I have been considering as of late whether it is the craft beer scene in Ontario that’s gotten boring or if it’s me.
I’ve decided it’s a little of both.
I still maintain relationships with a lot of people in the beer industry and I still attend a small amount of events related to craft beer, notably the recent “Brewer’s Ball,” an annual softball tournament ostensibly hosted by “The Southern Ontario Beer Boys” and in realty run and organized mainly by all-around-good-guy-and-oyster-enthusiast Steve Hukari. For the last few years, I’ve invited a team of assorted beer-industry adjacent folks and brewery professionals who couldn’t scrape together a full team on their own to join a crew under the guise of it being my podcast’s team, The Lil’ Bullshitters. It’s a great event and has raised a lot of money for charity and I have to hope it returns next year, despite Steve’s protestations (again) that this was the final year (if you want to hear more about this event and Steve, you can listen to this podcast episode).
This year, as the Lil’ Bullshitters proceeded to lose every game and drink more beer than any other two teams combined (as is our custom), I received some (though not a lot of) questions along the lines of “why haven’t you recorded a podcast episode in so long” or “why don’t you blog anymore.”
There are myriad reasons, of course — it’s time consuming, it actually costs me money to do the podcast as opposed to making me any, my job keeps me very busy, I have two kids that are active in a lot of sports and activities — but I realized recently it’s also mainly that I just can’t seem to muster much of a fuck to give lately.
I love this province’s craft beer scene and clearly I’ve made lasting relationships in it that are important to me. But “covering the scene” or expending the energy to do any sort of in-depth commentary as of late all just feels rather…“meh.”
Partly, I’m older and more boring now. I am past the point where I eagerly seek out new releases or line up for events — or even bother with tasting flights (Tasting flights are bullshit).
I mainly drink beer from the breweries in my own city and I have a regular rotation of favourites from the LCBO and the grocery store – and who the fuck wants to read about or listen to a guy drinking his fifth Anderson Craft Ales Italian Pilsner of the week? That’s not hot content.
But also, I think the “news” around craft beer has also become rather ho-hum.
It’s safe to say that the “Great Correction” that’s been foretold on this very blog and others like it for the last decade has happened. As craft beer boomed in the province, its commentators were repeatedly asked, “Can we sustain all this growth?” and historically the answer has been something like, “I’m not even sure how it’s still growing now.”
There were just too many breweries, too little shelf space. Too many former hockey league buds, marketing gurus, homebrewers with days job, and dudes who “just got sick of working for someone else and wanted to make beer they liked to drink.” And as I’ve written about many times before, this plethora of upstarts very rarely had the right mix of the brewing skills, marketing savvy, and business fundamentals to suggest they could all stay in business long.
Nevertheless, they persisted.
Enter COVID and suddenly the ability to be fast and loose with financial projections wasn’t an option. Owning a craft brewery suddenly meant more than having some decent beer, tradeshow paraphernalia, and a twitter account and the breweries that didn’t have their shit together started to disappear, whether it be by attrition, aquisition, consolidation, or a long, slow death involving a Dragon’s Den plea for franchise investment, a closed location, and a recent email to customers announcing the ability to label and brand the company’s beer whatever you want for parties!
But I digress.
The short version is probably that the purge has been good for craft beer consumers: we’re less flooded with contract brewers and shady upstarts who see craft beer as a gold rush — but I think it’s also meant that those breweries that remain and succeed are those who are playing it a little bit safe. What I mean is that the big craft breweries seem to have leaned into what they know will work: Light lagers and copy and paste haze bombs now seem to reign supreme and the little experimental shops are increasingly being consumed by bigger ones. And that probably isn’t great for fun, newsworthy reviews and developments. Do you really think the beer from Sleeping Giant, Merit Brewing, and Sawdust City, for example, will remain true to style now that they have all been purhcased by Lake of Bays under the umbrella of “Original Gravity Beverage + Hospitality Group?” Methinks not so much. Despite news releases claiming nothing will change whenever a brewery is bought out, it feels naive to think these smaller breweries and their recipes won’t have their processes and ingredients reviewed by folks now making decisions with an eye to fiscal responsibility. That’s historically not a great environment for experimentation and innovation.
Similarly, expansion into grocery didn’t move the needle toward more interesting beer. It was a fun and interesting battle to get more retail space for craft beer (see my last post, almost a year ago) but grocery and convenience store beer has also made breweries stop to think about which beers they might focus on to sell at Costco so folks can load up on “crushable” beer with their ground beef and Motts Fruitsations snack packs.
“What’s new in craft beer?” “30 packs of Muskoka’s Tread Lightly!” “Buckets of Northbound Lager!”
Who gives a shit?
To quote Dr. Dre from his song “The Watcher” on the album 2001, “Things just ain’t the same for gangstas.” The time when fortune favoured the bold seems to have passed and middle of the road beer with safe, practical go-to-market strategies is winning. I mean for fuck’s sake, Toronto’s Indie Alehouse location in the Junction is about to become a fucking McDonalds. I can’t think of a more apt anaolgy for the state of Ontario craft beer than that.
The boom is over, man. And I just can’t be arsed to get worked up about it.
And yet…
This neglected lil’ corner of the internet called Ben’s Beer Blog does actually represent 15 years of independent Ontario beer “journalism,” for better or for (mostly) worse.
It resulted in me being named by fans as “Ontario’s best beer writer” a few times back in the day. It got me some national media bylines along the way, and afforded me a decent social media following before Nazis and bootlickers made all the social media awful.
Importantly, it’s afforded me a place to rant and write, two things I arguably enjoy even more than I enjoy beer.
And so rather than retire Ben’s Beer Blog, I’ve opted to pivot, just a little.
I can’t cover Ontario’s beer scene like I used to. And let’s be honest, every donkey with an instagram account now posts a picture of the New England IPA orange juice clone and reviews beers more prolificly than I ever could (or would ever want to). So instead I’m going to bring this space back but use it to write about whatever I want. There will be beer, most certainly, but probably also some humour, thoughts on dining and hospitality in general, notes on the city of London, opinions on marketing — I don’t really know. It’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to. Hopefully the folks who subscribe are down to join me on this next, slightly-less-beer-specific chapter. And if not, see you at the Brewer’s Ball next year.
