A rather swell personal essay about one man’s love of a beer in today’s Globe and Mail:
Then one weekend last spring I was told they were out of Export in six-packs. I tried again the next week. Same story. The third time, the guy they call Red shook his head and said, “Sorry, they are not making it in six-packs anymore. I guess the six-packs aren’t selling very well.” I ordered two six-packs of something else and made my way home. I think I left the store paraphrasing T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in my mind, “I grow old, I grow old, I still like my beer cold.” I was brooding over whether to switch brands or throw away my aversion to drinks packaged in aluminum. Neither option appealed to a man set in his ways.
I think I am developing a soft spot for big industrial brewing. Maybe not like the guy in the essay but not so far off. See, I am hitting the mid-1900s in the Ontario brewing history that I am writing with Jordan. And I am writing today about how, as might be expected, EP Taylor looked out into the world at the outset of the 1950s and saw nothing but markets and opportunities. In 1952, he buys Quebec’s National Breweries, the company born of consolidations which had first inspired Taylor’s initial plans in 1928. In the same year, Carling Black Label was first brewed under contract in the United Kingdom. In the years that followed he expands operations in the US and buys breweries in Canada’s western provinces. Taking on the challenge, competitor Labatt bought breweries in Manitoba and British Columbia while building a new brewery in Montreal. Their original location in London Ontario also underwent large scale expansion. With the move by Molson into the Ontario market in 1955 with the building of new 300,000 barrel a year brewery on Totonto’s waterfront, the province’s big three brewers which would dominate the next thirty years were established. Whammo.
It’s all so positive and happy. Ontario’s population expands by 20% over the 1940s and the 1950s are pure economic boom. I may not want to drink the stuff that they are brewing but it’s all quite the rush.
[Original comments…]
Bailey – January 15, 2014 3:31 AM
http://boakandbailey.com
“I think I am developing a soft spot for big industrial brewing.”
Yes, us too. We’ve been reading about the computer-controlled mega-brewery Bass built at Runcorn, Cheshire, in the early 1970s and feeling nostalgic for something that, at the time, was seen by beer enthusiasts as a symbol of The End of Days. It has its own romance.
(Love the title of this post, BTW.)
Craig – January 15, 2014 8:51 AM
http://www.drinkdrank1.com
The story of “big beer” often is just as demonized as craft beer is mythologized. But big beer is a pretty interesting story. People who remember the early period—in the case of the U.S. the era just after prohibition—I’m finding are very, very nostalgic about the large regional breweries that survived. Not necessarily thinking that those beers were superior to today’s brews, but more like a bit of technology—like typing on a typewriter—that is gone, but not that far gone.
Alan – January 15, 2014 9:34 AM
Yes, the typewriter, the rotary phone, the black and white TV. For a while I kept a black and white TV in the spare room to watch a hockey game now and then.