Post Beer

According to my Blogger account, I had intended to write a post about the unstoppable rise of overhopped beer almost a decade ago, in September of 2013.  

For some reason, I never got to it, but now's good time to talk about this trend just as it seems to be dying out.  The winds have changed, and what would have been a prescient 2013 post will now just be me trying to keep some kind of momentum going on this blog!

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Way back in 2010, I went to Germany for the first time in a long time.  It was a pretty difficult time in my life, but I had a great time in Göttingen, and was very fortunate that I was able to return to Germany for months on end during the subsequent summers.

It was here that I discovered that I really liked German beer.  That is, I really liked lagers - I also liked wheat beers, but there is something wonderful about German lagers, and how I could drink so very very much of it and feel fine the next day, in a way that I'd never experienced in Canada.

I'll never forget the day I returned to Toronto, and went out to a local (unfortunately long gone) pub near my apartment with my parents and then young son.  I ordered a Steamwhistle, which advertised itself as a pilsner and which up to that very moment, was a beer I quite liked.

As I took that first sip, I was taken aback by its sweetness and, for lack of a better way of saying this, how difficult it was to just knock it back. It's not a terrible beer, but it's no pilsner!

As I recently pointed out implicitly on this very blog, Canadians can be uh, parochial.  Even in a big city like Toronto, there's a long-standing tolerance for mediocrity that I've always found really strange, especially when we have access to so many great cuisines and people with the cultural knowledge to prepare things well.  People here have always seemed to equate paying a lot of money in a cool place to eat or drink something with eating or drinking something good.

Although my taste buds readjusted to the sweeter Canadian beers, what didn't change was my emerging hostility to hoppy ales.  Which is why this article by Rick Ball in Guernica magazine spoke to me, although not enough to write about it at the time! 

I'd encourage you to read it, but the short version is that the reason we were (and are still) awash in overhopped IPA is because they're easier to make, and what started as a kind of reaction to bland corporate beer, became the many headed hydra of going out and watching people pretend that something that tasted like floor cleaner was actually delightfully refreshing.

Even at the time, articles like Hoppy Beer is Awful were sounding the alarm bells, even if it was with the-then necessary cultural proviso that she also liked these terrible beers, they were just getting too hoppy.

Perhaps the apotheosis of this trend for me was the opening of Bellwoods Brewery in my old neighbourhood. It checked all the boxes - it had this "authentic" vibe while simultaneously being very expensive, and advertising how local and "authentic" it was, while clearly the result of a large amount of capital.  

Nevertheless, everyone was raving about them so I thought I'd give them a try, and their beer was awful.  I don't say this lightly - at the time I didn't really like IPAs but I could stomach them, but they had this one IPA with blood orange that was literally stomach turning.  

Now to be fair to them, they've pivoted away from the hoppy beers to the sour ones.  But at the time, I was genuinely perplexed to see the volume of people walking past my apartment carrying their smartly branded bottles.  Did they really enjoy these beers?  Or were they just chasing trends?

Why did I care about this so much?  Probably because I drank a lot and so beer was on my mind!  Now, I feel so distant from beer culture that I don't even really know what's popular anymore.  What I do know is that a lot of breweries, perhaps to distinguish themselves from the easy-to-make IPA crowd, started trying to make nice German lagers again, and one can indeed find some good local beers that I don't want to use as a stain remover.

That being said, most bars and brewpubs here in Toronto at least are still extremely over saturated with IPAs, but at least now there's a small chance that there will be something I would like to drink, if I were to drink at all!

Even Bellwoods seems to have moved on - their most popular beer now is a sour, which again, coming from Germany, is something that both amuses me a depresses me!  But the story of trying to get a glass of Berliner Weisse with syrup in Toronto is a story for another day!

Reverend Billy

This morning, on the way home from walking my dog, I kicked a plastic Starbucks coffee/frappuccino/iced latte/whatever cup that someone had decided was better to leave on the ground instead of putting it into the nearby garbage container...who am I to judge?

Anyway, kicking it had a Proustian effect on me, because I immediately thought about Reverend Billy, someone I haven't thought about in nearly 20 years.  Specifically, I recalled the photo that accompanied this 2004 profile of him in the New York Times (unfortunately archived article lacks the photo!), which depicted Reverend Billy being held back by some random Starbucks patron.  

In my mind, the patron has the dead expression of a dad holding an unruly toddler, keeping Reverend Billy in place until the authorities could arrive and the patron could get his 2000 calorie Moccaccino with extra whipped topping or whatever it was he was protecting from the Reverend's anti-consumerist predations.  

I can't find the image anywhere online, so you'll just have to trust me, but it's evocative of a time when culture jamming was still a thing and the "average" person thought that it was more important to protect Starbucks than to let the performance artist play out his show. 

Times have changed, and come to think of it, I think if Reverend Billy went into a Starbucks now, he'd be greeted with applause instead of concern.  In other words, he'd probably get co-opted in that special way that capitalism manages to do to everything and everyone.

So it good to know that Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping have moved on somewhat from their anti-consumerist bent (haven't we all?) and onto other pressing matters, like recently writing about global warming and protesting robobees.  In other words, he's still fighting the good fight.

Although I haven't thought of him in decades, I'm glad he's still around.  Who knew kicking a trash on a Toronto street this brisk late summer morning would lead to reacquainting myself (and you, my dear reader) with something good?