Maybe it’s old guy navel gazing. Maybe it’s romanticizing a certain period of my life. Or maybe it never really happened at all. But I feel like craft beer in Ontario really did have a hey day.
It was brief, but it felt like something cool to be part of. It felt like something great was happening. Brewers were pushing the boundaries of what beer should look, sound, smell, and taste like and it was this fervent and fertile time period that made this industry blossom.
Maybe it was a decade ago? I’m not sure. I was drinking a lot at the time.
But Ontario craft beer was briefly a special sort of crazy. Controversy over cartoonish bombs on cans? Why not? Fuck the LCBO! Dry-hop everything until the air tastes like Citra. Dismantle The Beer Store and salt the earth so nothing owned by the big guys can grow back. Death to AB InBev!
Some say these words were uttered by George Herman Ruth, aka The Babe, while other historians maintain it was my friend, Leon Melville, speaking to me whilst sitting in the 500 level of a Toronto Blue Jays game in 2011.
What historians can agree on, however, is that whether it were the Bambino or Leon, the phrase was definitely uttered in regards to embarking on the famed, 9-9-9 challenge: consume nine hot dogs and nine beers over nine innings of baseball.
Whoever said it, as someone who attempted it, I can tell you that it shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s a grind. It takes courage and resilience and the fortitude and determination to force down roughly 10 pounds of substances proven to make your life shorter.
It’s tough to say if Doug Ford’s efforts to accelerate getting beer into Ontario convenience stores will help or hurt his chances in the pointless, expensive election he has just called.
On the one hand, anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex can see that Doug Ford’s frothy, folksy enthusiasm for bringing beer to the people is a self-serving, ham-fisted populism aimed at currying favour from the profoundly stupid and ignorant.
On the other hand, the world has given us ample evidence as of late to show the majority of the electorate is in fact profoundly stupid and ignorant.
Get ‘er done, Dougie.
Of course, if you’re truly fiscally conservative, you ought to be appalled at Doug Ford’s clumsy solutions to our beverage alcohol woes. The fight against the Beer Store’s monopoly on retail beer has been long and Mr. Ford, throwing fistfuls of cash at the problem has entered the fray with all the subtlety and tact of the Kool-Aid Man crashing through the kitchen wall to surprise some thirsty tweens. “Ohhh yeah, folks!”
According to figures released by the Financial Accountability Office on Jan 27th, in addition to the $225 million in public dollars Douggie paid to the owners or The Beer Store, accelerating liberalized beer sales in the province will result in $172 million in lower net income to the LCBO, an $812 million decline in LCBO retail revenue, a $192 million cost to give wholesale discounts to new retailers, $150 million in service rebates to brewers, $105 million in higher operating expenses, and $22 million in higher recycling fees. Also, presumably, will lead to human sacrifice, and dogs and cats living together.
A mostly fictional account of visiting a franchise restaurant
It was a confluence of unfortunate circumstances and bad judgement that led me to taking a three year-old to a suburban mall the week after Christmas.
There were things to return, a late gift to pick up, and we were catching an afternoon movie nearby. “It’ll be fun,” I had told my wife stupidly as she departed for a girls’ night. “We’ll kill some time and maybe grab dinner.”
It isn’t much later; errands having been run, movie abandoned at the halfway point, and said late gift — oversized and heavy — slung awkwardly in a ripping paper bag under my arm; that I begin to have my first pangs of doubt.
My back is starting to hurt. The mall crowds are irritating me. And my son, being three, had long stopped listening to rational suggestions.
“Buddy,” I negotiate, “maybe we don’t want to lick the escalator railing, OK?”
I shove his coat under my arm and assure myself we just need to get to a restaurant and get some food — and a drink for me — into our bellies. The food court is a no-go. We’ll never agree on something he and I will both eat and there is no chance I am lining up twice to eat. The mall is also attached to a location of The Keg but it seems like both a waste of money and an unfair thing to foist on people on weekend dates to bring a small child there.
And so to the mid-tier franchise restaurant we go.
I corral my son toward the correct escalator using a piece of candy I had found in my coat earlier that day. “There’s got to be one decent beer on tap,” I tell myself as we approach, like a fucking idiot who has never dined at a mid-tier franchise restaurant in London, Ontario.
My name is Ben Johnson, and I enjoy late 1990s top forty pop rock.
It’s something I didn’t ever see coming, but now that I’ve said it out loud, it feels inevitable and — honestly — something of a relief to admit. It’s one less thing to give a fuck about as I inch closer to middle age.
I first realized I had a problem when I was at the gym and, tired of the same two “Workout” playlists I created seven years ago, I opted for one of those “because you like X” playlists and let the algorithmic gods take me where they may. A few minutes into my breathy, post-weights elliptical jaunt, I realized with some sense of alarm that I was listening to Smash Mouth’s “Walkin’ on The Sun.” Not only that, I realized I knew every word to the song and I was…singing along?
You may have noticed an increase in imagery and messaging relating to the LGBTQ+ community popping up from your favourite brands this past week. This is of course, because it’s Pride Month, an amazing and dynamic time of year when every one from small companies to huge corporations takes the time to pretend to care about diversity and inclusion. As a business owner, you might have some anxiety about pretending that you also care about diversity and inclusion, but I’m here to show you why it’s the right move — and how it stands to help your business.
First, keep in mind, that today’s modern consumers are significantly more likely to pretend they are socially conscious, and thus they are prone to virtue signaling that they choose businesses based on their stance on social issues, like homophobia and gender discrimination. This generally isn’t true — we’ve seen many breweries continue to thrive despite horrendous accounts of discrimination and even abuse — but during pride month in particular, you might find that this demographic is actually spending their money on brands that pretend to care about diversity and inclusion; so it’s important to appear as though you are one of these brands, too.
In addition, new research provides compelling evidence that LGBTQ+ people can earn incomes and some studies have even suggested that this community buys beer. As a brewery owner, pretending to celebrate Pride can show people that your business is worthy of their investment.
Here are some ways to get in on the action.
Organize a Pride event
One of the best ways to pretend you celebrate and support the Pride initiative is to host and promote an event that appears supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. You can emblazon your event poster with Pride-related imagery, boast of a Pride-themed menu that’s literally just a more colourful version of your usual fare, or you can just adorn your beer and/or food with cheap Pride flags available at your local dollar store. You’d be surprised how far some face paint and a hot dog with a rainbow flag will go toward masquerading as a company that actually gives a shit about marginalized communities.
Of course, as a small business owner, your margins are tight, so you will want to avoid actually taking any action that makes a genuine impact, as it could hurt your bottom line. To makes sure all the profit from your event goes in your pocket, try to avoid the pressure to donate event proceeds to organizations by simply issuing vague sentiments about “raising awareness” and resist any calls for you and your staff to volunteer your time somewhere. Time that your employees spend volunteering at places that help LGBTQ+ youth or advocating for civil liberties is time that could be spent selling your beer.
Book a speaker
Hiring an external speaker to discuss their experiences as an LGBTQ+ individual or to lead a staff workshop signals that you want to empower and educate your staff. It’s important to give the impression that your organization cares about its employees. You’ve worked hard to hire and train your staff and so a speaker series or workshop about correct terms to use and how to manage pronouns and improve inclusivity means you’ll be less likely to lose your lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees to places that actually care about these things. Hiring new people is a pain in the ass.
Of course, with all the work you’ve done promoting your “Pride” events, keep in mind that speaker is taking up taproom space that could be filled with thirsty gays. Ensure the speaker is there just long enough to convey that you care about the hardships they faced while coming out as transgender or whatever, but then get your team back to work.
You might feel tempted to pay your speaker a reasonable fee in exchange for offering his or her expertise, but if you carefully position your event as valuable “exposure” and make a generous offer to tag that person on social media, you should be able to save a few dollars.
Bonus points if you can find a speaker who is also visible minority.
Talk about your discrimination and diversity policies
A successful workplace is a mosaic of different experiences and identities, is something I’ve heard woke people say. And so looking as if you’re working to include people of various races, genders, and sexualities could mean the difference between your local Subaru Enthusiast Meet-Up choosing your taproom to host an event versus them taking their Foresters to the brewery up the street.
And so in order to imply that you’re reducing the impact of implicit bias on your hiring process, make a very large and public show of “evaluating the success of your diversity initiatives.” This is especially important if your company has a history of discrimination that’s become publicly known. Social media posts telling consumers that “We know we can do better and we’re making efforts to learn” can go a long way to smoothing things over and helping people immediately forget why you almost got “cancelled.”
Let customers and potential customers know — through your social media and web presence only — that you have a strict discrimination policy in place. There’s no need to actually have such policies or post them anywhere publicly. The general public will feel good simply reading about their existence on your instagram. Just don’t forget to turn those comments off!
Brew a collaborative beer
Nothing speaks to a brewery’s interest in building community like a collaboration brew. Other breweries may talk the talk about supporting local community groups and charities, but a collaboration brew will show your customers you actually care just enough to let the people involved into your building.
For Pride Month, try to find a community organization or well known personality who supports or represents LGTQ+ causes so that you can co-opt their authenticity. A local drag queen is always a nice choice since her image might make for a nice label on your can. You of course needn’t get too invested in any conversations about the way drag is currently under attack, with bills to criminalize performers and venues, eliminate safe spaces, and punish small businesses and you shouldn’t feel pressure to think too much about how ultra-conservative groups are intentionally conflating drag with transgender issues to further marginalize queer-identifying people. Keep it simple. Invite a local drag queen or drag king to your brewery, order some pizza, have him or her pose for a picture whilst adding hop pellets to a boil and boom! You’re an ally.
Rainbows, rainbows, rainbows!
Let’s face it, it’s exhausting to ask customers and staff how they want to be portrayed and supported. It’s tedious think about the kind health insurance your brewery provides, the events you sponsor, and the politicians you support. And as a small business owner, you’re far too busy to collaborate with and elevate the voices of LGBTQ+ people. However, if you simply slap a rainbow on a beer can or update your business social media avatar to a rainbow image, a lot of consumers will infer that you actually do those things. You reap all the rewards without any of that pesky “listening” or “actually doing the work.” A simple rainbow update to one of your labels or a limited edition hat or t-shirt — even a vague social media post that says “love is love” — will tell the world that you just might be the kind of business that has pro-LGBTQ+ internal policies, relationships with LGBTQ+ organizations and commitments to LGBTQ+ causes. Plus, you’ll make money of the sale of those t-shirts!
There’s a reason all that rainbow imagery is everywhere this month: Using imagery to suggest your allyship is the quickest and easiest way to pretend you care.
Finally, wrap it up
If you remember nothing else, remember this: Pride Month ends June 30th. Be sure all your outward expressions of support for the LGBTQ+ community end promptly on that day. The last thing you want to do is have people thinking you support Pride the other 11 months of the year.
If you’re pressed to name local organizations that you support financially, you can always pretend you’ve donated to one of the following.
The Trevor Project – a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQIA+ youth PFLAG Canada – Canada’s only national organization that helps all Canadians with issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression. The 519 – A City of Toronto agency, registered charity, and. community centre committed to the health, happiness, and full participation of 2SLGBTQ+ communities in Toronto and beyond Egale – Canada’s leading organization for 2SLGBTQI people and issues, who improve and save lives through research, education, awareness, and by advocating for human rights and equality in Canada and around the world. Rainbow Railroad – A global not-for-profit organization that helps at-risk LGBTQI+ people get to safety worldwide. OutSport Toronto – Serving and supporting LGBT amateur sport and recreation organizations and athletes in the Greater Toronto Area.
If, for some reason, you’d like to have this blog post read to you instead of reading it, you can listen to Episode 76 of the Beer and Bullshit podcast, below.
Ben welcomes back Graeme Kobayashi, owner of Counterpoint Brewing, along with Front of The House Manager, Kayla Jager (aka instagram's KaylaLikesBeer), to talk about their new location, hot dog rollers, ice machines, social media, beer cocktails, and keeping your chickens safe from mink; plus Ben flip flops on Beertown and confesses to having Olympic fever.
Drinking alone at a bar is much maligned in fiction.
The clichéd trope usually features our hero, beaten down by the world, having lost his family/partner/coaching career/platoon, seeking refuge in the bottom of a bottle. He’s hunched over a sticky bar on a corner stool, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray next to him, and he’s staring blankly at a game playing quietly on the TV in the mid-day din of an old, dark, wood-paneled bar.
Inevitably, this is the setting into which someone from the hero’s past arrives, casting the blinding glare of the outside world on the bar as he or she arrives to wrench our main character from his Wild Turkey-soaked-funk, butt out his smoke, and send him back to his family/the murder case/the ballpark/the Saigon jungle to exact revenge.
Cue the comeback montage.
But here’s the thing about this tired trope: Not only is it a lazy shorthand for despair,. it’s factually inaccurate. Because to me that nicotine-tinged, stale-beer-scented, mise-en-scène doesn’t seem like a place to be rescued from. To me that sounds fucking lovely.
In fact, I can think of few better places to spend a few hours in solitude than a divey bar. And if you’ve ever done it, I’m sure you’ll agree: Drinking alone at a bar is actually pretty awesome. It really is something akin to self-care and it’s shockingly effective at curing your loneliness and boredom. Haven’t chatted with another human in a while? Wandering around your house or apartment aimlessly? Head to your local and strike up a conversation with a bored bartender or some other solo drinker. Learn something new about composite flooring or sustainable endoscopy or whatever dumb thing it is they do for a living. Regale them right back with stories of the dumb shit you do for a living. You’re meeting a new person. There’s beer. It’s great!
On the flip side, drinking alone at a bar is also a great cure for overstimulation. Is your house a toy-cluttered shitstorm of noise, sticky surfaces, and offspring? Sneak off to the bar around the corner when everyone is asleep. Have a pound of wings. Watch a west coast game you normally wouldn’t give a shit about. Turn off your brain and Just. Sit. There.
Oh yeah, baby.
And in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of local bars and restaurants are hurting right now. In addition to the rising costs of pretty much everything, the lingering effect of the pandemic seems to be that a lot of people seem to have forgotten the simple joy of going somewhere just for the sake of going somewhere. It’s something I’m only rediscovering now as a germaphobe with a now three year-old pandemic baby. I don’t think of it as wasting hard-earned money on drinks I might have had more cheaply at home, I think of it as doing my part to stimulate the local economy. Yes, the word hero gets thrown around a lot lately, but in this case, I’ll accept it.
So here’s hoping Hollywood might get the message and stop misrepresenting the sublime enjoyment of a fresh pint or a well-made cocktail sipped in solitude in the dusty confines of a neighbourhood bar. Instead of some asshole wrenching our hero from his alone time and pulling him back to whatever hellish nightmare he’s seekingt to avoid, even just for a few hours, lets instead see that asshole pull up a pull up a barstool and order a shot.
“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
~Revelation 18:2
The days of The Beer Store’s monopoly are over, and I fear we are the poorer for it.
For months now, we’ve known something big was coming from our Dear Premier, Douglas Clortho Ford. There had been rumblings that an announcement about the province’s retail beer system was forthcoming and my sources at Queen’s Park were increasingly troubled by Dofo’s anxious, aggressive behaviour. They tell me he’d been eating an inordinate amount of mint-flavoured toothpicks from his favourite Etobicoke diner and aides were calling out sick in droves, fearful of his restless energy. “He has been pacing for hours,” one told me a few weeks ago under the strict condition of confidentiality. “He’s worn through two pairs of double-wide loafers and he’s sweat through half a dozen ill-fitting wool blazers.”
Indeed, he was excited. And now we know why.
Because two weeks days ago, steeped in Dep gel and bounding through the automatic doors of a convenience store like the demon dog from Ghostbusters bursting out of Louis Tully’s bedroom, Ford announced that the province wouldn’t be renewing the Master Framework Agreement, which currently limits the number of grocery stores that are allowed to sell beer and prevents anyone but The Beer Store from selling beer in formats bigger than a 12 pack.
Yes, the days of The Beer Store’s monopoly are over, but I fear we are the poorer for it.
Obviously, killing The Beer Store’s stranglehold on the exclusive ability to sell Ontarians packaged beer is a good thing. The Beer Store, conceived of as a cooperative of Ontario’s breweries, became a farce once the biggest breweries on earth commenced their ruthless strategy of buying up or pushing out as many independent breweries as possible in the name of bland, yellow, carbonated capitalism. Now the erstwhile co-op is owned by three of the earth’s biggest beer-marketing machines and has lumbered on as the dusty, conveyor-belt-and-malt-fart-scented offspring of the shittiest parts of Canada’s beer industry; a biproduct of unchecked greed kept alive by stupidity and laziness.
The Kitchener-Waterloo Region is home to a plethora of great breweries — and almost none of them have founders who were charged with two counts of assault and one count of assault with a weapon.
It is unfortunate then that, when the City of Kitchener recently opened up their Requests for Proposals (RFP) process to find a “non-premier brewery partner” to serve beer at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium Complex and Kitchener Golf Courses, they awarded the contract to Four Fathers Brewing Company in Cambridge. Unfortunate, of course, because in 2018 Four Fathers founder and University of Guelph Professor John Kissick actually was charged with two counts of assault and one count of assault with a weapon. Those charges were ultimately dropped in 2020 when Kissick entered into a peace bond with the party who brought forward the charges, but to craft beer drinkers and any feeling humans who watched video of the (alleged) assault (myself among them) the incident likely left a bad taste in their mouth.
Indeed, for many in the craft beer community, especially women and folks who have been marginalized, this relatively high-profile “partnership” will likely lend credence to a prevailing sentiment that I’ve developed lately about the industry’s desire and ability to police itself, namely the realization that no one actually gives a fuck. Continue reading “The Uncanceled”→
Nothing has been announced yet, but I have heard from enough sources with enough insight into the company that I feel comfortable posting this. I will of course update this post when it inevitably creates a need for a press release. *UPDATE: Equals brewing has confirmed the purchase of Side Launch. Full statement from Justin McEllar, the President of Equals, has been added to the end of this post.*
Equals, for the uninitiated, is a contract and co-packing business right here in London Ontario. They likely already brew a handful of your favourite contract beers, including Triple Bogey, and they have become a go-to spot for local breweries that need occasional help with capacity. They also offer private label brewing and have a couple of their own brands, including Shake Lager, and the downright excellent Bangarang hard seltzer (Seriously, it’s really good).
Side Launch, as most will know, is a once-great brewery in Collingwood that has continued to make head-scratching decision after head-scratching decision as the board that runs the company tries to maximize profits and, in recent years, clearly position the place for a sale. Continue reading “The rise, fall, and sale of Side Launch Brewery”→
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