Tag: beer

In defence of Drinking alone at a bar

Posted on by Ben

 

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.

#82 – The surface is the best part – Beer and Bullsh*t

Ben and Chris chat with Matt Giffen, owner and founder of Bench Brewing in Lincoln, Ontario, about the importance of sustainability, irrigating their eight acre farm/brewery, using Niagara fruits in the brewing process, and embracing old world brewing techniques — plus the three former South Lions get into high school trivia and try to make this already-niche podcast even more niche. Iron 'em out!
  1. #82 – The surface is the best part
  2. #81 – The 81ers
  3. #80 -A crafty fox
  4. #79- Pull the ripcord
  5. #78 -Order the prime rib

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.

The End of The Beer Store’s Monopoly

Posted on by Ben

 

“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.

Continue reading “The End of The Beer Store’s Monopoly” →

How to drink at kids’ parties

Posted on by Ben

A version of this post first appeared in the pages of the December 2018 edition of Original Gravity magazine.

It’s a conundrum as old as breeding: The weekend arrives and all you want to do is drink beer, but you’re a parent, so you have responsibilities.

If, like me, you too have procreated, intentionally or otherwise, you will know the debate well. Saturday rolls around and you have to weigh the benefits of your child having an active and healthy social life against your own perfectly reasonably desire to do nothing more than spend the day casually sipping beer in your backyard.

I would argue, however, that the two options are not mutually exclusive: You can and should drink at functions geared to children.

I would even argue that one demands the other. Anyone having spent an afternoon in close proximity to a dozen children re-enacting Lord of the Flies can attest to not only the propriety but, indeed, the necessity of having alcohol on hand.

In fact, I feel fairly confident that drinking alcohol was likely invented by a parent facing a birthday party. I can picture the first Aztec, about to watch kids play pin-the-tail-on-the-sun-god and jumping around an inflatable bouncy pyramid, compelled to drink something he or she had let ferment in hopes it might take the edge off.

Of course, not everyone feels this way. Continue reading “How to drink at kids’ parties” →

The beers I don’t share on Instagram

Posted on by Ben

Recently, Crystal and Tara Luxmore, David Ort, and I decided to make a semi-regular attempt to write something on the same theme, rotating which of us proposes the theme. This concept has no name yet and we’ve only loosely defined the parameters, but here it is. For this first edition, I threw out the idea of ‘The beers I don’t share on instagram.’


As a beer writer, or blogger, or influencer, or beer whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-call-me, much to the chagrin of my friends and family, I tend to share a lot of myself, and by extension, my beer drinking, on social media.

Given most people’s natural tendencies toward making themselves look better on social media (no one, of course, looks the way they really do in most selfies, no one actually eats such artfully-plated meals at every seating), you might think that the beers I choose to share on my Instagram feed are carefully curated to be impressive or to attract more followers, or maybe even appease the beer companies who occasionally send me beer in hopes that I will share them with my uniquely-targeted following.

But they aren’t. Continue reading “The beers I don’t share on Instagram” →

Putting away pints: Are cellars worth it or just expensive beer purgatory?

Posted on by Ben

This piece originally appeared in print and online for the first edition of The Growler, Ontario’s Beer Guide.

When I mention my beer cellar, my wife usually rolls her eyes.

Mainly she does this because she knows when I say something like, “I’ve got some really good stuff in the cellar right now,” I’m actually referring to rows of dusty bottles on the metal shelving that I bought at Home Depot and put in our basement.

And while, of course, it is a tad pretentious to refer to these shelves next to the laundry tub as a “cellar,” it doesn’t take much more to have a functioning beer storage space. Indeed, the ideal conditions for storing beer are essentially just a cool, dark place where you can fit a bunch of big bottles.

Tomas Morana is the co-owner of Birreria Volo, arguably one of Canada’s best beer bars. He’s also a co-founder of Keep6Imports, a company that works to bring rare and funky imports to Ontario. At Birreria Volo in Toronto’s Little Italy, the cellaring program is very much part of the venue’s draw and he takes it seriously. Continue reading “Putting away pints: Are cellars worth it or just expensive beer purgatory?” →

Ontario brewers should think twice before they buck themselves

Posted on by Ben

I’ve been hesitant to weigh in on the buck-a-beer fiasco for a few reasons, not the least of which is that fellow beer writer Jordan St. John already did it, literally the day Doug Ford’s campaign announced dollar beer was a possibility back in May. 

But now that it appears the PC government is going to make good on the promise and now that it appears an Ontario craft brewery is actually opting to pursue dollar beer, I’ve literally been asked to weigh in and will be appearing on CTV News Toronto at 6pm today so I’ve had some time to consider the possibility and thought I’d put my thoughts down here too since that is what a god damned blog is for, right? 

So here’s the problem with dollar beer: Economies of scale mean breweries simply can’t make a very good beer that will cost $1 and still make that brewery a profit. If you attempted to, you’d probably end up using extracts instead of real, quality ingredients, you’ll use adjuncts to get more bang for your buck and, essentially, a dollar beer is going to taste like it’s worth a dollar.  Continue reading “Ontario brewers should think twice before they buck themselves” →

Where Ontario’s candidates for Premier stand on retail beer, and why it doesn’t matter

Posted on by Ben

Over the past few days, much ado has been made about the candidates running to be the premier of Ontario and their various positions on beer sales in this province.

Doug Ford got the party started on May 18th by releasing an official statement through the PC party that he would “expand the sale of beer and wine into corner stores, box stores and grocery stores all across our province.”

In response, Kathleen Wynne opted to hold a press conference on Tuesday  that was, at best, embarrassing, in which she doubled down on her ongoing policy decision related to retail alcohol and invited no less than the CEO of MADD and the head of OPSEU, the union that oversees the LCBO, to join her. Basically, she confirmed she’s sticking to the grocery store plan she enacted (which, to be fair, was actually the biggest change to retail alcohol sales in something like 70 years).

Andrea Horvath, who presumably didn’t want to miss out on the fun of distracting voters from actual issues, then commented and suggested that an NDP government might actually review the entire idea of selling wine and beer at grocery stores all together—which seems entirely consistent with a pro-union NDP. They opposed the idea of beer in grocery stores at the outset. Continue reading “Where Ontario’s candidates for Premier stand on retail beer, and why it doesn’t matter” →

Beer is very healthy

Posted on by Ben

Craft beer is booming in North America and, while the industry is fun and vibrant and its growth is doing much to support local economies, did you know that a recently-released study can be very narrowly interpreted to imply that beer is healthy?

It’s true! According to A Professor at Whatever Fucking University did a study that got picked up by the newswire this time, beer has significant health benefits.

“Sure, beer has healthy things in it,” says Professor, in a severely truncated quote I cherry-picked to support my flimsy thesis and traffic-grabbing headline. Continue reading “Beer is very healthy” →

What to expect from Ontario beer in 2018

Posted on by Ben

Because it’s that time of year, here are the things that I think are going to shape the conversation as it relates to beer, especially in Ontario, in 2018.

Weed
When it comes to the craft beer industry, it seems kind of crazy to me how little attention is being paid to the legalization of marijuana in Canada. To my mind it is impossible to suggest that the destiny of any meaningful changes to our beverage alcohol sector won’t now be intrinsically tied to all things pot.

Government resources are right now being dedicated to drafting new legislation, debating policies, and creating laws that will govern how each province will handle the prospect of legal weed. And if you’re a pot fan or a policy wonk, these are exciting times, but if you had any hope that you might see meaningful changes to your respective province’s liquor laws anytime soon, I’ve got some bad news for you: Much of the resources and political capital that would be needed for progress in the world of beer are going to be focused squarely on sticky-icky for a while. Continue reading “What to expect from Ontario beer in 2018” →

30 years of Great Lakes Brewery

Posted on by Ben

At this point, Great Lakes Brewery has largely cemented their status as a great Canadian brewery and has earned their place in most Canadian beer fans’ hearts.

I’d wager that, right now, almost everyone reading these words has at least one GLB beer in their fridge. And why not? They make great fucking beer.

But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, the killer version of Great Lakes that most of us know and love is a fairly recent innovation considering that the company has actually been around for 30 years. Purchased by Peter Bulut Sr. in 1991, Great Lakes was, at the time, a small brewery in Brampton with an 18 hectolitre system that made their beer using syrupy malt extract brewed on an electric kettle. And so, roughly the same time they bought the business, they bought a mill and a masher to make beer from proper malt, and immediately outgrew the brewery’s fermenters. Taking possession of the company in April, Bulut had to move his operation to a 30,000 square foot building in Etobicoke by August, and today that’s the building the brewery still inhabits.

Bulut quickly found success in the 1990s Toronto restaurant scene which was, at that time, largely dominated by Greek families. Having come from a Greek and Serbian background and having been raised in an Italian school, Bulut was a man of languages and would often adapt the dialect of whomever he was speaking with and tell restaurateurs he was actually from the same village as them. It proved to be an effective ruse and, as a result, he ended up selling a lot of beer.

Like, a lot. Next time you drink a Karma Citra, be thankful for the hardworking Greek people of Toronto and their patrons who drank a shit ton of Great Lakes Lager in the 1990s to make that IPA possible for you. Continue reading “30 years of Great Lakes Brewery” →