A student says, “are hops used for anything other than beer?” We’re sitting in the second floor lab of 215 King Street East, which houses the Chef’s House at George Brown College. The Chef’s House is a gem that doesn’t get enough public recognition in Toronto. The students stage there as they approach the end […]| St. John's Wort
I didn’t really want to think about numbers today. I had hoped to finally get to Rule Four for craft beer, but that’s probably going to have to wait. The Ontario budget dropped yesterday and there are changes transpiring for the Craft Beer industry in Ontario. In fact, this is not a bad time to […]| St. John's Wort
(Ed note: Ok, so we’re jumping around a little. I already had rules four and five figured out, but when something presents itself, you have to talk about it.) I was coming out of King Subway Thursday night when I got a call from the head of a brewery in London, Ontario. He wanted to […]| St. John's Wort
Rule 3 really breaks down into two sections. 3A) Every time you introduce a new beer, it’s going to be someone’s favourite beer. It could be an incredible beverage and a wonderful experience. It could be middling, but suited to the person who is drinking it. It could be objectively bad but come along at […] The post Rule #3: Novelty Is A Two Way Street appeared first on St. John's Wort.| St. John's Wort
Sometimes, when I make a Collaboration beer there’s a hidden double meaning. For example, Amsterdam Revelator, Shacklands Golden Mouth, and Granite Fisher King are all secretly St. John beers. John the Revelator, John Chrysostom, John Fisher. They fit the tradition they’re in as well. Bock, Golden Ale, English ESB. I had toyed with trying to […]| St. John's Wort
As we established in Rule 1, beer is a luxury good that contains small amounts of recreational poison which people really enjoy. For that reason, it hits people’s desire button. The difficulty is that since the audience for beer does not have uniform desires (since desire is somewhat ephemeral) and since desire is frequently not […]| St. John's Wort
(Ed. Note: I’ve been writing about beer for 15 years now, and I feel as though it’s time to see if we can’t condense this knowledge down into useful information that might help explain how we got to this point. We’ve been through a boom, we’re going through some pretty serious consolidation. Did we learn […] The post Rule #1: Beer Is Almost Never About Beer appeared first on St. John's Wort.| St. John's Wort
2024 has been an interesting year for Ontario’s beer market. We’ve had closures, although not quite as many as you might imagine. We’ve had mergers and acquisitions, some of which make no sense. We’ve had the odd brewery open in the province of Ontario, which is not as ludicrous as you might assume if you […]| St. John's Wort
A couple years back, people would joke that they were tired of living in unprecedented times. Well, we’re still there and I don’t really see anyone laughing. Inflation is a real problem and it comes at a time when the beer industry in Ontario is being shaken up by serious changes to the retail program […]| St. John's Wort
It’s a really interesting time for the brewing industry in Ontario, and it’s one of those moments that prompts some re-evaluation. Josh Rubin called me the other day from the Toronto Star to ask how long I thought The Beer Store would remain in business, pointing out that there are drop dead dates for the […]| St. John's Wort
I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like my Birthday. September 9th has more often than not been the first day of school. Monday, Tuesday. Didn’t matter. Sometimes it would be on the weekend before, but the odds were that my Birthday signalled the first day of school. It always felt like they were telling […]| St. John's Wort
Revelations come in odd places. I had gotten off the St. Clair replacement bus the other month and was walking across Maple Claire park from the Gunns Road streetcar loop. It’s the shortest and least aromatic path to the event space where I pick up the odd shift. Getting to work is an exercise in […]| St. John's Wort
It’s an interesting morning from a task variation standpoint. I’m just about to start teaching this semester’s Beer 1 Online Class (spots still remain) at George Brown College in Toronto. The online class usually has some concessions to distance included. If you have all the students in the same classroom downtown, you can control glassware, […]| St. John's Wort
Over the course of the winter, when I was writing about teaching sensory detail for beer, I wrote: My hope is that by the end of the six week course they’ll learn to slow down a little and appreciate things more, maybe develop more experience, maybe learn to direct that impulse. Some of them will […]| St. John's Wort
It seems odd to write about a beer that’s almost gone. Usually when I write about a collaboration beer, I do it a couple of weeks before it comes out because the brewing process is complete and I want to drum up some enthusiasm for it. It turns out that it’s a little different if […]| St. John's Wort
It comes as a small, pleasant surprise that I get to talk about excise taxes for the alcohol industry in a vaguely positive way for once, given the announcement today that a couple of changes are being made at the federal level that will support small brewers across Canada. After all, I was just explaining […]| St. John's Wort
I got out over my skis a little. Part of my plan for the year, just at home, is to read more. I’m aiming for a couple of books a month and so far I’m a little above that. I had been reading Slavoj Zizek’s Living In The End Times. I’ll take any help I […]| St. John's Wort
It’s hard to say exactly why the wheels came off the lecture. It was probably a combination of things. There was news out of the UK last week that Marston’s was going to stop using its Burton Union system for yeast propagation, and having been there just over a decade ago to see it in […]| St. John's Wort
When I got hired to teach in 2017, I was a subject matter expert. I didn’t have any teaching experience to speak of, except for having been an instructor at a music camp in high school. I also had a dread of public speaking which I overcame in about a month because all of my […]| St. John's Wort
Matt Pearson said to me, “take off your glasses.” It’s a weird request, coming from a guy I barely know, but since we’re in public, I do it. “Close your eyes and turn around in a circle three times.” This is not Simon Says, and besides, we’re in the middle of the Beer Cooler at […]| St. John's Wort
