Canada – Page 7 – A Good Beer Blog

Friday Bullets For The Week Of The Blackout

The power went out. From 3 pm to midnight yesterday. Sat around in one room for the evening and marveled at the power of the battery. I tweeted and listened to radio. Ice was to blame. Ice from the sky. Fortunately, it appears to have rained all night washing away the coating. A few trees in the neighbourhood fell. Now, there is good reason to have those ribs in the freezer:

♦ I like beer as much as the next guy. Probably more. But I am not sure why one of Ontario’s less interesting brewers deserved $1,000,000 in tax support annually.
♦ Really? I assume the PM does not know every implication of every Federal legal brief. And besides. If the brief was correct in relation to same sex marriage, it also means that the same is true for different sex marriage – if you don’t meet a foreign level of consanguinity in your home country, a Canadian marriage would not be valid. No one believes that.
♦ Let’s be clear, then. I am the guy who backed Harper this week, not the National Post. No Senate reform, please. No need to entirely lock up Federal governance, Steve.
♦ Scots apparently are not free to make up their minds. Time to revive the Declaration of Arbroath. “It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.” Makes you weepy just thinking about it.

There. Done. Gotta work one more day before the gorging of rib fest begins. Thanks, blackout, for reminding me to make time for ribs.

Was This The Earliest Brewing In English Canada?

Sneath, Pashley and Rubin all mention the 1600s brewers of New France – Hebert (1617), Ambroise (1646) and Talon (1670). But I just came across this reference in a footnote in the Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1671-1674, published by Toronto’s Champlain Society in 1942, describing payments being made on 16 February 1674 for goods supplied to the ships of the Hudson Bay company:

John Raymond, “By Severall quantities of Ship Beere at 40s p. Tonn Strong beere at 12s, 9d a barrell & Harbor Beere at 6s 6d p. barrell with Malt & Hopps dd. Capt. Gillam, Morris and Cole”, £ 79.

A few months later, a committee of the Hudson Bay Company on 6 July 1674 directed payment to the same John Raymond £ 30 on account of “”Beer and Malt. dd. on board the Prince Rupert.” These items appear among a long list of payments for other necessary goods for taking aboard the ships Prince Rupert, Messenger and Employ. You will see in footnote 2 to this post on a blog by Norma Hall subtitled “Northern Arc: the Significance of Seafaring to Western Canadian History” that these three ships were sailing between England and Hudson Bay in the first half of the 1670s. The Prince Rupert and Messenger, at least, over wintered.

There are loads of interesting questions and observations from these passages from the Minutes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1671-1674 including why are they shipping malt and hops separate from barrels of beer. If these ships overwintered and carried malt and hops it is pretty obvious that they must have been brewing. We know the British brewed on ships in the Arctic in 1852 so why not in 1674? But also – what is “harbor beer”? It costs about half of “strong beer” and we know from Gate’s work on Kingston that in 1825 “small or ship beer” was being sold in Kingston. But most of all the question is this – was this the first brewing of beer in English Canada? Or did other earlier over wintering ships brew, too?

Personally I Prefer “The Government Of Harper”

…because, it’s really the same thing as “the Harper Government” yet it is clearer about his intentions:

Erin Junker, a senior communications adviser at Health Canada, responded by email: “This was a directive I received from PCO.” The Privy Council Office is the bureaucratic nerve centre that serves the prime minister, working in concert with the Prime Minister’s Office. A PCO spokesman responded to a series of questions Wednesday about the Health Canada email exchange by reiterating that “there has been no change in policy or direction.” Raymond Rivet said in an email that he “cannot speculate” on what directive Ms. Junker was referring to: “There may have been instances where the term was introduced but, as I have said, there was no formal directive to use the term Harper Government.”

On one hand, I say run with it. Who cares? Steve wants to be the anti-Trudeau? That’s fine. Chretien beat him to it 15 years ago and Steve has about 35 million in deficit and a hell of a lot of Federal-Provincial agreements to go to catch up. Steve wants to change the symbols, the tone, the constitutional traditions? Go for it. We’ll have his grey and white flag one day, too.

But if I was a Tory I would be livid. Except Mr. Harper is not a Tory. He is not a Progressive Conservative either. He has gotten rid of both those things. And now he is getting rid of conservatives, too. It’s all Steve – Steve – Steve. For now. Because when he is gone? Liberals forever. Or the NDP or whoever. Name the heir apparent if you disagree.

At least the conservatives won’t lose when the house of cards fall. And one day it will.

Friday Bullets For Your Labour Day Weekend

You better be meditating on the benefits we all share from the labour union movement this weekend. “Sure, I’ll take the day off but don’t you dare think for a minute that I like unions.” I can hear you. You hypocritical holidaying ingrates. Me, I will be singing “The International” and all my Billy Bragg 45s and calling everyone I meet comrade or maybe even Leonid.

⇒ WATCH OUT! SPACE JUNK!!!

⇒ Glad that’s cleared up. Italians are now “ethnics” under the rural overlords world view. Next, Scots and Irish and soon New Brunswickers.

⇒ Ernie Eves busts out against those Ontario Tea Party Tory bastards: “I don’t think it was fair and I don’t think it was loyal and I don’t think it was compassionate and I don’t think it’s honest.” Crime: voting for someone. Now, that’s a Tory: anti-democratic and proud of it.

⇒ I have no idea how sad it must be to be a Blue Jays fan. I mean, it’s like they think the team doesn’t suck. See, being a Leafs fan, I know they suck.

⇒ Do we now feel a twinge of guilt for reveling in Conrad’s fall? I will give him this – there is no one else reporting honestly on the state of the back end of the justice system like he is.

Ahh… long weekend. I needed it. I earned it. Really did. Didn’t I. I didn’t? Who says?

Socialists In Quebec Particularly Support Beer

I’ve told you no politician in Canada denies beer. Jacques Boissinot‘s photo for the Canadian Press above of NDP leader Jack Layton taken in a bar during the Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins playoff game on April 14 proves it. It looks a lot like the one of our Prime Minister pouring a brew in Halifax earlier in the campaign, except he’s not as awkward. Jack awkward? Heck, the second night of the debates got moved to make sure there was no conflict with this game and Jack Layton made sure he let voters know where his heart lay last night – a sports bar in Montreal, La Cage aux Sports. And unlike Harper, he looks like he actually knows how to down one. More here.

Again, In Canada No Politician Refuses The Beer Vote

Even though we are freakish in our cultural fear of untamed beer and booze flowing through the land, beer is big in Canada. So big, as noted before, that no Canadian politician in his right mind would fail to support it. Up there, that’s Prime Minister Harper in the middle of this Federal election pulling pints in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He’s a big uncomfortable loaf of a man, clumsy with a beer bet, who no one expects he kicks back with a beer or two on the weekend.

Yet, as my pal Stephen Maher noted, he had the common sense to not finish the pint of the Keiths. Well done, Mr. Prime Minister.

Politics, Pubs, Leadership and Density

Interesting observation in the Montreal Gazette today about why it is that the two-dimensional Pub Minister and other cynical forms of political band wagoning over the pub trade has gotten such attention in the UK election:

Few commentators question the need to help out a sector of the economy made up of 52,000 pubs – the majority owned by large pub companies or breweries – in a country of 61 million. By comparison, there are just 6,100 drinking establishments in Canada – including pubs, bars and night clubs – to service a population of just under 34 million, according to Statistics Canada.

Well, that would do it. We have only one tavern or bar for every 5,500 Canucks while Brits have five times as many per person. Sure, there are hot houses of pub life in Canada like old colonial east coast towns Halifax, Nova Scotia and St. John’s Newfoundland. Heck, good old Pembroke in the Ottawa Valley had at least 15 bars for 15,000 people when I lived there in the mid-90s. A whole country of that? Of course pubs are an election issue.

But, thinking about it, I really have no idea who is going to win this great British contest we are all watching so eagerly. Who’s going to win? In the end, it’ll depend on who comes forward to stand up for what is good and right. Yet, unlike tomorrow’s election, we may never know who has been more boorish: Pete or Protz and the CAMRA lads. Unless, of course, someone who was also the table comes forward to place that “X” next to a name.

The Women Every Real Canadian Male Has A Crush On…

Canada’s Marie-Philip Poulin, left to right, Kim St-Pierre and Charline Labonte drink beer on the ice with their gold medals after Canada defeated the USA in women’s Olympic hockey final game in Vancouver, British Columbia, Thursday Feb. 25, 2010. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Scott Gardner)

Truth be told, every Canadian male has a deep and abiding crush on every member of the woman’s hockey team and photos of them drinking beer just feed the flame. We have commercials where the players kick doltish men like us all on the ice. They sell us social networking tech. While we have to work on their taste in beer, these are the sweethearts of the nation. Goalie gear, baby. Oh baby.

Did Richard Lautens of the Toronto Star get the best picture of the moment?

An Olympics And Beer Story That Makes Some Sense

I still wonder what the average Latvian thinks about all this but at least this story makes a little more sense than needing to shut public booze sales and politicians drunk driving. Yet the International Olympic Committee is not amused:

Nearly an hour after the Canadians won their third consecutive Olympic gold medal with a 2-0 win over the Americans, the players came back out on the ice in the near-empty arena, smoking cigars and swigging champagne and beer. (Rebecca Johnston even tried to drive the zamboni.) “I don’t think it’s a good promotion of sport values,” Gilbert Felli, the IOC’s executive director of the Olympics, told the Associated Press after learning about the celebration. “If they celebrate in the changing room, that’s one thing, but not in public. We will investigate what happened.”

Gold. Literally. What’s that IOC? Leave it in the locker room? Hide your beer drinking?? What a joke. Remember, these are Canadian hockey players and remember what the Russian goalie said when the mens team gave them the boot the other night: “They came like gorillas coming out of a cage.”

Yet is that what we are? Is that what the world sees? Are we really the wild men and women of the north, clubbing and hammering poor Russians and American athletes as mere foreplay for a good beer? Sadly, no one appears to have taught the women’s hockey team on the ways of good beer. Does she really need to be sucking down a Molbat macro-blurt?

Category: Canada