A Good Beer Blog

Why did Ontario have to make its own path to beerdom? Well, a war and a river for one thing. As we discussed yesterday, the land that is now Ontario was settled in 1783-84 by Loyalist refugees from New York state after the American Revolution. For the first five years, Kingston is a military town without civic government. Over the years that follow until about 1843, it is the leading town in the new British colonies of Upper Canada and then Canada. But the threat of war with nearby America hovers over it well into the 1860s. Kingston sits where the first Great Lake meets the St. Lawrence River which flows on past Montreal, past Quebec and out to the sea. For well over the first hundred miles of that flow, the south shore of the river is in US hands as are half of the islands. And that made shipping drink to that spot particularly difficult as this summary of a letter to the Governor of Canada dated 11 May 1783 suggests:

The want of rum; the Indians have been supplied a little more liberally than usual to keep them in good humour. The honourable and liberal conduct of Hamilton and Cartwright in lending rum, by which they must be considerable losers, only stipulating that a certain quantity of dry goods might be shipped for them at Carleton Island, to which he had agreed. The Indian officers that have resided at the Indian Villages for some time cannot be removed for fear of creating suspicions, but they will be discontinued as fast as circumstances permit, The Indians behave well, but he wishes Sir John Johnson would appear soon.

The Johnson clan, founders of Kingston, were an integrated family of Anglo-American’s and Mohawk. John Johnson’s step-mother was Molly Brant or Konwatsi’tsiaienni so the references to rum and its use describe a bond, not the disrespect and degradation that came in later generations. Almost thirty years before, in 1775 William Johnson, the elder, described his provisions of beer and their purpose in his accounts: on 6 June as ” 2 Barrels beer of Hend’k Fry for the Conajoharees to drink the Kings Health” and again on 22 July of the same year “To a Bull to the Mohawks + 3 Barrels of Beer for a War Dance at their Castle”. Beer and rum were part of the supply requested and required when you were making allies at the farthest end of the reach of the Empire. Because until 1777 – and really for some time later – the Johnsons and their well stocked booze stash are the western end of the British Empire except for a few thinly manned forts.

Which leads to a few observations. If you click on the map above, you will see that there is a route A and a route B to Lake Ontario, the navy filled buffer that protected the Loyalist settlers and later immigrants for their first four decades there. The St. Lawrence, a 112-gun first-rate wooden warship of the Royal Navy along with other cannon laden ships, was built at Kingston in 1814. It was bigger than any other ship in the fleet globally. But it could not reach the sea. Not by route A or route B. The St. Lawrence, route A, was filled with rapids that left the early inhabitants lake locked. Route B fell into US revolutionary hands with the fall of Johnstown in 1777 after thirty years of the upper reaches effectively under control of the one family, one man.

So, how to get beer to Kingston when one route is under constant risk of attack and the other is in enemy hands? Well, you don’t. You have to wait to grow crops and then you have to feed yourself, sell some off for cash and then sooner or later you get to the point that there is enough extra to make beer. Have a look at that ad we looked at yesterday placed in a Kingston newspaper in 1820 by the brewer Thoma Dalton. He is seeking both ale customers and malt suppliers in the local farming community as a means to overcome imported rum, as a means to create a local economy. The next year he is in Montreal with a trial shipment of 100 barrels of “Kingston ale” for public auction. He must have convinced the farmers of Kingston to do business.

Over the next decade and a half Ontario continues to fill and local breweries are there. In 1836 there is a brewery for sale or rent in St. Catherines and another at the River Credit at the western end of Lake Ontario. Five years earlier, in 1831 there was a brewery even further to the west serving the 800 residents of the area of Guelph, currently home to micro turned national Sleeman as well as the craft brewers of the Wellington Brewery and the F+M Brewery.

So why did Ontario become a land of local beers made with local products sold to local people? There was really no other reasonable choice, no other good way to get your beer.

Beer. It only gets to you in so many ways. You make beer and provide it to your community. You make beer and ship it to another community. You ship beer in and provide it to your community. There are not too many other options for the beer trade whether you are talking about 1810 or 2010. Today we are talking about the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The community I happen to live in now, Kingston Ontario, is a lucky choice if you are interested in the history and beer in Ontario as it is where Ontario began. Actually, it was all the Province of Quebec when it began as a British governed community in 1783. At that point, Quebec then ran all the way west and included Ohio and Michigan. The people who first settled here were wealthy Mohawk Valley NY land owners, their slaves, their Mohawk allies and their Loyalist tenant farmers evicted from New York state during the American Revolution. Not the British. This is a community started by battling Yorker farmer warriors.

Allen Winn Sneath in his book Brewed in Canada states that the first brewery in what by then was called Upper Canada was the Finkle’s Tavern, founded a few miles west of Kingston in Bath in 1800. The Ontario historic plaque indicates it was built earlier, in 1786 when the area was still Quebec. Sneath’s book has a photo from the collection of beer writer Ian Bowering. What did they do before then? For the first years of Kingston we are likely looking at locally made home brewed ales, maybe some casks of strong ale being brought in for the wealthy but mainly lots and lots of rum if you go by the ads in the available newspapers. In a way, the tastes of Kingston echo of the community led by Sir William Johnson who died suddenly in upstate NY in 1774 just before the Revolution. He left his affairs to his son John who went on to lead led the Loyalist defense of upstate NY in the Revolution and then because the Superintendent of the resettlement here, the first colonization of the Great Lakes basis under British command. William Johnson was in the habit of importing good strong beer. It’s likely his son, John, continued the practice.

Kingston was still a strong ale town in 1890 according to this article from that year in The New York Times. The town was filled with farmer warriors who would have immediately grown their own grain crops as soon as they hit the shore. In that clip from the Kingston Chronicle of the 3rd of March 1820 above, the first commercial brewer in Kingston, Thomas Dalton, seeks out local grain to make his extra strong bodied ale, even using a nationalist argument to encourage drinking of Canadian beer over West Indian rum.

So, good strong ale was likely being both brewed and brought into Kingston soon after its founding in 1783. And with it came the genesis of the Ontario craft beer trade that continues today.