Or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Drink Lager
Maybe it’s old guy navel gazing. Maybe it’s romanticizing a certain period of my life. Or maybe it never really happened at all. But I feel like craft beer in Ontario really did have a hey day.
It was brief, but it felt like something cool to be part of. It felt like something great was happening. Brewers were pushing the boundaries of what beer should look, sound, smell, and taste like and it was this fervent and fertile time period that made this industry blossom.
Maybe it was a decade ago? I’m not sure. I was drinking a lot at the time.
But Ontario craft beer was briefly a special sort of crazy. Controversy over cartoonish bombs on cans? Why not? Fuck the LCBO! Dry-hop everything until the air tastes like Citra. Dismantle The Beer Store and salt the earth so nothing owned by the big guys can grow back. Death to AB InBev!
We – and by we I mean the brewers, the sales reps, the owners and the collective, foaming-at-the-mouth weirdos on the fringes — we beer writers and nerdy zealots with ink-stained tasting note Moleskins and Untappd obsessions — were a tribe of rabid gatekeepers. We knew what craft beer meant and, brother, if you were trying to fake it, you’d get fucked six ways to the weekend.
Pretenders were roughly shown the door — given a tongue-lashing by a frothy-mouthed and petulant Jordan St John at a beer festival, thoroughly trounced in posts on that esteemed journal of record, blogTO, or – worse – eviscerated in the merciless hellscape that was bartowel. Authenticity was the only currency worth a damn, and it was guarded and fawned over like a dusty six-pack of Westvleteren purchased from Brock Shepherd when he closed Burger Bar. Many a contract brewer was sent packing, red ink on their balance sheet, a case of Hogtown Brewery glassware rattling under their arms and their tail between their legs.
But every revolution devours its children. And the fever broke.
We rode a turbulent, hoppy wave of IPAs to its unnatural and violent end, like a semi-truck of dogshit driving through the patio doors of a tasting room on trivia night. Suddenly, everything was sour. Haze was king and Juicy his queen, and every brewery scrambled to manufacture some orange-hued, Instagram-baiting NEIPA.
Beers sparkled with glitter, labels screamed for attention in ways that made Smash Bomb look like a children’s colouring book, and the rabid delirium for hype new releases steamrolled over the old flagships like Kevin O’Leary piloting leisure craft over his neighbours. The old gods—skilled brewers, quietly honing their craft—seemed rudely shoved aside by the owl-shit-slick marketers and a wave of trust fund donkeys looking to cash in on the craze.
Somewhere along the way, chasing innovation turned into chasing weirdness for weirdness’s sake—beers brewed with fruit, with lactose, with gum pried from the park benches of Kensington Market. One of the WWE villains known as The Ford Brothers—not even the fun crack-smoking one—somehow became an accidental champion of the movement to “free beer”, and we felt obliged to feel thankful. It was like a honey badger returning your car keys. It was cool because, hey. I’ve been looking for these, but now there’s a fucking honey badger in my house.
The thing we loved seemed to lose its shape, its centre—it was just chaos, noise, and oh wait a fucking pandemic to boot.
And so now, in our collective hangovers, with new breweries pouring peanut butter cardboard diacetyl whatever, and old favourites shutting down and getting bought up, more than ever I find myself craving the clean lines and honest thirst-quenching bite of something unpretentious. Something that doesn’t insist on itself or demand applause. Pour me a fucking pilsner. Crack open a helles. Pour me a noble lager that cuts through the static, that balances the madness, to remind me—for just a moment– of what craft beer used to be before the circus came to town.
This post originally appeared in the November 2025 edition of Spent Grains, as “The Fever.” Spent Grains is “a little zine about beer and stuff in Toronto.” You can access current and past web and print versions of the zine here.
Photo by Dandelion Soup (Flickr), CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 — https://flic.kr/p/8SbbVs
