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!
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?
“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.
Thanks to publicly available documents and a tip from an anonymous reader of the blog who works in the area, I have discovered that Bellwoods Brewery is looking to expand their brew pub to take over the space next door to them at 120 Ossington.
Currently the home of V de V “a vintage and industrial style furniture and home accessories store,” 120 Ossington is a corner lot located directly next to Bellwoods’ existing location and features frontage on Ossington and a considerable footprint in which the brewery could expand its operations. The proposed development plans for the brew pub expansion reveal that the space could add significant seating and a larger kitchen space. Continue reading “Bellwoods Brewery is planning to expand their brew pub”→
“We have sourced a small 3 hL brewhouse from a manufacturer located in Cambridge, Ontario. Our focus at the Barrelhouse will be on farmhouse ales and barrel-aging.
We have been working with barrels and brettanomyces since 2010 but it is difficult to do so in a working production brewery. Our new location will be a safe space to experiment with different Brett strains as well as aging with bacteria cultures. Our goal is to continue developing our house wild yeast strain while using the space to test different brewing techniques and raw ingredients. It’s essentially a lab, separate from the production brewery, that we can use to focus on making farmhouse ales that we love to drink.
It’s going to be a lot of fun and each of our brewers will have a chance to rotate through and learn about brewing with wild yeast and bacteria.
The majority of our barrels will continue to be stored at the Esandar Brewery (around the corner from the Barrel House). We don’t have enough room to store the entire program onsite at the Barrel House.”
~Iain McOustra, Brewmaster for Amsterdam Brewery, on the company’s forthcoming third location, which will open at the end of September. For a couple more details, check out my brief post in Toronto Life yesterday, here.
“If I have to answer another fucking email from people asking when we open.”
It’s early on a rainy Tuesday morning in Gravenhurst, Ontario and Sam Corbeil, Brewmaster at Sawdust City, is half-joking about what he admits is a pretty good problem to have: Future customers are eagerly anticipating the opening of his brewery and continue to contact him to find out when they can buy his wares. “I’ve already got two emails today and it’s not even noon,” he says, laughing. Continue reading “A first look at Sawdust City’s new brewery”→
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