Category: Nova Scotia

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.