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The O

Back in the day, when your grandparents wanted a beer at home, they couldn’t just crack one open and pour, they had to punch through the flat topped can with a sharp piece of metal. The crude device they used, called a Church Key, has fallen out of fashion in modern times as technology brought us the pull tab in 1959 and then, later, the push tab in the 1970s–essentially the same beverage can technology we use today.

Lately, however, there seems to have been a movement–whether it’s actually necessary or not–to attempt to create a can that pours beer even better. Coors, for example, patented the Wide Mouth Can in the late 1990s, Samuel Adams released their Boston Lager in “Sam Cans” in 2013 that, while they looked just like normal cans to me, actually featured an “opening [that] is placed further inboard on its wide top to allow for better airflow while drinking, which means the beer’s aroma, a major component of flavor, has a little more room to breathe.” Continue reading “The Original Snake Bite: return of the church key” →

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As has been posited by fellow beer scribe Jordan St. John, it once seemed like roughly every six months we were inundated with a slew of articles about the makes-you-want-to-smash-your-head-through-drywall-it’s-so-frustrating world of beverage alcohol in Ontario.

Six months seemed to be roughly the amount of time it would take people to forget that one company was allowed to have 440 retail beer stores in this province while the people who actually make beer in Ontario were still only legally allowed to have one. And so this was the amount of time that would pass before some article would pop up, cause some outrage, make the rounds on social media, then quietly die with nothing ever coming of it. Some beer writers may have even used this cyclical outrage to build a reputation as something of a shit disturber. Ahem. Continue reading “Documentary on Ontario’s alcohol laws will stream online” →