(Ed note: Ok, so we’re jumping around a little. I already had rules four and five figured out, but when something presents itself, you have to talk about it.)

I was coming out of King Subway Thursday night when I got a call from the head of a brewery in London, Ontario. He wanted to tell me that Labatt’s Mill Street Brewery location on Bermondsey Road in Toronto was closing down. I already knew that. I had heard through the rumour mill in January that it was unlikely to be operational for very much longer from the head of a different brewery. I had heard from Robin. I would continue to get text messages from brewery owners and homebrewers and one of the founders of Mill Street over the course of the evening.

News travels fast, especially in the craft beer industry, which is full of people who like to gossip after a few pints. We’re not quite as bad as the wine industry, I think, but we do like a chin wag.

I was struck by how little the news mattered to me. I was on my way to teach a class. Oddly, I was on my way to teach a class in room 253 at George Brown. It was the same room I was teaching in when I found out that Mill Street’s brewer, Joel Manning had passed away. That was two phones ago. I know because I dropped the phone when I found out. It was new and didn’t have a case yet. 

This morning I got a call from someone who said, “you still write about beer. Did you hear Mill Street Closed?” I wasn’t really going to address it, but as we talked, I realized why I didn’t feel like it was terrifically newsworthy.

Joel’s passing had a real impact on me. He was too young. Additionally, he had been the face of the company for a long period of time, even after the sale to Labatt. We got along pretty well. I remember giving him grief about his West Coast IPA. I said to him, “This isn’t a West Coast IPA.” He said something like, “Yeah, but I like it better this way.”

I wrote in The Growler later on: Mill Street’s West Coast IPA is 50% wheat, which West Coast IPAs are not. Part of the mash is intentionally soured, which is not something that happens in IPAs. It uses German hallertau blanc hops to add a hint of melon and stone fruit. It is aged on toasted French oak to give it texture. There isn’t anything West Coast about it. It tasted like an outsize witbier. It was still pretty good.

I also remember the day I found out that Mill Street had sold. I was in Windsor writing the first edition of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide. It was a couple of days after the Bautista bat flip, Windsor was having its first craft beer festival, and no one had told the rep at the Mill Street booth that his brewery had been sold earlier that day. He was the subject of some good natured ribbing and a complete lack of customers.

When they opened the Mill Street Beer Hall, they hosted a really lovely dinner with all of the beer writers trying to convince us that they were still cool. They were just a little corporate. There was axe throwing, and a certain amount of axe grinding. Flash forward to 2018 and the entire core lineup is updated to be organic.

People will tell you that when a brewery sells, the products get worse because they cut corners. Joel Manning had revamped all the recipes along with his brewing team and they were the best they’d ever tasted. Attention had been paid and all the ingredients had been made organic. They had had to really think about this transition and they wanted to make it as good as possible. It was! Legitimately, it was probably the best those beers ever tasted.

Of course, no one knew that because I was the only one that showed up. Joel and I switched from sample glasses to pints and rather than trying to sell me on the product, he just let it speak for itself. It was one more tasting that became a drinking. It resulted in one of my favourite pictures of him. We had a nice time and to this day I use Mill Street Organic as an example of the flavour of Weyermann Organic Pilsner malt in my Beer 2 class. 

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People really cared that Mill Street had sold. They were angry. It was part of their experience of craft beer within the city. It started just after the Millennium, and that holds its own significance when you’re starting a new century. A lot was written and continues to be written about the predations of large breweries. People love novelty, but they don’t like change. 

For most of history, breweries didn’t exist for more than fifteen or twenty years. Molson, Labatt, and other huge multinational corporations are sort of aberrant. For every Carlsberg or Asahi or Sapporo or Weihenstephaner, there are thousands of breweries that didn’t make it. That, in and of itself, should tell you something:

The default mode of a brewery is failure. Usually, within the first generation.

Consider that in Ontario, the oldest independent brewery is Wellington currently, probably followed by Great Lakes (if you don’t count brewpubs). Do you know how many small Ontario breweries survived past their first generation of ownership? It’s a vanishingly small number. 

Think about American OG craft breweries. What’s actually left from the 1980’s that exists in the same ownership structure? Basically just Sierra Nevada.

It’s hard work. Unless you’re Sleeman and you’re starting with a large amount of money from Stroh’s, you’re probably not going to make it. If you’re the owner, you’re probably mortgaging something to buy steel and lease a building. If you’re the brewer, you’re probably going to shorten your life through repetitive injury carrying hoses and lugging 55 pound bags of grain and raking out mash tuns and just through wear and tear tripping on drain channels and pallets and slippery floors. Imagine going through all that and producing something mediocre called “Dirty Blonde.” (Currently 797 on Untappd)

Let’s say everything goes really well and you’re not just a hobbyist. We’ve had a lot of breweries open and close within a couple of years in Ontario. Sometimes their annual production wouldn’t fill a large Jacuzzi. Discounting those, let’s say you have shelf SKUs and you’re up around 2,000 hl a year.

What’s your plan? Are you going to get big enough to sell to a large corporation? In this economy? Is your brand important enough to be consolidated? Will anyone miss it when it’s gone? According to my spreadsheet, which requires some updating, 119 physical brewing locations have closed in Ontario since 2017, just after Mill Street was purchased. Not many of them were purchased by larger companies. 

If you’re successful enough, you get to sell out. If you’re not successful enough, you get to sell your equipment. This is the fundamental misunderstanding with craft beer: The wolf is constantly at the door. Labatt’s existence into the modern era is miraculous. They likely would have gone under without Interbrew in 1994 or 1995. The baseball strike really hurt them. Molson is the indirect beneficiary of E.P. Taylor’s consolidation after prohibition. 

That’s two companies that made it, and they’re both international conglomerates.

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Listen: Beer is about people.

Without a figurehead, it’s pretty difficult for people to ascribe meaning to a product. I haven’t had a contact at Mill Street in a couple of years. Look at what Mill Street makes currently. Organic Lager has been produced in London for a long time. What’s left? Hundredth Meridian Amber, which was never a killer app. Blue Wave Dry Hopped Lager is going to suffer because of Blue Jays ownership (history does tend to rhyme).

Once the brewery sells and the original staff move on, the coherence of meaning behind the products fall away. Tankhouse, which people referenced to me all day Thursday, was the epitome of a style: The Ontario Pale Ale. It was thoroughly emulated around 2009-2010. It was influential; the apotheosis of an early wave of development in our province.

It hasn’t been in cans at LCBO in at least two years. You can still get it at the brewpub or at the beer store, but the cachet possessed has disappeared. As the meaning of the brand dissipates, they don’t need as much production space. What bears comment is that people have been laid off in a tough economy and Mill Street’s Bermondsey plant won’t be the only local brewery shuttering this month. I hope everyone finds work, but I don’t know how likely it is that it will be in the same industry.  

In its way, opening a brewery seems futile when you consider the track record of success on a long enough timeline. But look at all the work you provide for brewers and drivers and servers and cellar hands. Look at the products you create and the enjoyment had by those consuming them. There’s a sort of nobility to it compared to moving papers around an office. Pushing that keg up the hill.

But no one can keep that up forever, and even if you succeed and manage to sell in one piece, once the meaning instilled by the first generation is allowed to dissipate, it’s a matter of time.