Ontario – Page 18 – A Good Beer Blog

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.

The Best Christmas Present For Ontario Ever?

I hadn’t thought of an attack on Ontario’s beer retailing weirdness from the Federal level but that may be just what is lining up for 2014:

A spokesperson for the Competition Bureau confirmed Friday that it’s “currently examining the differences between the beer industries in Ontario and Quebec and exploring the effect that these differences have on competition in each province….” “The bureau chose to focus on the beer industry as there have been a number of conflicting reports as to why the price of beer varies between Ontario and Quebec,” Phil Norris, a spokesperson for the Competiton Bureau, said via email. Sources told Global News Beer Store officials and others have been interviewed by the bureau. Regulators were “collecting information from industry participants,” Norris said.

Collecting information? I suppose if the mandate is limited to assessing a nutty regulatory system’s effect on pricing one must make a study of the obvious. As Jordan has detailed, the pricing arguments may not be all they appear but for me that is not the point. I have no interest in limiting my choice when it comes to my shopping whether for beer, cheese, shoes or books or anything. I buy at least half my beer ever the course of the year in Quebec or the USA. I’ve gotten the occasional wee lectures from overly eager border guards telling me I should not buy in the States but, really, when you allow yourself to take consumer product advice with folk with sidearms where are we?

I am happy to pay full freight. I am happy to declare purchases at the border, support local and support actual well crafted just about anything. But, when it is all boiled down, what I am most happy with is the idea of reducing the intermediaries. I prefer two parties to a transaction, the maker and me. Add a third as retailer and I am not upset but getting into wholesaler, bonding firms, distributors, importers and clearance certificate issuing laboratories and you start seeing not only why a simple product like beer is over priced but over wrought. As in what hath this system wrought?

At the moment – as it has since 1927 in Ontario – it hath wrought market constriction to the point one cannot be sure of value or even preference. We get what we are given and are expected to line up and praise the short shelves of selected goods. No thanks. I’ll continue to take much of my money elsewhere until that changes. If that takes a prosecution of the provincially regulated monopoly by Federal officials, so be it.

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?

Incidental 1930s Brewing Letterhead Images

Now there’s a sexy title for a blog post. A real whooah-ish search engine optimization blog post title. Letterhead Pr0n. I should have paid more attention to the lighting when I was at the archives last week with Jordan in Ottawa. But, still, these are pretty sweet. It is amazing how elaborate the Taylor and Bates letterhead is. Rich old guys in suits drinking beer and having the time of their lives because they own a brewery and a radio station.

Travel: A Trip Up To The National Archives

I made a quick trip to the Library and Archives of Canada as part of researching the book on Ontario beer history. Among the most interesting things seen was all the white with black veined marble throughout the place.

That’s the foyer up there. The Wellington Street building down the road from Parliament and the Supreme Court has an odd combination of the white marble, aged pine and brass fittings. It feels like the Earth HQ might have looked like on Space:1999. Apparently I failed to notice the Henry Moore down to my right when I took the picture.

Ontario: Toronto’s 1877 Temperance Debate

Working away last night on the history of Ontario beer and brewing while Jordan was dilly-dallying over beer in the 1980‘s, I was looking at issues related to the beginnings of temperance and specifically references to the “Dunkin Act” of the Province of Canada, named after politician Christopher Dunkin and repealed in 1878. See, before Canada became a country – sorta – in 1867, there was this other country called… Canada which existed under a constitution that lasted from 1841 to 1867. It was named after the upper end of New France, conquered in 1760 by the British which was named, you guessed it, Canada.

Anyway, the Dunkin Act was the short name for The Canada Temperance Act of 1864 under which municipalities could vote to declare themselves “dry” – meaning free from alcohol sales. When Toronto ran its vote in 1877, a committee of those working for the “no” side kept notes of the debates and, after they won the day, published them. The accounts are full of spicy Victorian rhetoric like the passage above spoken on 23 July 1877 at the Coliseum on Alice Street. Apparently the Sally Anne held meetings there, too. I shall endeavour to work the making of pants too tight to sit down in part of my daily patter from herein out.

And, as the rest of that passage illustrates, the temperance movement may have had quite a valid point in those times. Not only was there a mass of drinking going on but there were other things triggering the movement. The rise of mechanical workplaces needing greater sobriety, the development of a greater sense of individual responsibility compared to more carefree status-ridden Georgians of the first third of the century and, not least of all, the development of a mass middle class of skilled tradesmen and less affluent professionals. Concurrent with this was a pretty sharp u-turn in medical thought which shifted daily alcohol consumption from a principled part of a robust diet to a poison to the body and society. It is interesting to watch this shift happen in less than half a generation just as southern Ontario gets fully mapped out if not yet populated.

We are prone to associate ourselves with history’s winning sides but few of us would not side with the goals of the reformers at this stage of the debate. The are, after all, dreaming and fighting only for the lives we live today. In the story of Ontario beer takes something of a side seat in the debate at this point, the real enemy being whisky. In fact, just a few days before on the 10th of July one speaker, surely coincidentally named O’Keefe, got a big cheer from the crowd when he said he was pro-Temperance, though not in a legal imposed form, and also in favour of light wine and beer. Poorly made cheap rot gut? Who sides with that now?

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.

Encouraging Good Beer North And South

A couple items in the news caught my eye this week, one from here in Ontario and one from New York to our south. Up here the news is this:

The LCBO’s redesigned and relocated Laird and Eglington location in Toronto will showcase a new 1625 sq-ft cold room boasting a prominent craft beer section spanning up to 160 linear feet of shelf space. Craft beers will be arranged by beer styles (ie. IPA, Stout, Lager, etc.).

That’s a relief. I was worried it would be arranged alphabetically or by the primary colour on the cap. Basically, the provincial monopoly on better drink is opening up one new store and it will have a bit more space for good local beer. Fabulous. 13 million Ontarians. 160 feet of shelf space. It’s the subject of government press releases. By way of contrast, the law down south in the State of New York is aiming to spread the goodness of good beer a bit more broadly according to this news item:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says 14 local farm breweries have opened statewide as a result of legislation that took effect in January. The law created a farm brewery license for those who rely heavily on locally grown farm products for their beer. Under the farm brewery license, brewers do not need an additional permit to serve beer by the glass.

While there is still concern that not all the breweries that open do not actually hire that many staff, it is clear that this great law is opening up new meanings for real and local when it comes to NY beer. And creating rural employment and wealth. Heck, they are even letting farm stands sell nearby wine as a means to boost jobs in small communities. I suspect a lot of this is due to the guidance of departing Ag Commissioner Darrel Aubertine, my near neighbour over the lake, a guy with whom I did once sit and have a beer. Practical laws to use good beer to generate wealth.

Do the changes to our south make the news up here worthless? Not exactly, but it sure puts things in perspective. Notice how lobby groups need to be involved, masses spent up here on updated retail space. Swankification. In New York, farmers are freed up to seek a share of the market, to expand it. Which makes better economic sense? Which speaks better of the government’s attitude to its own citizens?