St. John's Wort

It’s no secret that one of the things I look forward to every year during Ontario Craft Beer Week is the comparatively larger number of people thinking seriously about beer and food. Beer dinners, for instance, abound. The version of beer and food pairing that I think is probably most […]

Flights and Bites @ Fanny Chadwick’s – 2013

One of the things that frustrates me when I’m reading a bottle of beer is when there are food pairing suggestions that don’t tell you anything. “Try this with spicy foods,” the label proudly exclaims, as though that conveys any useful information. Usually, when the bottle says something like that […]

Beer and Food Basics: Hops and the Marshall Stack

One of the things that frustrates me when I read about beer and food pairing is that the subject tends to get filed down into digestible sound bites. I suppose that makes sense given that a lot of communication on the subject takes place on twitter and in short articles. […]

The Basics of Beer and Food – Malt and Maillard

Recently, I was sent a copy of Tom Acitelli’s new book, The Audacity Of Hops, for review purposes. I finished it last week and I can tell you that it’s well worth reading. The prose is engaging and the story that it tells of craft beer’s rise to prominence is […]

Book Review – The Audacity Of Hops

One of the things that always interests me in craft beer is how larger regional breweries deal with the market. Of course, there are independently owned regional breweries like Great Western who are pretty much devoted to doing one thing and doing it well. Then there are large breweries like […]

Big Rock – Changes in Direction

I want to suggest something to you, and it may be something that has crossed your mind if you’re a brewer in Ontario. I think that we’re all aware that large brewers are, if not faltering, then experiencing a period of contraction. This is probably as the result of the […]

Hoppy Beers and Monoculture in Ontario

In this week’s column, I answered one of the most frequently asked questions that I get, which is “What do YOU drink.” I imagine that anyone with a beer blog or column gets that question quite a bit. Most people go with the tried and tested answer “a lot of […]

The Twisted Kilt

Probably the most interesting thing about the currently available LCBO brewery feature is the fact that many of the beers from Brasserie Dupont are not as easily quantifiable as past featured breweries. If you look, for instance, at one of the first brewery features from Tree Brewing in British Columbia, […]

The LCBO Dupont Brewery Feature

The other day, I was invited to a lunch launching a couple of Goose Island’s beers in Canada. Specifically, Matilda and Sofie. The Goose Island property is a contentious one, and to attempt to relate the details of the lunch without at least acknowledging some basic facts about the brand […]

Beer and Food: Goose Island and Nota Bene

I’m sitting here and I’m trying to come up with an interesting and insightful way to plug The Brewer’s Plate. I mean, you could go with “It’s one of the premiere events of the Toronto beer scene!” or “It just keeps getting bigger and better!” or “I know $125.00 seems […]