It’s always hard to know when it is acceptable to review a new brewery. There are a number of schools of thought here. For the Ontario Craft Beer Guide, we included everyone who was open whether we had tried their beers or not, denoting untried products with the designation “NR”. […]

Avling Kitchen and Brewery

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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 […]

Longslice Brewery and The Aviary

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It’s not really St.John, you know.  No one really had that as a last name. It wasn’t a medieval occupation like Smith, or Baker, or Fletcher, or Cooper. An eccentric master at school would always ask if it was Sinjin, since I went to Upper Canada and it must have […]

On Picking Hops in Kingston

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It was somewhere around hour five of in class time on Tuesday when I tripped over an idea. I was explaining American Lager. There’s an exercise where we try a number of them side by side in order to display the amount of difference between them. “These products were designed […]

Lactose Babylon – Modernity and Post Modernity in Beer

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This winter took an oddly futurist bent. While I was developing classes and material, Nora Young’s Spark got in touch from the CBC to ask about AI in beer. I went away and diligently researched what people were doing around the world. There are some good ideas out there, but […]

The Future Soon – TasteGuru.AI

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I’m not quite sure how I ended up on the radar of George Brown College. I know Troy Burtch from Great Lakes had been teaching their continuing education beer appreciation course, and he probably recommended me, given that Jesse Vallins had a scheduling conflict. It was timely. I had finished […]

So You Want To Be A Teacher – George Brown’s ...

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I have a website writing assignment that I should be focusing on, but I have frequently found that it is a good idea to clear ideas out of my head before starting something like that. I want to talk to you about the current status of the beer market in […]

Fun With Numbers: 2019 Ontario Market Edition

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I don’t like beer cocktails. Let me tell you why. The beer cocktail supposes that beer is not a finished beverage and should be used as an ingredient towards a separate end. Personally, I think of beer as being a finished product. It’s been designed by someone and is therefore […]

Some Thoughts on Marijuana Infused Beer

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The Rosedale Diner is sort of a neighbourhood date night place. That’s how I remember it, anyway, having taken a date there about a decade ago. It’s funny that I remember the Duck Confit more than the conversation, but perhaps not all that surprising. I had read Kitchen Confidential and […]

The Rosedale Diner

He gets it wrong, but maybe I’ve explained what I’m looking for badly. “Culture comes from the top down,” says John Keeling standing behind a row of bleachers during intermission. “Say I get a bonus annually and the director of the company comes to me and says that next year, […]

Some Thoughts on Fuller’s