Nova Scotia – Page 3 – A Good Beer Blog

Our Collective Family Record Of Slavery

I have the TV on in the mornings. It drones on and if I am lucky and the kids sleep in past 4:45 am, I get to pay half-attention to the CBS Morning Show to learn about all the real news. And this morning there was a short piece about the genealogy of Michelle Obama which told about the five generations from slavery to the White House:

She began working on Michelle Obama’s roots at the behest of the Times before President Barack Obama’s inauguration. Smolenyak said her mother, like Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, carried the surname Shields, and an “instant affinity” pushed her interest. The first lady’s ancestors lived across the South and Midwest, and many were part of the Great Migration that saw blacks leave the South for the industrialized North. It was the 6-year-old slave Melvinia Shields, bequeathed in her master’s will and later sold for $475, who tugged at the genealogist’s heartstrings. “It’s still jarring to see dollar signs associated with human beings,” said Smolenyak.

In my work I am bumping into history more and more and find the specifics of personal history and who was related to who the most interesting stuff. A few months ago, I asked myself who was the last slave in my town. I didn’t really answer the question but found some information – especially the story of the man who seemingly incongruously fought at Sackets in red during the War of 1812 even as had also been brought to Ontario at the end of the American Revolution as a slave to Loyalists. Makes me wonder if any were on the ships from New York City in 1783-84. There were plenty of possibilities in those days… possibly. I still need to find the 1812 soldier’s name but it also reminded me of the prof who taught slavery in first year property class to illustrate the principles in a way that stuck in the mind. Nothing like a children listed in a slave sale advertisement to bring a point home. Now I wonder who the last slave sold in my town might have been. And where was the sale held? I had no idea they were curious about the same questions in Largs.

Pre-Drinking: What Is Old Is New Again

I am not sure what it is about journalists these days but they seem to have entirely forgotten what life was like in the 1980s. People seem to think that, you know, the special friends relationship of hooking up was invented by those with a Blackberry and that facing economic tough times is something that no one has coped with before. Odder, however, than forgetting the lax ways of amore and getting together with pals over a pot of weak tea is the idea that “pre-drinking” as described by the Toronto Star this morning is new:

Young people are engaging in a “new culture of intoxication” that even has its own buzzwords – “pre-drinking” or “pre-gaming.” If you’re a confused parent looking for a simple definition, just click on YouTube, or on urbandictionary.com, where it’s described as the “act of drinking alcohol before you go out to the club to maximize your fun at the club while spending the least amount on extremely overpriced alcoholic beverages.” This new form of binge drinking goes far beyond a warm-up to a night out with friends, says a new report by Centre for Addiction and Mental Health researcher Samantha Wells and two colleagues at the University of Toronto and University of Western Ontario. It’s an “intense, ritualized and unsupervised” drinkfest, in many cases perfectly timed so that the booze hits the bloodstream within minutes of stepping inside the bar, Wells said in a telephone interview from London, Ont.

Wow. They are “unsupervised” when they do this?!?!? Imagine that.

Did anyone involved with these studies ask a Maritimer who was in university a quarter century ago? Frankly, I still find it odd to be in a pub before ten in the evening given that the Halifax social scene required picking up a case (Nova Scotian for 12 beer) on the way home, having something for supper like K-D or oven fries and then landing at one house or another to, frankly, pound them back until it was time to get the taxi downtown. But these days I get all snoozy well too early for this sort of thing. I hardly make it to the end Num-Three-Ers on Friday night at eleven now. Yet somewhere some part of me is happy that gangs of the young are still being safely dumb in fun packs within reasonable parametres, singing at the tops of their lungs, turning into bags of seat as they slam-dance or whatever the kids are up to today.

Session 15: How Did It All Start For You?

I want to say one thing. Where the heck did the days of whatchure fayvrit bock go? All these questions like who’s your beer friend, what’s your best beer place? I wish we’d get back to beer and a lot less about me…or you if you are another beer blogger. But at least this one is about me and beer.

There. Done. Off chest.

So, I was trying to thing of auspicious moments on my early years with good beer. I am a lucky guy who, at 45, started in my university years interest in beer in early 80’s Halifax, a seaport town, that was interested in beer and drink and donairs and whether Keith’s or Moosehead was better house draught. A place where one could say “it’s a drinker” on a lovely day and know by midnight you;d be amongst 50 pals in the taverns, pubs and beverage rooms of our fair city’s waterfront. I’ve written about the 1980s Halifax pub scene then in an earlier edition of The Session, but here are some notes:

In frosh week of 1982, my second year of undergrad, I decided unfortunately to drink a large amount of MacEwans Scotch Ale much to my later distress. Twice that night I noticed that it went down with the consistency of HP sauce and was quite different from the local Nova Scotian lagale I had been drinking.

The next year, 1983, the college bar had a “beers of world” weekend and we all drank Dortmunder Union which came in in very thin glassed bottles with light grey labels. Not too long after, Maxwell’s Plum, an imports bar opened in Halifax.

Soon after that on Christmas Eve 1985, I ran into my high school pal, Pete, at his new gig bartending at The Thirsty Duck put on a new keg of the recent novelty arrival Guinness. We went through a fair bit of that at that pub, too.

In 1986, the Halifax scene takes another jump with the Granite Brewery (now also of Toronto) at the old Gingers location on Lower Barrington, started up its experimental brewing with a variety of levels of success. About that time, the New Brunswick micro Hans Haus or Hanshaus started in Moncton and, according to Brewed in Canada, lasted five years. They brewed a lighter lager but also a beer that I recall as being like a marzen, darker and flavourful.

In 1985 I am in Holland working and traveling in France and the UK will college pals and, again at the end of 1986, I am to be found backpacking in the UK, in the pubs trying what’s ever going. The latter time I visit the Pitfield Beer Shop which Knut visited in 2005 and buy two homebrewing books, one by Dave Line and the other by Tayleur as well as some basic equipment I expect I can’t get back in Canada like polypins. I still use some of that stuff as well as those authors’ more basic brewing techniques.

But I think the real break came when I got the November 1987 issue of The Atlantic and read the article “A Glass of Handmade” – an article that gave me a sense there was something happening in North American outside of Halifax, that was maybe like the UK, that was maybe something to look forward to. I wrote about that back here and even sorted a copy of the article for posterity in my bloggy archives. Go read it again – it’s a great snapshot of where craft brewing was in 21 years ago and reminds me of what I was thinking about when I was first learning about what beer could be.

Session 9: When Beer And Music Shaped My Life

A bit like Greg, when I thought about the topic for this month’s edition of “The Session”, hosted and proposed by Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey, I was initially disappointed as this one’s generality seems to be taking us another notch farther and farther away from the beer and nearer and nearer to a free for all, allowing for a drift towards that glaring lack of attention to detail that any good beer blogger should fear.

Yet the posts so far today have dispelled my fear as has just wallowing in a bit of recollecting. I have to go quite a ways back to a time when music and beer were more closely associated for me. Not as background music either – when one older brother came back from a trip to family in the early ’80’s, his most telling remark was that the British pubs he had visited all seems to have jukeboxes compared to our last trip, the summer of punk in 1977. And they were all playing “Born in the USA”. That’s not music. That’s music in a can.

Stephen Beaumont’s post for the session – or one of them – makes a very good point about the music in a bar being a huge part of the
experience but it is also important to note that canned music is a fairly recent introduction into a lot of bars – a reality of only the last 35-25 years. Even in my youth of the early 80s many Halifax taverns were still only either loud with conversation or had live music. And it was that live music we sought out because we sang, too. Maritime Canadians like me have a capacity for shout-singing a good shanty with the best of them and we sang them in the taverns like the Lower Deck with certain songs being somewhat obligatory like “Barrett’s Privateers” by Stan Rogers and, of course, the cultural anthem “Farewell to Nova Scotia” which usually brought the house down in pubs like the Lower Deck with the long tables being hammered and dimpled by beer glasses keeping the beat, students and guys in the navy sharing their benches and trying to out do each other on the chorus:

God damn them all
I was told we’d cruise the seas for American gold
We’d fire no guns, shed no tears
Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier,
The last of Barrett’s Privateers

The music was real and I was making it, the tavern was on a Halifax pier and the beer was then, for the most part, locally brewered draft by regionals Keiths and Moosehead even if a few imports were popping up like Newcastle Brown and the oddly present but welcomed Frydenlund lager from Norway – both also coastal brews. Stephen shares a bit of the flavour of Halifax that from that time, too, in his post:

Then there are times when beer trumps music, as it does in this story told to me many years ago by Kevin Keefe, founder of eastern Canada’s first brewpub, the Granite Brewery in Halifax. Winning Maritimers over to British-style ales wasn’t the easiest of tasks for Kevin, but in doing so he recognized that he would create for himself a sort of captive audience. And so, one by one, he convinced the locals to switch from the regional lagers and bland, blonde ales to his unique dark ales and best bitters, including, eventually, one long-time hold-out we’ll call Alan. Alan was for many months skeptical about the appeal of the Granite’s ales, Kevin told me, but after numerous tastes and talks, finally came around and began to drink the Best Bitter on a regular basis. This continued for some time, up to and including the evening when a hugely popular band was playing in a rival bar, attracting away the bulk of Kevin’s clientele.

Funny. The Alan I knew in the mid-80s of Halifax (me), the one hunting out the best place to belt out the best song at closing time, was starting to enjoy craft beer in a Halifax brewpub that actually pre-dated the one that came to be called the Granite Brewery. As I went on about back here, their equipment was originally at a sort of down at the heels place called Ginger’s which was a few blocks, a few rougher blocks nearer the train station and the docks, south of where the places now called the Granite and Ginger’s sits today. We’d also another source for early craft beer from a southern New Brunswick brewery, Hans House, that I do not think made it into the 90s.

But Kevin Keefe is right. It was the place as much as anything that made learning about his early efforts at craft beer so attractive and so different – whether that first harbour town tavern or later, at the Henry House, the new sort of upscale pub that he introduced into the scene that made for the setting. And those places of his had, for much of the time, something hard to find these day of mainly canned tunes or those days of table thumping massed messed choirage – the peace of no music at all.

A Brewery, A Literary Tour And Another World All In One

Her: I sure hope no one mentions this ever again.
Him: Me, too. How unlike us. Best to bottle it up. Pass me another.

An interesting combination of two of my interests may well come together in Nymburk, some 30 kilometers east of Prague, where a brewery, Postřižinský Pivovar, helps continue its story as a local brewery, how the brewery altered the life of an author – and how the brewery itself became a character in the life of the community through the author:

The brewery, operated by brewing firm Pivovar Nymburk, has strong historical and literary connections with Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who was raised in the brewery grounds and wrote “Postřižiny” (Cutting It Short) about his childhood encounters with the brewery workers. The book was made into a hugely successful film in 1981 by director Jiří Menzel, who recently adapted another Hrabal work, “Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále” (I Served the King of England). The brewery now uses the literary connection with Hrabal as a marketing tool, and the writer’s amused face stares out from the labels of most of the bottles of Postřižinské Pivo sold in the Czech Republic.

That speaks volumes for me…but sadly more over what is not than anything. We in the English speaking world are so concerned about avoiding making connections about beer and locality and community that we forget that our behavior must seem fairly bizarre to other cultures. Just from my own experience I can think of a bar owning pal who was barred by the local regulator from selling a drink he had come up with that referenced Anne of Green Gables. Recently we’ve seen some US states call out the lawyers and tribunals to keep Santa off beer bottles. Heck, in the chapter of the upcoming book Beer and Philosophy that I penned I noted that the law of New Brunswick barred representations of beer in family situations in advertising. We can’t make fun of fictional characters or even describe what actually is – because to do so we point out there is beer in our lives. Because that would be, I guess, dangerous.

And yet we do all this despite knowing we all have tales of our own how beer characterized the community. I can only speak to my Maritime Canadian youth but we all heard how Moosehead’s Dartmouth brewery had the free tap for those working on the floor and wondered why we didn’t all drop out of undergrad and apply for a job. We knew teetotaling farmers with the case in the barn. We knew the ties between Halifax’s Keith brewery and the VE Day riots when the youth of the town invaded the place and drank the brewery dry, likely some knowing relatives – maybe those above – who had some stories. We even watched ads just a few years ago for Alpine beer and how it was not worth making a career for yourself away from home because you might not be able to get your brew…and probably knew people who likely took the advice.

In many ways, beer frames (or at least colours one corner of) what you are and what you could be expected to be….but you really shouldn’t talk about it. Beer is such an interesting touchstone for our collective denial of what we are. Far better to focus on what we think we should be. Somehow it exemplifies all the danger in life we were warned of – even though we happily live it with anyway. Weird stuff.

Ten-Penny: Another Maritime Canadian Beer Disappears

When I was in undergrad in the early 1980’s, just before New Brunswick’s Hans Haus sorta failed at lift-off and Nova Scotia’s Granite Brewery took off, I mainly drank beer made by two breweries that made beers that were pretty much like beers in the rest of Canada, except they were made by Moosehead’s Dartmouth brewery and Oland’s in Halifax’s north end. The brands we bought were local and we were loyal to the beers of our province like Old Scotia, Schooner, Keith’s and Oland’s Ex. One beer me and my pals did not have such fondness for was Moosehead’s Ten-penny ale but we no longer have to fear this beer as Halifax’s Daily News reports:

A Maritime brew is heading for extinction, but it won’t leave many drinkers crying in their beer. Ten-Penny Old Stock Ale is soon to be a memory in Nova Scotia. Bottled by New Brunswick-based Moosehead, Ten-Penny is already off the shelves at most Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation stores. But at what seems to be one of the last bars in HRM to sell Ten-Penny, it’s not exactly flying out of the cooler. “We have 26 left and we put it on our sign outside, so we’re trying to trick people into coming in and buying it before it’s gone,” said Kendall Burton, general manager of the Lion’s Head Tavern and Grill.

If you can’t sell Ten-Penny at the Lion’s Head, believe me, you have an issue…justsayin’. And don’t order the salad. Anyway, if old style Schooner was the beer your uncle drank (or at least he did before that day when it magically began to taste exactly like Labatt Blue) Ten-Penny was the beer your grandfather drank because it smelled like his shed. The professors at my small undergrad bought it, one suspects for the same reason that anyone did: so no one would steal one on you. It was musty and even musky stuff with a pale malt funk that has the power to catch on the gag reflex even as a 20 year old memory. While it is enjoying strong US sales, the Moosehead brewery in New Brunswick is the remaining rump of the east coast empire after the Dartmouth branch ceased operations in the 90s. The brewery describes the beer in this way:

Ten-Penny Old Stock Ale: Ten-Penny is a robust ale brewed using top fermenting ale yeast, more malt and hops for extra body and higher alcohol content (5.3% alcohol by volume). Its unique flavour has made it the choice of Maritime traditional ale drinkers for decades…

That description is almost as kind as the decision to cease production.And while the two whole reviewers at BeerAdvocate say it was not anything to look forward to in its last incarnation either I am sure there are those that will regret this decision and if you are one of them feel free to vent. I make no judgment. We are here to help.

Local TV Dies A Little More

It had been getting a bit crappier than I was comfortable with lately due to cuts but Clear Channel affiliate WWTI ABC announced today that it was cutting its 6 pm and 11 pm news broadcasts to focus on hourly updates and weather…oh, and the internet. [I think they will be investing in the use of technology – wizards!] Just a year and a bit ago, they had an hour and a half of local Watertown, NY news and sports every evening at 6 pm and more at 11 pm with a special Friday night high school sportscast called the Sportsblitz…or rather the Sportsblitz.

Now, the best source of corny local sports is gone. How will I know how Lafargeville or Pulaski do in high school lacrosse next spring? How will I follow Sackets in the Class K, Division XXIV NY state boys basketball regionals? Why do I care? Through my life, local TV news has going the way of other slowly dying things. In the good old days, CBC Halifax TV in the ’70’s had the resources to do news broadcasts from Tomaso’s pizza and other wacky places and WLBZ Bangor brought Dick Stacey’s Country Jamboree to the Maritimes via cable TV (blogged about here…it even made The Christian Science Monitor), Wingham Ontario’s CKNX-TV in the 1980’s did a feature on my brother in law and his chicken that would ride on his bike handlebars, Pembroke CHRO-TV in the ’90’s, now an Ottawa station, covered the local court scene I was working in. It is not entirely over as Kingston still has an hour of local CKWS news at 6 pm and another half hour at 11 pm and Watertown NY still has one local TV newscast on WWNY-TV but they are affiliates using a lot of national feeds and the local hokey sportscasts are the first to go.

Sad. We’ll all eat the same cheese from squeeze tubes by the time I am 83.

Midtown Tavern, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Midtown Tavern, R.I.P. David Swick has the whole story in Halifax Daily News.

A city that prides itself on its heritage, and a legendary tavern whose days are numbered. Sounds like a match made in tippling heaven. Operators of the Midtown Tavern in downtown Halifax have applied to the city to tear the old place down, to be replaced by a new drinking spot in a 20-storey hotel. Chances are good that this will actually happen. Times have changed. Even 10 years ago, the Midtown was hot, hot, hot. But plain decor and basic food are no longer the key to success.

“We still serve a tonne of food [Ed.: Dave, even I don’t think Mr. Grant was thinking metric], but no one’s drinking anymore,” says Eric Grant, one of two sons of longtime owner Doug Grant. “We used to break even with the food and make money on the beer. You can’t do that if people don’t drink. If you won the lottery tomorrow and told me you wanted to open a tavern, I’d say you were crazy.”

Doug Grant, now 78, has told his kids they can do what they want, Eric said. So they worked with a developer to create a plan, and are now taking calls from hotel chains, with an eye to putting a fancy new bar at the base of 20 storeys of rooms. Rather than unceremoniously destroy the Midtown, tourism and heritage officials might consider picking it up and moving it. Plunked down somewhere else in town, it could become a curious attraction. Here, after all, is a tavern that did not change for decades — and stayed enormously popular through almost all of that time.

We’ll never see its like again.

Boiled dinner, two and juice. Even in my Halifax time, 1981 to 1992, you passed through the Midtown on your way to other bars, the Deck or the Seahorse. Now it would be a stop or more likely a walk by on the way to Rogues Roost. It wasn’t the same after Jerry moved on a long time ago. He held the place open for us on a blizzardy Friday night.

Around 1984, I saw an oil painting of the Midtown jazzy on a rainy evening for $400.00. I kick my own arse thinking about not buying it. I had steak and egg and two and juice there before seeing Gretzky play for Canada ona Saturday afternoon in September 1983 against the Czeckoslovaks with Hasek either in goal or on the bench as a kid. I think I have had a beer with three-quarters of my best friends in that bar.