sessions to can for the LCBO. Delays are inevitable opening a brewery in a condo building with a parking lot, and the concrete pad has been reinforced with beams below the deck. 

Jimmy slides away for a minute to tour newcomers through the brewhouse, and Elliott, tending bar, points out some missed detail. The center strip on the wood accented bar is, indeed, canary wood. The foosball table in the corner is from the Peat brother’s teenage basement. In point of fact, they found hidden bottles of homebrew inside it while installing it in the bar. It is very like a rec room in that sense. A cornhole setup leans against the wall in the corner. Near the entrance, a Raspberry Pi powered arcade cabinet with ~8000 games seems unsurprising given Longslice’s 8-bit vaporwave website.

In terms of the beer, Loose Lips is a fairly standard Amber Lager, and the grist, according to John is 75% Vienna malt, which comes across in texture. Bready with a touch of dried raisin and caramel, but light enough in flavour to please a sports fan looking for that big brewery equivalent. It’s what they used to refer to as a gateway beer. Hopsta La Vista, bearing inspiration from English and American IPAs from the previous decade shows its age a little bit with significant bitterness and a deeper, sweeter caramel and toffee malt character than you’d see in a modern hazy IPA. The current highlight is Sky Bison APA, which was the first batch on the new system and pairs Galena bittering with Cascade and Azacca, a combination I haven’t seen before, but which I’d be happy to see again; a hint of blackcurrant peeking through the fruit salad.

Guest taps include a rotating selection, but the decision to have them at all is a savvy one. It cuts down on the need for the brewery to produce rotating selections at a time when they are focusing on LCBO and licensees, while acting as a draw for local craft beer fans who are constantly in search of something new. 

I confess to not having understood the Longslice brand when it existed as a contractor, but the fact that it was born out of a rec room and now exists as the rec room for an entire district of the city seems to do it some justice. The vibe is comfortable, rather than spartan, and the focus is on wholesome communal fun and accessibility. This is good, since twelve more condominium buildings are going in, and Google has its eyes on property a few blocks over. There may be a time in the not too distant future when Longslice never has to concern itself with selling beer except through their front door.

But that’s how development works: latently.