History – Page 31 – A Good Beer Blog

What’s With The Boxes For Cutting Straw?

Again with Lord Selkirk’s diary of 1803-04, I noticed one thing on page 114 that sorta suck out. In his description of the set up of the kiln, there is a particular notation: “…small portable boxes for cutting straw are made for $9…” What the heck is that about? What is the function of the box? Why do you need a number of them? And what is the function of the straw?

Here is a very detailed discussion of the straw or chaff cutter. In that discussion, the tool is shown as going back centuries. The function of the cutter was to make the straw digestible by cutting it into small enough lengths to be mixed with the feed of a horse. And in this case, Selkirk’s note follows a reference to a horse run mill to grind the malt. So it could be just that.

But there are two other uses for straw in this brewery. One was expressly mentioned the other day. Mr Grieve the brewer mixed straw into his mash to keep the wheat from gumming things up. Torrified or popped wheat can be used for that today. Cutting the straw would make sense to ensure it was evenly distributed through out the mash. Straw can be a multi-purpose resource in what I am starting to call if only to myself “vernacular” brewing. Brewing with the locally available resources. If, out of that, you make a unique beer maybe that is an “indigenous” form of beer.

But there is another possibility. Or is it an additional one? Maybe he was kilning with the straw. Attentive readers will recall the fern ale post of the fall of 2011. In that discussion, we see that in the 1600s and 1700s, while coke was growing as a kilning fuel for large operations, straw was still a reliable fuel to make the palest and least smokey malt. Good wheat straw, when used with skill, made the sweetest pale malt. Notice, too, that Grieve is kilning his malt in a place and at a scale where other desirable fuels are unlikely to be as readily and cheaply available. Wheat was the monoculture crop, the gold standard for sale and even export. There may have been plenty of wheat straw sitting around as the district filled with settling farmers. If so and as the beer had a high proportion of wheat, these strong ales of his my well have been quite pale despite their frontier origin.

Just a thought. Could be tasty stuff.

Albany Ale: An Actual Log Brew House In 1803

OK, sure this is actually a brewer in Geneva, New York and not one on Albany… but it is an actual brewhouse from 210 years ago even if it was 190 miles or so to the west. And it is one described in quite a bit of detail in the 1803-04 travel diary of Lord Selkirk as he travelled through the lower Great Lakes preparing his settlement at Baldoon, Upper Canada. Having come from Boston, on November 9, 1803 Selkirk was moving west through the Finger Lakes heading towards the Niagara frontier and at Geneva met with a Mr Grieve who owned a distillery and a brewery. He took careful notes and even drew sketches like this diagram of the brew house. There is a fair amount of material here so let’s take it a bit at a time.

=> I am I think finally full redeemed! Well… redeemed ish. See, it is a wheat ale operation:

…half barley half wheat he uses about 500 Bushels of barley vis all that he can find to buy & pays the price of wheat – being very little cultivated… Wheat alone makes thick stuff & the liquor will not run of from the grain – sometimes by the assistance of a mixture of Chopt straw it can be done, but the wheat at any rate does not improve the quality of the beer…

See, I have been writing about indigenous strong wheat ale brewing in New York for over three years now but have never seen it described. Now I have an eyewitness account.

=> And it is strong ale. Grieve speaks of making stronger ale for storage through a summer but is brewing for present us an ale with 3.5 to 4 bushels of malt per barrel. Now check my math but when I tried to work out the strength of an 1835 Albany ale a few years ago I came up with a figure north of 8%. What would the strength of his proposed 5 bushel keeping beer be?

=> The brewing process is both described and illustrated. Click on the picture above and you will see a bigger image. The upper image is a top view of the brewery while the lower one sees that from the side. Why this detail? Selkirk is recording the scene just in case he wants to replicate it at his new settlement. The phases of brewing through the system are: (1) heat water in boiler; (2) mash malt with hot water dropped down from boiler; (3) draw wort off mash by gravity down into a jack tub; (4) pump or “jack” wort back up to boiler where it is boiled; (5) drop the hot wort into the first 10′ x 14′ cooler or coolship and, after some time, drop it again into the second coolship; (6) drop the cooled wort into the working tub where primary fermentation takes place; and (7) rack into barrels.

Perhaps as interesting as the idea that this might be that missing link between the Dutch wheat brewing in CNY before the Revolution and the more formal scientific brewing starting in the 1820s and ’30s is the last observation made by Selkirk. There is plenty of cider being made from trees which have re-sprouted from the roots of the orchards destroyed by the Sullivan Expedition in 1779, a very ugly campaign to eradicate the Iroquois allies of the British Crown. Their resilience then makes me wonder how long they had been growing and also if there are any descendants today.

Ontario: Women And Beer Before Temperance

sessionlogosm This month’s edition of The Session is about women and beer which, if you think about it, represents 50% of everything in our beery culture. Sure it does – as long as you have your methodology correctly aligned. So, there should be a wide range of topics. For me, I noticed a few things along the way as Jordan and I have been researching and writing the history of brewing in Ontario and especially things prior to 1860 that are well worth sharing. Why 1860? Temperance and trains, of course. The whole society changes when trains and temperance get a major foothold.

The thing is that – before temperance and trains – beer seems to be a townie drink, a drink that you get when you are within reach of a brewery or a transit point. Consider this as you consider that, as set out in the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1991: Public Eating Proceedings, in the chapter “Temperance Hotels and those ‘Damned Cold Water Drinking Societies’” Powers and Duncan describe at page 238 how Catherine Parr Trail:

… gave advice to immigrants in 1852 and included recipes for making beer, noting the absence of the ‘sweet well flavoured home brewed beer of the English farmhouses. Unfortunately, she said, “the taste for beer has often unhappily been superceded by that of whiskey.’ She provided recipes for treacle beer, beet beer and maple beer as an alternative to whiskey.

See, once you get anywhere away from town and a cartloads of hooch is heading your way, it is going to have the most concentrated form of the stuff on it unless there is a compelling reason not to do that. And until trains and temperance push to the forefront, there just isn’t a reason. And see Parr Trail missed the “sweet well-flavoured home brewed beer of the English farmhouse”? This backs another thing we suspect: that there was not a lot of surplus barley floating around Upper Canada even well into the middle third of the 1800s. One farmer interviewed in his old age recollected that he didn’t even see barley until he was in this twenties in the early 1840s. Which leads to beet beer on the frontier. You do what you can.

So, what was the place of women in such a culture. Fortunately, I have my copy of In Mixed Company by Julia Roberts reviewed back here in 2010. Roberts has a chapter in her book entitled “Public Life for Women in the Era of Separate Spheres” which discusses the experience of women in Upper Canadian taverns. And I have a handy copy of Wives and Mothers, School Mistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada 1790-1840 by Elizabeth Jane Errington, a historian who I have had the pleasure of meeting. Errington’s books has quite a number of observations of the intersection of women and alcohol in the colony during that period.

And what do we learn? One thing is that women were present in taverns as daughters, wives and widows working under or as licensee but also as travelers stopping at the inn and even local drinkers. Roberts indicates that as early as the 1830s inns were advertising special separate provisions for female customers. These provisions were further divided by class and included separate entrances, parlors and waiting rooms as well as balconies. And in some cases they are recorded as drinking alcohol including beer:

At Robinson’s tavern in Prescott, “Sarah” charged half a pint of beer in 1844… Widow Wilson lodged at Robinson’s for two and ah half weeks starting 31 October 1847. On her first day, she charged a glass of whisky, a glass of brandy and several pints of beer. She then stuck to beer and her tally on the last day of her stay was fifty-six pints, an average of three pints a day. Treating others accounted for part of the total.

As the title indicates, Errington’s book focuses on the working life of women. She notes that even when a couple ran a tavern together, as noted by one traveler in 1797, the husband ran the farm while the wife ran the tavern. As the post-Revolution economy evolved, wives were less involved in maid’s work and more often acted as hostesses especially in more established hotels. On the frontier, however, things were not as genteel. Errington quotes from Susanna Moodie on the preparations for a work bee when neighbours came to achieve some collective goal:

…our men worked well until dinner time, when, after washing in the lake they all sat down to the rude board which I had prepared for them, loaded up with the best fare that could be procured in the bush. Pea soup, legs of pork, venison, eel, and raspberry pie, garnished with plenty of potatoes and whisky to wash them down, besides a large iron kettle of tea.

Women and beer? Before the rise of temperance as a political force to be heeded and before the train when barrels of beer could be gotten in as far as the rail line went, it was a townie thing in Upper Canada. And women were there as they were everywhere.

History, Consistency, Stability And Efficiency

The post at Jeff’s titled “A Better History of IPA“, written in response to a particularly poor piece of old school beer writing, led to comments and on of those comments led me to recall this:

From Schenectady to Albany, about twenty miles, the country is sandy and poor. We travelled at the rate of seven miles an hour, but what with our avalanche adventure, and some other detentions, it was long after midnight ere we reached the city. We had so far exceeded ordinary hours, that the Hotel was hushed in repose, and although we might certainly have raised the home, it was rather doubtful whether we should thereby have improved our condition. We found the porter dosing in the hall, and having committed our luggage to his charge, we agreed upon diving into a certain cellar, which we had observed to be still lighted up as we drove in. Here we found a good sample of low life in Albany. It was about three in the morning, and some of the party had evidently been indulging freely during the previous hours. Still there was no brutal drunkenness nor insolence of any kind, although we were certainly accosted with sufficient freedom. After partaking of some capital strong ale and biscuits, we returned to our baggage apartment, and wrapping ourselves in greatcoats and cloaks, we enjoyed a tolerably comfortable nap, until daylight again put us in motion.

The passage is at page 192 of a travel diary from 1832, Practical Notes Made During a Tour in Canada: And a Portion of the United States by a Scot named Adam Fergusson. I love it. Diving into a cellar to find a 3:00 am party with a feed of biscuits washed down by what was likely Albany Ale of the sort discussed a few years later by the New York State Senate in hearings over adulteration charges against Hudson Valley brewers. Jordan found the diary on line and shared as part of our research for the history of Ontario we are writing and then I shared it with Craig for the bits like this that relates to Albany brewing history we are writing.

What got me thinking about that cellar party in 1832 was not Jeff’s post so much – and certainly not the underlying butchering of both history and thought – but this comment:

And where is the evidence of brewers historically using modern dry-hopping techniques, pelletizing processes, refrigeration, CO2 purging/blanketing, and other techniques for maximizing hop aroma? Just because a historical brewing log says they added 10lb/BBL of hops doesn’t meant the beer was anything like many beers are today. And the hops today are just so different that it’s not even a comparison, though you’ve already written that off and I don’t think it matters anyway in the face of the rest of the process differences. Bottom line is beer today is substantially different from the past. I don’t agree completely with Charlie’s historical take, but your critique of him doesn’t really address or refute what he wrote.

The author of the comment is, I understand, Sam Tierney who is an excellent brewer of excellent beer at Firestone Walker. There is a lot in the string of comments so read the whole thing. The purpose of this post is not to refute or even debate Sam’s point so much as explain what I understand about the point as well as to elaborate where the point leads us. Perhaps a list of observations will help me in organizing those thoughts. In no particular order…

1. Beer is both basic and complex

One thing that is entirely correct in Sam’s observations is that technical advances have played a huge role in the present day boom in good beer. The variations and expansion of sales in IPA in particular has if not led this boom it is a key identifier. It is also the case, that those technical advances are not necessary for the creation of excellent beer. How can I say that? More that anything else I know that because I am a bad brewer. It has been some time since I brewed but today with little more than buckets, a stock pot and simple speciality equipment I could brew excellent beer. With those rudimentary tools, I have made many batches of all grain beer. It is beer of quality that have been received by pals with enthusiasm. I say, however, little more because there are two key items that go a long way to ensure that excellence is achieved. I have access to very good ingredients. The best malts, top notch hops and yeasts packaged by the suppliers to craft brewers. That is important. More important, however, is the StarSan. For me, cheap and effective sanitation is the actual miracle behind modern brewing, whether at the scale of the homebrewer or that of the industrial plant that puts out craft beer or macro gak.

That being said, there are at least three things that craft brewers do that I can’t. The good brewer of good beer achieves success though the three-fold benefits of consistency, stability and efficiency. Consistency I will define as sameness from batch to batch. Stability for me means sameness in the bottle or the cask for a reasonable period of time. Efficiency means making good beer from the least resources reasonably possible. For me, Sam’s comment reflects these achievements of modernity. And important ones they are. But they are not determinative on the question to the point he states. They certainly do not add up to beer today being substantially different from the past.

2. Beer has been basic and complex for centuries

While I am researching brewing history a lot these days and even been writing about brewing history for some time, I am not a historian. I am the amateur popinjay dipping a toe in the water at best. Yet… I have seen certain things. One is certainly that the history of brewing – and especially North American brewing before and beyond the advent of lager and all it has brought – is one of the most neglected topics I have ever come across. Being a lawyer, one is something of a generalist researcher and I have had to study topics are diverse as First Nations history of Ontario and New York, the properties of concrete and the intersection of strollers and dog parts from a human rights perspective. In each area, those who have gone before have laid down reliable grounding for those who follow. By law is like that. Like beer, it as old as culture.

From my research in brewing, however, I have learned that many accepted truths and well-known assumptions are incorrect. Pale ale in the English-speaking world is centuries old. There was a very good reason for the temperance movement to come along as the past of not that long ago was a stupefying drunken place. And the American love of highly hopped strong malt ales is as old as the nation. It is not just that there is nothing new under the sun so much as what was old never really leaves us so much as alters a little as culture around it alters a lot. So we forget. We forget that in the mid-1600s, skills of the good brewers were honed likely as sharp as they are now – it’s just that the tools were not what they are now. But beer is not special in that regard. The same is true of all aspects of our culture. So just as Shakespeare scratched on vellum with a quill pen to create masterpieces, so too the ancient brewer or brewster knew

…the best and most principal fewel for the Kilns, (both tor sweetness, gentle heat and perfect drying) is either good Wheat-straw, Rye-straw, Barley-straw or Oaten-straw; and of these the Wheat-straw is the best…

Of course they did. People did not sit about moaning about how they regret not living in the future. They achieved excellence in the world around them based on the resources around them. Including with beer.

3. IPA has separate centuries-old American roots

I tweeted a tight meaningful summary of this point just yesterday:

Taylor makes very strong hoppy beer, trains Ballentine, Terry Foster recalls Ballentine, trains US craft.

Every time from here on out you see someone pretend to retreat from Twitter discussions because 140 characters cannot contain their wisdom, please remember that tweet. Except not for the misspelling of Ballantine. Let’s unpack the idea a bit.

a. Taylor. Taylor is a key figure in mid-1800s Albany brewing. He owns what was likely the largest brewery in North America around 1850. When you see a listing anywhere in the hemi-sphere for Albany Ale from the 1830s to the 1880s it is likely Taylor’s being advertised from Newfoundland to Texas to California. Craig has more.

b. Ballantine. Craig has a lot of detail under that line but a key point is that Peter Ballantine trained under Taylor before he went off to brew on his own in Neward NJ, starting a line and legacy of beer that can still be consumed in some form today.

c. Terry Foster. I wrote the post under that link in November 2004, nine years ago. Foster, among other things is the author of Pale Ale, volume one of the Classic Beer Styles series issued by Brewers Publications. At page 1 of the 1990 edition of that book, he wrote:

An impressive and highly individualistic U.S. example of this beer is (was?) Ballantine India Pale Ale. Supposedly made from an authentic 19th century English recipe, brewed to a high gravity, heavily dry-hopped and aged in oak casks, this beer has a very intense, complex aromatic character (or did have until the last few years or so).

See? The only thing Foster may have wrong is that Ballantine used an English recipe. Or not. When Americans in the 1830s figure out how to do something they are likely relying on British brewing guides but, regardless, the apply that knowledge by brewing the beer in the US. And brewing a beer that was likely a lot like beer we are familiar with today. This is not to say that this is the only source but it is a key one and one that has been disregarded or unexplored. I have no idea why.

So, there you have it. I was up at 4:45 am thinking out this post and now, eight hours later, have hand cramps. Remember. The past is amongst us. North American brewers have innovated for hundreds of years. Craft brewing is continuing that tradition and, in doing so, make beers remarkably like their forefathers. Go figure.

Ontario: Did The Beer Stay In Town In The 1830s?

I am thinking I may have a theory or at least a bit of half an idea. I was in the library yesterday waiting for the kids swim lessons next door at the Y to end and came across a copy of a book from 1913, a History of the County of Lennox and Addington by W.S. Herrington from which I found this passage from an interview of a man then in his nineties:

I remember the first election I ever witnessed. It was over seventy-five years ago, about the year 1836. John Solomon Cartwright and George H. Detlor, the Tory candidates, were running against Peter Perry and Marshall Spring Bidwell. They ran in pairs; Perry and Bidwell were called the rebels by the other side. There was only one polling place and that was in Bath. It was a little booth at the edge of the village. I was quite a young man at the time and didn’t know much about the issues; but I could understand that the people were greatly excited. The taverns of Bath were crowded with men wrangling about the votes. Whiskey was flowing freely, and there were plenty of drunken men and brawls in the streets. There were plenty of taverns all over the county. There was Charter’s tavern near the head of Hay Bay; John Davy’s over near Sandhurst, and Griffith’s in the second concession about four miles west of Charter’s. Ernesttown must have had a dozen at least.

I like these sorts of old guy interviews. Like the one from 1899 with the recollections of a ninety year old guy of his pre-Victorian youth including Albany Ale. In this recollection above, the guy being interviewed is from a farm outside the village beyond the smaller town to the west of the military, mercantile and brewing centre of Kingston. He grew up in a log cabin. The degrees of distance from the big centre, the layers of the hinterland, describe distribution. See, Ontario – or rather Upper Canada – at this time was still a tenuous proposition given the continuing uncertainty of the Republic’s intentions. It was also one run on a combination of an imperial demand economy tied to local sustainable farming. Before the 1840s repeal of the Corn Laws, crops from here were shipped to Britain and manufactured supplies were shipped back. We were part of the great Georgian hive.

It seems to me that the references to whiskey in the book are what they are – not a euphemism for drinks so much as confirmation of the drink that’s on offer. The same man quoted above stated all the crops were wheat and corn. He did’t see barley until he was in his twenties – right about the time of the repeal of the corn laws in the 1840s and the end of guaranteed supply to the empire. Elsewhere in the book a country store ledger is described. Plenty of spirit references and a few wine sales but no mention of beer. I had in my mind for a while that all the references to whiskey may have meant they were brewing their beer at home but if there’s no barley being grown that’s unlikely.

So, where was the beer going in the 1830s? Likely it stayed in town, was sold to the military or was moved by sailing ship in multi-cask loads to other centres along the shore of the big lake like York, later named Toronto. It maybe takes the railroads in the coming decades for beer to get more deeply distributed. In a world of coastal sail and carts on questionable roads, a cask of the hard stuff is probably the safer bet, the better investment for the families operating the taverns and the country stores.

Ontario Beer History: An Afternoon’s Chat With John

Still being on holiday, I took a drive an hour and a half to my west to talk with John Graham, owner and brewer at Church Key Brewing in Northumberland County, Ontario. It’s grown a bit since my first visit in early 2005 but only a bit. I was after some knowledge. I am working on the Ontario brewing history book Jordan and I are writing. I wanted a sense of where John thought things were in the 1990s. Near history. The days of maltier beers. The days when breweries closed as well as opened. It was a good chat as John is not only one of the more independent brewers in the country but one who has, as I learned today, not much of a work history outside of brewing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Depth.

A great talk. I learned a lot. But it was the day as much as anything. He had cut down picked his own hop bines – Goldings and Zeus – and was working on a brew. I took more time that he likely had but as we sat in the shade out back it seemed like five minutes. I asked him if he considered ever making a corn brew and, looking at the field beyond the fence at the fields around the brewery of GMO macro gak grain-like substance, he said he would if he could ever find some corn that wasn’t compromised. Heritage corn for quality good corn ale. I can buy that. And I would.

So… Were There Loyalist Brewer A-Holes, Too?

I have been putting my mind to the question of who was the first Loyalist brewer in what is now Ontario. Not the first brewer but the first Loyalist brewer. Which means there is a starting line that is fairly identifiable, the end of the American Revolution. The image above is by James Peachey, a war artist, of some of the first Loyalists settling in at Kingston next to the ruins of a French outpost last populated from 1673 to 1758 or so. The image is from June 1783 as the first Royalist Americans trickle in from the south, from places like Albany, NY. Their tents in the back by the ruins are just about where this place sits now.

The usual story is that the first brewer in Ontario was Forsythe at Kingston in 1793 or Finkle at Bath around 1786 or so at his tavern, the first between Kingston and what is now Toronto. Based on the records. Which is what is great about records and what sucks about them. See, in that picture above I see he beginnings of a wave, the fist few of a lot of displaced farmers and successful towns folk. Not a lot of them are going to be very much against having an ale. And not very many of them are going to have much to do at the moment, being displaced refugees given three years of supplies. It does not make much sense to me that such capable folk are going to wait years for investment in a fixed brewery or the opening of a tavern to get their beer. I have been looking for something that will back up my suspicions. Like this bit about Joel Stone, a Loyalist from Connecticut who in about 1787…

made the journey together up the St. Lawrence to the ramshackle refugee camp of New Johnstown (now Cornwall, Ontario). Ever reliant on his family, his half-brother Stephen came up to assist Joel. Along with him came eleven other men from Litchfield, all eager to take up lands in the new province. Stone once had high hopes in this new land, even petitioning Sir Guy Carleton to make him “Deputy Surveyor General.” Stone would receive no such government office upon arriving in Canada. Instead he wrote to his father, “I have begun making malt brewing beer and distilling spirituous liquors from wheat, barley, rye etc…”

See, one thing I see over and over is how easy beer is to make with the basic ingredients and a basic sense of the technique. And if I can do it what in God’s name would keep someone in the 1780s from doing it, too? Nothing. We see this today all around us. A surge of new and in progress breweries popping up, of many degrees of quality from any sort of brewer. A bucket or two of malt, heat, water and some herbs from the bushes and – voila – you’ve got your beer.

It’s the resilience of beer and the will to make it and drink it that impresses. Whether setting aside a portion of your supply of seed in the 1780s or, today, scraping enough to get the first growler out the door, there is a will to brew. Doesn’t mean you’ll last, be remembered or even be any good. Beer doesn’t really care. It just wants to be made, that’s all.

So Now #JordanAndAlanBook Has A Name

Just so you can plan your Father’s Day shopping for 2014, the book contracts have been confirmed with the publisher History Press, aka our reputable publisher. Never thought I’d have one of those.

And, as befits a birthday, it has a name: Ontario Beer: A Heady History of Brewing from the Great Lakes to the Hudson Bay. I noticed something about the name. It goes against the regular direction of things. The general theory goes that Ontario grew east to west. But it really grew west to east after the last Ice Age, then later south to north with the Five Nations and their neighbours, then a blip in the east with Cartier… but then north to south-westish with Henry Hudson followed two generations later by the first outposts of the Hudson Bay Company, then a blip in the far east with Lasalle and Frontenac followed by then a little continuing action at the very southwest across from Detroit until the Loyalist surge south to west at Niagara along with south to north along the St. Lawrence, then very far east to west after the War of 1812 and west and west and north and north-west and west until… now.

Better get at it.

Ontario: When Was The First Beer Downed Here?

A puzzle. As has been noted, Jordan and I have accepted the offer to co-write a book on beer and brewing through Ontario history. It is part of the series put out by The History Press series on regional brewing histories. Which leads to lots of questions. Like… how does one write a history? But that is a big question. A more specific question is what was the first beer consumed in what is now Ontario. One candidate is the beer found in the hold by the mutineers of Henry Hudson’s ship in 1610 who set poor Captain Hank and a few others adrift in James Bay and then set to ripping the Discovery apart as recounted in 1625 by one sailor who was present:

…there were some of them that plyed their worke, as if the Ship had beene entred by force, and they had free leaue to pillage, breaking vp Chests, and rifling all places… In the Hold they found one of the vessels of meale whole, and the other halfe spent, for wee had but two; wee found alſo two firkins of Butter, some twentie seuen piece of Porke, halfe a bushell of Pease, but in the Masters Cabbin we found two hundred of bisket Cakes, a pecke of Meale,of Beere to the quantitie of a Butt, one with another.

The trouble is that while it is clear that the mutiny was in James Bay but not clear that the mutineers drained the beer at or near the western half of the bay’s shore line that later becomes Ontario as opposed to Quebec. They do keep the eastern shore in sight on the way home after they abandon Hudson and the others left to their own devices. But that was after they gunned the beer. Where did they do that? Such problems I have. Well, not the sorts of problems these lads me but, you know, modern problems.

Ontario: Perhaps The First Upper Canadian Beer Ad

This isn’t an ad for the first brewery in Upper Canada but it is an ad for a brewery in the first edition of the Upper Canada Gazette issued the same date as stated in the ad. It is also not necessarily the first brewery in the colony but that might be a tight race. Steve Gates, sometimes comment maker around these parts, identifies Forsythe as building the Kingston Brewery in 1793, too. And, of course, it would post date the likely first brewing in what becomes Ontario by about 120 years given the Hudson’s Bay Company was packing malt in the hold on its first adventure in the 1670s. Plus, there was posssibly even commercially brewed beer in Niagara at least when the brewery was set up as the paper the first edition was printed on was from Albany NY meaning a cask or more of Albany ale may well have traveled the same journey as it had a habit of doing. It appeared on the lower right of the last page of the paper, the only ad in the whole first edition.