For their annual Cask Days festival, the Moranas seem to find a way to out-do their past year’s performance. Between the showcase region (California this year), the number and variety of interesting beers, and the top-notch food this is the beer event I highlight in my calendar and look forward to for months. It’s also at the end of the beer festival season in Toronto (for the most part) so it makes sense to try and suck every bit of marrow possible from it. I was literally first in the door for session one and will also head back at […]
Events
standard Beer Dinner: Innis & Gunn at The Bristol
I didn’t have to wait long for someone to take me up on my offer to help promote an upcoming beer dinner in Toronto. On 30 September, Dougal Sharp the founder of Innis & Gunn will be at The Bristol on Queen West for a four-course special event. Happily, Innis & Gunn PR reps here in Toronto were good sports about answering the standard questions I set out, which I hope will help you decide whether this dinner is worth your while. Here are their answers: Roughly, how much of the beer menu is limited edition or one-off beers? There will be […]
standard Golden Tap Awards 2014
The 2014 installment of the Golden Tap Awards was held tonight at beerbistro on King Street and the awards presentation was hosted by Cass Enright of The Bar Towel. I have bit of a rant coming up. Before we get to that head over to my post from last year to refresh your memories on who won the 2013 awards. The self-description for these awards focuses heavily on their democratic nature. Interesting in theory, but when the ballot box can be linked to from social media it’s really just another encouragement for a dizzying amount of spam. Everyone is acting with honest and […]
standard I Will Promote Any and All Beer Dinners
This post has been sitting as a draft for a while, but an invitation from the always gracious Troy Burtch of Great Lakes has given me the impetus – and accompanying photos – to finally post it. I joined Troy on Monday of the 2014 Toronto Beer wWek at Morgan’s on the Danforth for a meal featuring food by Anne Sorrenti and some of Etobicoke’s finest ales. Lately, I’ve been on a real kick about beer dinners. I wrote a fairly detailed post that covered what I think makes them good or bad for craftbeer.ca and I also posted another fairly thorough story […]
standard Toronto Beer Week Preview
The trouble with week-long programs of beer events is that organizers want to be inclusive and have trouble saying no to borderline events. TBW is better on this front than OCD week in June – partly because they don’t cover the entire province – but the event list has still become somewhat unwieldy. Instead of running through the comprehensive list of probably-better-than-average suggestions, I thought we better to offer a few pics that I think will escape attention. (By the way, if you took the week off work and really do want a-to-z guide, Ben Johnson’s at blogTO is more […]