Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
So, could the menu offer a Woman Wine? I would have preferred that the mug was manly as opposed to simply masculine. I had no idea mugs were, in fact, gendered. What do they get up to in the dishwasher? I also didn’t know that while their masculinity was superior when not in frosted form – something many males might agree upon – that they were inferior to pitchers. Makes one want to work on that two fingered fastball a bit more… if you know what I mean.
I have been on the road all day so am just seeing now that one of my favorite beer bloggers, Simon “Reluctant Scooper” Johnson of England, has passed away far too young. That’s my favorite of the portraits of himself he posted over the years. I never met Simon but we talked now and then through emails, tweets and blog comments. I completely enjoyed his writing. His optimism, bimbles and – perhaps more than anything else – his sheer interest and joy in so many things. And his humour. Here’s his bio:
A bloke who likes beer. What, you want to know more? OK. Ex face-painting clown, lives in the English Midlands, works with data, loves pork pie, hates couscous. Married with one barbecue. Knows some brewers and publicans. And politicians. And, ahem, “characters”. Has written for papery stuff like Beer (the CAMRA quarterly magazine), Gin & It (UK drinks journal) and Beeradvocate (US beer magazine) but is still holding out to be the pub reviewer for Country Gentleman’s Pig Fertilizer Gazette.
Not sure many others could have pulled off the craft rope post or levened it with a bit of meaning as he did. And he thought to give thanks, too. He loved Orval. He helped with the grunt work of the OCB wiki. A friend has posted photos of how he spent last Saturday with Simon, goofing around. His sense of infectious fun came through in everything he wrote. You know, were this rotten news today to turn out to be a massive wind up of us all on his part I would think it a classic. But it isn’t. It’s just rotten sad news.
His blog can be found here and responses to the sad news can be shared on Twitter under the hashtag #RIPscoop. My thoughts are with his family and friends.
Some amazing photos came out of last night’s efforts in nearby Prince Edward County with the risk to early tendrils which will, with luck and skill, become the vines that make the grapes that make the wine. The photos above are from a collection posted on Facebook by Norman Hardie, makers of excellent pinot noir loved by Joe Beef which means likely enjoyed, in turn, by Mr. Bourdain. And me, of course. Three degrees of vineous bacon… or beef… or something. Below is a shot posted on twitter by Harwood Estate in the western end of the county.
What is going on? Bales of hay are lit when the temperature sneaks down towards freezing in the spring when the buds have just opened or in the fall when the grapes are just about right. The smudgy smoke takes advantage of an inversion layer holding just enough warmth to push up against the dropping cold. I think. See, I learn about stuff like this from the internets. If twitter is to be believed, success all around on the ground with the cold beaten off.
It’s a distracted time. The game between Toronto and Boston is interfering with the game between Toronto and Boston. The first thunderstorm of the spring is moving through giving parched seedlings out in the garden as heavier duties of life nibble at the back of the mind. Yet, it is a warm Friday evening. The kids are out. The smells of that season we Canadians call “not winter” float in through the one open window as the first large drops pat pat pat on the bags of compost waiting to be settled into their plots on the next dry day. As good a time as any to see what’s going on out there on the internets.
→ In two weeks or so, I have a chance to hit the one orchard estate perry maker I know of in Ontario. Which makes me utterly jealous of Pete Brown. A folk music, cheese and perry/cider fest. Pleasures unimaginable.
→ Please just leave Bieber alone. In Canada, he is now a grown up… sorta.
→ Jeff makes some very good points on the impending reaction from big beer should what’s been considered (for about five years now and still maybe a few more to go) as craft beer not eat itself or, who knows, actually gain a significant market share… as in something approaching 20%. Me, I am quite comfortable knowing that big brewers will quite happily flood the market if need be with cheap and excellent beers inseparable from those offered by the current profitable puritans of craft marketing. I do like his idea that the approach is to add more flavour to lagers but I think this is but one prong of attack. Watch your flank, big craft.
→ Boak and Bailey started early and didn’t have to deal with the thug.
→ Stan then Craig reacted to a xenophobic article on how US craft brewers woujld teach Germany a thing or two by being boring and hoppy and achieving <1% marketshare. No consideration on the role of Mosel in the overall equation. Much hand wringing over ugly American interventions but, believe me, far better than dealing with the ugly side of Canadians.
There. The hockey is 1-0 in favour of my team at 8:23 pm while the baseball is the same score for… my team. JINKS! Better quit while I am ahead.
Brewed since 1990, this wheat beer is one of the best arguments against worrying at all about tenancy forms of brewing in principle. While one might unkindly point out the web 1.0 nature of the brewer’s web presence, it does give you what you need to know and, more to the point, sets the tone. Fairly focused small batch niche brewing at a high standard for the best part of the craft beer revolution. Quite Toronto-centric in business terms, the stuff never gets out here much, here in the rude and rustic hinterlands 200 km to the east. I get there so rarely but did share part of an evening with the brewer, Michael Hancock back in 2009. I recall him complaining or at least explaining the trials of keeping on top of quality control whether in the then new can or as served from taps watched by the eyes of others.
What about the beer? Deft as much as anything. Even from the can, creamy wheat. Then there’s banana, a bit of white pepper and a bit less clove than the other guys. Clouded gold under whipped egg white froth and foamy rim. Leans slightly towards coconut creamy aroma. Lightly soured and spiced in the finish. An insane $2.70 a can, probably the best value in Ontario beer. Would a younger brewer would ruin this with a tiny fleck of shrubbery root or the bark of a tree? It needs none of it. Not so much a vestige of brewing past as a reminder of the days of easy adulteration by adjunct or showboating by faddish hop.
Oddly, the BAers tell you how the RBers rate it #1 then rate it not as highly.
It’s Session time again. Or it was Friday and now it’s Sunday 8:02 am. See, there’s things to do. Gardening, smoking pork, napping, sitting. So, it was with deep regret that I realized I needed to post something for this the three quarter-ish of a century edition of these, Les Sessions. The question this month is a bit, err, specific:
Creating a commercial brewery consists of much more than making great beer, of course. It requires meticulous planning, careful study and a whole different set of skills from brewing beer. And even then, the best plan can still be torpedoed by unexpected obstacles. Making beer is the easy part, building a successful business is hard. In this Session, I’d like to invite comments and observations from bloggers and others who have first-hand knowledge of the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery. What were the prescient decisions that saved the day or the errors of omission or commission that caused an otherwise promising enterprise to careen tragically off the rails?
Hmmm… a tad particular, no? A wee bit off the point of the plan. Seeking business advice from beer bloggers? Let’s see. What did Stan write? Oh, cheater pants. He inverted the question and pointed out how brewing the beer is not the easy part. Good thing that is true or I would have a real issue with Stan this month. A real issue.
So, …”first-hand knowledge of the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery.” What can I say. You could do worse than read the blog How to Start a Brewery (in 1 million easy steps) from one of Canada’s more successful craft brewers, Beau’s. Go look at the beginning, 25 May 2006 when they were about 65 employees smaller. Here’s the first batch being brewed. Here’s when the yeast died at the customs office. Read on. You will likely find there were no prescient decisions. There was panic and scramble, beer and patience. And luck. Lots of luck. And good taste and humour. Brewers who lack the skills at those sorts of things, well, don’t make it.
Oh, I cheated as much as Stan did. Damn. I’ll have to have a word with myself.
If I have a favorite beer at a favorite pub, it’s a pint of McAuslan Oatmeal Stout at the Kingston Brewing Company. It does not hurt that the place is a block from my work. But news has thrown a pebble at my world just now, placing that pleasure at perhaps some risk:
After a quarter century in the business, the husband-and-wife team behind the McAuslan Brewing company has sold their company to another Montreal-based microbrewer, RJ Brewers. Peter McAuslan, who founded the company with his wife Ellen Bounsall in 1988, told CJAD News it was just the right time for the two of them to get out. “When one starts a business, you always have a sort of an end point in mind,” McAuslan said. “Both of us over the last ten years said, ‘well, there’s going to come a point where we’re going to want to sell out and take advantage of the work that we’ve done.”
Risk you say? Don’t get me wrong. I have had RJ’s Belle Gueule and it has its worthy place. But successors rarely maintain the particularity of a beer even if quality generally is maintained. Different equipment, hands on the knobs, water tables or yeast strain races? You’re never sure about these things. With luck, I’ll stand corrected this time and that wee note of licorice will be there along the twiggy hops for years to come. Good news for the team of McAuslen and Bounsall certainly and perhaps part of an era we’ll be entering where many such just rewards are gotten by many more retiring first wave microbrewers.
But, really, it’s not like I drank the beer because of them. I drink it because of it. And I hope it has many more years ahead of it.
One of my favorite things to do is to not do something. Last year, I planted parsnips, onions and carrots in the square of soil by the front door. The carrots got dug up in early October and the onions were lifted a month earlier. But five parsnips were left in the ground all winter. Where they apparently grew. I had to dig around each root down around a foot and pull on the damn things. I left at least a quarter inch width of each in the ground. They came out with a snap.
A few months ago, I referenced a wooden tankard that had been found on Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, as part of my review of Mitch Steele’s book IPA. I didn’t clue into one aspect of the tankard until I read this story about another similar wooden tankard from the 1500s found last year in the mud of the River Thames as described in this story posted at the Museum of London’s website:
It is comparable in shape to a modern beer mug, however, this tankard holds three pints. Was it used to carry beer from the barrel to the table or, was this someone’s personal beer mug? The quantity of liquid held in the tankard and markings suggesting it once had a lid, may indicate that it once served as a decanter. However, the lack of a spout seems to contradict this theory. The only other items that are contemporary and similar in appearance come from the Mary Rose, although the Mary Rose examples carry 8 pints.
Eight pints!! That is otherwise known as a gallon. Click on the picture to the right for a full version of the Mary Rose tankard. Notice how it appears to have straps of split branches rather than metal. Notice also how the photo above of the three pint tankard neatly illustrates how the handle shape likely indicates there was a lid just as on the Mary Rose tankard. Otherwise, why does the handle rise up above the rim as it does? Nothing like the well applied use of scientific photography in the cause of drinking vessel description accuracy by Murray Saunders for the Daily Mail and the unnamed photographer in the Wharf article. Perhaps a guild of their own is in order.
Speculation goes on that these large vessels may have been used as jugs but I wonder. Not only is there no spout, obviously a known technology in those times but it presumes very odd handling of the beer. Barrel to jug to mug. Why not just barrel to mug? B => M is better than B => J => M technology as it needs no staff person as middleman. No waiter. Why wouldn’t these sailors just be lined up daily and given their full gallon, the measure for consumption throughout day? It’s not like they are sitting in a pub as they drank the stuff. Besides, ship’s beer was weak. And anyway, serving jugs had a different shape.
Keeping in mind that by “little guy” I actually mean small brewers and not larger brewers who need their smallness to be defined by a trade organization… but this news out of Newfoundland is just weird:
…the bosses at Labatt Breweries in St. John’s apparently thought it was a good idea to instruct their employees to train workers who would replace them in the event of a strike. The employees refused and walked out, and are currently on a wildcat strike. The mind reels, and then reels some more upon news that a judge ordered the workers to stop interfering in Labatt’s daily business because, he said, they would do the company irreparable harm. Apparently, in a globalized knowledge economy, being replaced on the job does not qualify as doing irreparable harm to a worker.
We have to also be mindful, of course, that being a good brewer does not automatically entitle you to be considered as a good employer. You will recall how in 2011, Rogue of Oregon was the subject of “a devastating article about how Rogue Brewery treats its workers” to quote Jeff. Like any good consumer, that was the last time I bought any of their beer but, to be honest, anti-union tactics is something of a norm. But asking local workers to train their own foreign import replacements? Notice that a Canadian bank has been accused of the same thing this week. Which has led to an apology from now sweaty browed president and CEO Gord Nixon as clients are voting with their feet and withdrawing their deposits.
We clearly have a problem with any law that allows this. And any community that condones it. Will Canadians walk on Labatt, too? I hope so. Most likely in Newfoundland where the policy hits home most closely and people have an aversion to being led. They are not called the masterless men for nothing. One would hope these things would matter more generally, too. I do appreciate when Ethan points out that, hey, it’s capitalism but one needs to recall that capitalism is about trade and, frankly, turns on the principle “buyer beware.” As in be wary. Be aware. Know who and what you are dealing with. And appreciate, as Nixon now knows, that it is the consumer who defines what is appropriate within the construct of capitalism, not the law or business.
