History – Page 30 – A Good Beer Blog

Quebec Beer-Drinkers Cardiomyopathy?

This article at the CBC.ca website answers a question about a major event in Quebec’s brewing history:

One of the first published reports on cobalt intoxication was in 1967. Called “Quebec beer drinkers’ cardiomyopathy,” doctors described 44 men in their 40s to 60s who were heavy drinkers who died unexpectedly. “There was a suspense element to the story,” recalled cardiologist Dr. Yves Morin of Quebec City. “It took a lot of time and effort to find a cause of the disease.” It turned out the men all drank beer made at the Dow brewery in Quebec City. The brewery had added cobalt to stabilize the beer’s foam.

Here is the actual medical journal from the 1960s on the outbreak. I had heard more about that the brewery had denied responsibility and dumped its inventory in the river than they were putting cobalt in the beer. Cobalt. Yum.

Fuzzy Photos Of Drinking Things From A Museum

A few hours on the fourth floor of the Royal Ontario Museum Saturday found me looking for beer stuff in the exhibits. Just a game. You think of how pervasive beer has been in western culture and how places like museums like to not discuss it all that much and it starts to be a fun game to play for a tired mind after a long night in a noisy hotel. Fun? Time passing maybe. Temper maintaining perhaps. Anyway, there was some fairly interesting stuff to be found.

Like that friend of Bertie Wooster who passes time when walking through London by imagining golf shots, I think about the beers I would have from these museum pieces. Not hard when the drinking vessel in question is a 1750s Silesian glass tankard but what about a fourth century Sudanese clay drinking cup. Clay asks for something like thin boozy porridge but there’s not much of that going around these day in this civilization. Chip shot into the Shaftesbury Memorial pool at Piccadilly.

Then I think about the techniques the curators are using to get the beer stuff into the displays but not really mentioning. In one room of the exhibit, two Georgian silver tankards are in the back placed on bookshelves along with other curios as if they were not really used for drinking beer at all. In another display, pewter pots are lined up in a row to describe weights and measures as opposed to the uses to which they were put. The weighted and measured. Odd. No pottle. The fifteenth century mead drinking jug made of spruce sits next to the leather canteen in a daring juxtaposition of old things, weirdly shaped and made out of strange stuff. Two iron glanced off Shakespeare’s forehead neatly carries on down Charing Cross Road. Kids are getting tired feet. Me, too.

We took the subway back to the hotel, three stops south to Osgoode the TTC car as empty but for us as the sidewalks had been on the way north earlier. The kids said that Toronto was nice but it was no Montreal. I knew what they meant but it was not a bad Toronto, either. University Avenue looked like the MIT area of Cambridge if the MIT area of Cambridge had stopped being built in 1973 or so.

Ontario: 1600’s Hudson Bay Company Arctic Ale

So, we are working through the final draft of the history of beer in Ontario and I realize something has been staring me right in the face for quite a while now. Here is the passage in question:

The early ships’ crews considered its beer of great importance and even survival. In 1668-69, the crew of the Nonsuch over wintered on the James Bay coast and reported upon their return:

…they were environed with ice about 6 monethes first halting theire ketch on shore, and building them a house. They carried provisions on shore and brewd Ale and beere and provided against the cold which was their work…

See what I missed that was sitting right before my eyeballs? They brewed ale and beer. The news was reported in issue 408 of The London Gazette, too. Not that they made both ale and beer but that they survived a winter in the Canadian Arctic. The Nonesuch was small and tough, custom picked to both survive the trip to the edge of the known world and be hauled out of the water to avoid the crush of ice. Only 53 feet long, a replica can be found in a museum in Manitoba. Manitoba? Yes, well, after the British Parliament’s Canada (Ontario Boundary) Act of 1889 introduced a boundary that divided the former Rupert’s Land that included the watershed of the big bay, including much of what became Ontario’s north.

Got it? Wonderful. But let’s get back to the point. They made two things to drink. Two fermented beverages. Why? You are stuck in a situation that may as well be the dark side of the moon, you have cleverly brought a survival space pod as well as sufficient supplies (think food in tubes) to make it though the six months of frozen horror… and you make two types of booze? Why the heck do you do that? Well, just a century and a generation before the voyage, the benefits of ale was described in 1542 by the physician Andrew Boorde in his book A Dyetary of Helth. The key was conveniently referenced by Martyn this week: “Ale for an Englysshman is a naturall drynke.” Yet he is also the man who wrote:

If it do come by an hurt in the head, there is no remedy but pacience of all partes. If it do come by debilite of the brayne & head, drynke in the mornynge a dyshe of mylke, vse a Sirupe named Sh’upus acetosus de prunis, and vse laxatiue meates, and purgacions, if nede do requyre, and beware of superuflous drynkynge, specially of wyne and stronge ale and beere, and if anye man do perceuye that he is dronke, let hym take a vomite with water and oyle, or with a fether…

….so it is hard to know what to believe. Especially if you remember what Pepys said folk on ships got up to when they were on the ale on April 30th, 1660:

After that on board the Nazeby, where we found my Lord at supper, so I sat down and very pleasant my Lord was with Mr. Creed and Sheply, who he puzzled about finding out the meaning of the three notes which my Lord had cut over the chrystal of his watch. After supper some musique. Then Mr. Sheply, W. Howe and I up to the Lieutenant’s cabin, where we drank, and I and W. Howe were very merry, and among other frolics he pulls out the spigot of the little vessel of ale that was there in the cabin and drew some into his mounteere, and after he had drank, I endeavouring to dash it in his face, he got my velvet studying cap and drew some into mine too, that we made ourselves a great deal of mirth, but spoiled my clothes with the ale that we dashed up and down. After that to bed very late with drink enough in my head.

Is that what they were doing with that ale up there in the Arctic in 1668? My heavens.

Another Milestone In Writing Ontario’s Beer History

Milestone? Ramming over 400 years of history into the form of one book tends to make you forget milestones. Too many fly by. Jordan and I are coming to a final point with all the text placed in one spot with a real beginning, middle and end. With still a few weeks to go and without spilling too many beans… what have I learned?

=> An iPad mini is not unlike a shovel. Years ago, I kept an acre vegetable garden and dug it and turned it every year with just a shovel. One Saturday morning I said “to hell with this” to the sky and bought myself a bright red $1000 Toro rototiller that could be started on turf and, before moving forward, would straight drop down turning the ground to gorgeous fertile soil. I called it “Lil’ Shiva” for obvious reasons. Two days ago I bought the 15.6 inch laptop on sale that I am typing on now. Not squinting as much all of a sudden.

=> I am glad I shared in the writing of The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer with Max first. It got a lot of mental content out of the way but also got me in the habit of sitting down and pounding out 400 or 800 words not as a stand alone thing like these paragraphs but as part of a bigger statement. I’ve started its sequel.

=> Ontario’s general history is far more interesting than folk would tell you. Huge chunks of the social and political story can’t fit into the narrative solely for reasons of scale. It is sad that there is no well known book simply called The History of Ontario as there are similar works in other, more self-aware jurisdictions. The story of the provinces brewing gives some hints as to why that book might not be on a bookshelf near you. You will have to wait, however, until June to see what I mean.

=> I have far more interest and even affection for big institutions like the Hudson’s Bay Company and big people like E.P. Taylor. Rather than being the massive faceless corporate monoliths they might be taken for today, they each were cutting empires out of the hinterlands in their way. Consolidation was inevitable in the brewing industry in its day just as much as it was in the automotive industry. Today, we don’t expect to buy cars made in our own local communities. Why would Ontarians of 1890 or 1949 care any more whether their beer was local? PS: Labatt > Carling even if it was smaller until their last competitive decades.

=> How about the beer? If Labatt were to bottle its Export IPA circa 1900, it might well blow more than half of the craft beers brewed today out of the water. The beer I would really like to try most, however, is early 1800s ship’s beer. Simply brewed with few ingredients and low alcohol, it is one of the lost brews that would have been an utterly common place thing in a shore town like mine two hundred years ago. Common as Kleenex or coffee in a paper cup.

So, there you go. An update or sorts. Still plenty of writing and editing to come but the end is near. Then another book. And maybe another if things work out.

The Many Friends Of John D. Aikens

Coming to the end of the first draft of the Ontario beer history Jordan and I are writing, I find myself in the spring of 1927 at the Toronto hearings of the Federal Royal Commission on Customs and Excise. Officials from every major brewery in the province are being grilled under cross examination on their business smuggling beer into the United States. The glimpses of honesty through the lies are just good clean fun. When the manager of Carling was asked if they couldn’t make a profit at $1.75 a case, he replied “well, you can’t make a large profit.”

But of all the people in the witness box, I like John D. Aikens best. A shipping clerk, he appeared in the middle of row upon row of owners and business managers. While he cannot claim to be like Washington who never told a lie… he couldn’t tell a good lie. See, while all the others were crafting their tales to place all sales beyond the border and therefore beyond excise taxation, young Aikens tried to make everything better by letting the Royal Commission know he only sold illegal beer to his friends. That’d be OK, right? By the time the legal inquiries and hearings were done, the Supreme Court of Canada found it likely that O’Keefe bootlegged 17% of its production for cash within Ontario. That’s a heck of a lot of friends. And over $420,000 in back taxes.

The Love Song Of J. Alfred Sixpack

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.

Ti-Jos: Something That Won’t Make The Beer Book

Somethings just won’t make the book on Ontario’s beery history that I am writing with Jordan. I am working my way these days through the period after our version of prohibition ends in 1927 until, roughly, the beginning of microbrews in 1985. Jordan is back there somewhere untangling the Victorians.

This image is one from a regular series of serial cartoons placed in Ontario newspapers by Labatt during WWII under the pen name Ti-Jos. They are obviously patriotic but there is a theme of moral economics that flows through the set. They are set largely in the home or shops but the message is about what citizens need to do on the home front to aid the war effort. In this edition, you better damn well not be spreading rumours if you don’t want shortages.

Which is my message for each of you today, too.

Ontario: In 1998 Did “IPA” Mean Macro Gak Or…?

This in interesting… well, to me at least. It is from the 1998 debate in the Ontario legislature on the imposition of regulation on the Brew On Premises trade. BOPs do not exist everywhere. In Ontario, they are sort of a hybrid between home brewing and macro brewing where you can go to a business and order a batch of beer from a menu, participate to a certain degree with the person running the place but get to use proper brewing set ups. In 1998, they fell under government regulation. But that’s not the interesting thing. This bit of the statement by MPP Mike Colle from 2 November 1998 is:

The appreciation of fine beer and fine Ontario wine has really exploded in Ontario in the last couple of decades. At one time, it was rare that you would go into a restaurant and see a bottle of wine on a table; you would see people having everything but wine. Now you can see Ontarians of all stripes enjoying good Ontario wine, and also they’re enjoying good beer. At one time it was just your basic beer that Ontarians were drinking. You remember the ones drinking old IPA? I call them the old IPA drinkers. Well, we’ve gone beyond the old IPA and we see people now appreciating fine-brewed micro-brews or speciality beers by the major manufacturers and brewers. It’s part of Ontario’s socioeconomic fibre that drinking beer and wine as part of your meal, in moderate, controlled fashion, is quite acceptable, It’s an industry that employs a lot of good, taxpaying Ontarians.

Apart from the weird idea that beer and wine are for mealtime, notice that reference to IPA. Likely what’s being referenced is a beer like Labatt IPA and that IPA from a point in our collective memory at its final days of popularity – before the lighter beers we all bear a certain responsibility apparently to dislike now, beers like Labatt Blue and 50. So, like now recalling the reputation of disco dancing in the age of New Wave, we are a few times removed from the beer in hand, the beer in the slur. In 1998, Colle is 53 so may be recalling the IPAs of the late 40s and early 50s. This could, in fact, be him visiting the brewery’s cask room in the 1940s. A beer with Victorian roots. The ales of his uncles perhaps.

Even just fifteen years on, it much be hard to fully appreciate the slur. What did IPA represent that was so different from “fine-brewed micro-brews”? Like Ten Penny to a Maritime kid, was it musty? Too grainy? It must have meant something to him as he referenced it three times in quick succession.

1825 Saw Many Forms Of Upper Canadian Beer

Click on that image to the right to revel in its full glory. That is an ad for the new brewery opened in my town in 1825 by Thomas Molson seeking to break out of the decades old family business down the river in Montreal. A neat if short lived enterprise. But I speak not so much of Tom or his ambitions today as the evidence in that ad of the marketplace of ideas into which he was speaking. It ran in the Kingston Chronically for for many months so it was speaking to somebody.

Notice all the sorts of beer. As this is 30 years after the earliest reference to porter being downed in Upper Canada, I am not surprised to see it on offer. On my reading of the ad, however, I see the brewery knocking out eight sorts of beer. There are five price ranges. There are wholesale and retail sales. At the bottom you can see they are buying barley which means they are, as would be expected for the times, malting their own malt. So it is likely the amber beer is made of amber malt and the brown stout is a whopping big beer made of brown malt. Now, that’s a beer to recreate.

Notice also that he will take produce or cash. Somewhere I came across an article from a few years earlier about another Kingston brewer agitating for the buying of local beer over the New York stuff. I need to dig that out. Albany made be er showed up not long after the War of 1812 ended. But by 1825, Upper Canada is well into its anti-American most conservative phase under the grip of what was known as the Family Compact. The first wave of leadership from the American Loyalist refugee group that showed up in the 1780’s after the American Revolution was lost is dying off and is passing control to British born Tories who came of age in the glory of the defeat of Napoleon. They are seeking to make Upper Canada a model colonial example to the Georgian Empire under, of course, their guiding hand.

What is really most interesting to me, that all being said, is that there were other brewers in town. With their own brands of beer. Could it be that the beer fan of 188 years ago had his or her choice of over twenty beers? Did they buy based on preferences within a wide selection? That for me would be quite, as they say, a something.

1749 Quebec Drinks Advice From Pehr Kalm

Home alone on a sick day, what else better to do but catch up with my old pal Pehr Kalm on his travels 264 years ago. Working on the Ontario beer history book in recent days, I am looking for references to brewing in New France to seek if I can established what might have been going on around here before it was even Upper Canada. See, what is now Ontario has been many things in the past, bits and pieces of many empires. Beer and other drinks hitch a ride with most of them. And until 1791, southern Ontario was part of the British colonial Province of Quebec and, before 1758-60, part of New France.

And we have some really swell tidbits of information. On 15 August 1749, Swedish botanist and diarist Pehr Kalm was at a reception for the newly arrived Governor General of New France, the Marquis de la Jonquiere, where he reports the “entertainment lasted very long and was as elegant as the occasion required.” All the greatest and the good of the colony were there but you get the sense that it was a wee bit laddish as this is the main topic he records of the conversation:

Many of the gentlemen, present at the entertainment, asserted that the following expedient had been successfully employed to keep wine, beer, and water, cool during the summer. The wine, or other liquor, is bottled; the bottles are well corked, hung up in the air, and wrapped in wet clouts. This cools the wine in the bottles, notwithstanding it was quite warm before. After a little while the clouts are again made wet, with the coldest water that is to be had, and this is always continued. The wine, or other liquor, in the bottles is then always colder than the water with which the clouts are made wet. And though the bottles should be hung up in the sunshine, the above way of proceeding will always have the same effect.

I need to try that one. We have to remember that Kalm was not an idle wanderer. As the Borgstates, he “was commissioned by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to travel to the North American colonies and to bring back seeds and plants that might be useful to agriculture.” So, he is a scientist on the lookout for things… stuff… doings and goings-on.

He describes a pretty rich diet amongst the elite. Brandy, coffee and chocolate for breakfast. Red claret and spruce beer are in much use at the noontime dinner and again at supper at seven in the evening. He notes that people store their beer in their ice cellars beneath their houses to keep it cool in the summer and notes that it is customary to put ice in drinks to keep them cool. It is likely that the beer is spruce beer as “they make a kind of spruce beer of the top of the white fir” which is seldom taken by people of quality. He also notes that it is “not yet customary here to brew beer of malt” and also “nor do they sow much barley, except for the use of cattle.”

This last bit is interesting as one hundred years before the Jesuit records clearly show efforts to create local brewing capacity as part of the earlier economy of the colony. Kalm, however, describes a wealthier and less self-sufficient colony in the late 1740s at least among the elite. There is no longer a press so all books are imported from France. Large sums are spent on boat loads of wine. Cider and beer are so 1630s it would appear.

What does that mean for Ontario? Well, likely the forts by the end of the French empire were supplied with casks of wine rather than malt made beer. Yet, in the last quarter of the 1600s, that was not necessarily the case. When the likes of Lasalle and Frontenac ruled the spot where the Great Lakes meets the St. Lawrence River… who knows?