My Top 10 Beer Lists

If writing for and reading blogTO has taught me anything, it’s this: People fucking love lists.

Accordingly, in what might be the smartest, laziest, SEO-ist thing I’ve ever done, I thought I’d post the ultimate click-bait this Friday afternoon in a blatant attempt at attracting some traffic to the blog while doing as little work as possible: A top ten list of  lists.

Brilliant, right?

Below is a linked list of my favourite lists that I’ve written. And while this is an exercise in supremely lazy writing, it turns out that this is actually pretty damn informative, and not a bad way to get you in the mood to drink a few beers this weekend, if I don’t say so myself.

Now I’ll just share a link to this post on twitter with some trending hashtags and badaboom bada bing, I win the internet today. #bonerpatrol Presumably if this goes well, I might one day conceive of a top ten list of lists of lists, but I assume the universe would implode if I did that so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Enjoy!

The Best Beer Selection in Toronto

Not to be confused with the list I recently did compiling the bars with the most beer taps, this list is a great guide to the bars that blogTO readers helped choose as those with the best selection. This is a little dated given that Bar Hop wasn’t around yet when the list was compiled and I’d imagine it might rank among the top two or three, but it still stands as an excellent source of locations to go for good beer choices. Some disclaimers not included in this list originally: Cloak and Dagger is rumoured to have horrendous draft maintenance, Bier Markt is usually full of douchebags, and I’ve never actually been to Ciro’s.

The top 10 non-Beer Store beer stores in Toronto

Arguably one of the most useful things I’ve ever written, this is a list of the city’s various brewery retail stores and includes the sizes of bottles they sell and their hours. Seriously, bookmark this shit. It too is dated given that it doesn’t list the Amsterdam Brewhouse retail hours and doesn’t have Bellwoods’ hours of operation (11am until 11pm everyday), but it’s still damn handy. And yes, that is my hand holding that Spring Bock. Sexy, right?

10 bars & pubs where Toronto beer experts go to drink

An interesting post wherein I simply asked some beer folks where they like to drink, this is also a lesson in people’s ability to read things in their entirety given how many people opted to add more bars in the comments. I asked people their opinion! There is no right or wrong. Fuck. Anyway, I also like this image taken by my friend, the fantastic artist Traven Benner on one of my first beer-writing outings to chat with the Hogtown Brewery guys; who subsequently ended up buying photos from Trav for their website. So there you go.

12 local beers for summer patio season in Toronto (2012)

Maybe it’s because we’re approaching my saturation point for all the big, dark, boozy beers that come out each winter (see list below), but I’m fond of this list of bright, hoppy beers (some of which probably aren’t around anymore). Also, when I needed an image for this one, I put out the call on facebook for a summery beer image and photographer Jeff Higgins came through with this refreshing-looking but sacrilegious image of fruit in a beer.

12 local beers to drink this summer in Toronto (2013)

Simply my updated version of the above list of summer beer, taken together, this makes a nice like list of 23 great summer beers (It seems I included Muskoka’s Summer Weiss two years in a row. Sue me.

10 local beers to drink this winter in Toronto

This post came about on a day that I had no idea what to write about, then opened my fridge and noted that I actually had the above lineup of excellent beers. I lined them up, sanpped some photos, cracked a couple of them and, voila! 10 local beers to drink this winter. My fridge is like the beer equivalent of the magical wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia.

The Best Pubs in Toronto

This format of post at blogTO is (typically) informed by their regular reader’s polls. Essentially, when I write them, I’m curating a list suggested by readers. So it seems easy, but in reality these posts, and the tiny little blurbs each entry requires, are the hardest to write.  This is a good list of pubs, though. I’ve actually only been to nine of the 12. Don’t tell anyone.

What Toronto beer has the best looking label?

I don’t recall what my original title was for this post, but it wasn’t this. I wanted to write a post of the story behind the city’s beer labels and this title, while presumably garnering more traffic and generating discussion, seemed to turn the whole thing into a competition, which is kind of beside the point when it comes to discussing art, but ah well.  Commenters may have taken the opportunity to add many iterations of “BELLWOODS RULEZZ!!!11!!” but I like the images and stories for this one–all of which I wrote about and photographed at my in-laws cottage (that’s their blue shed!).

Six Things You Didn’t Know About Steam Whistle

I took the Steam Whistle tour back in June of last year. I then attempted to turn it into a blog post, but blogTO thought it was too “PR-ish” so I posted it on my own blog. If you’ve never taken the Steam Whistle tour, this list might interest you. I’ve clearly only included this post here because I said I’d list 10 lists and here is one more to help me reach 10.

10 ways to cure a hangover in Toronto

Finally, this list isn’t specifically beer-related, but I’m fond of it. It’s kind of all over the map since I was trying to come up with things that weren’t all the obvious choices like greasy food or masturbating and going back to sleep (thankfully that was covered in the always-helpful comments section).