Announcing a New Great Canadian Beer Guide - May 2001
Back in 1993, recognizing that a period of relative stability had descended upon the Canadian beer industry, I roamed the country recording the stories behind the breweries and tasting and rating their wares. The results of that effort were published in 1994 as Stephen Beaumont's Great Canadian Beer Guide.
By the year 2000, a whole lot had changed in my home nation's beer marketplace. Breweries that had been front-and-centre in that original Guide have since been absorbed by others or driven out of business entirely, and new breweries -- dozens upon dozens of them! -- have come along to take their place. In six years, the face of beer in Canada has changed radically.
And so I took once again to the cross-Canada road, tasting and travelling extensively. Over the course of about seven months, I visited every province in the country, taking six return flights and logging more than 10,000 kilometres of driving to do so. Almost every brewpub and brewery in the country was visited and five reporter's notebooks were filled with tasting notes. Additionally, I conducted dozen of blind tastings back in my Toronto office.
The end result is the new, smaller-format Great Canadian Beer Guide, Second Edition. Instead of the original's 74 breweries, there are now 163 documented and discussed, and the number of beers reviewed has soared from over 300 to more than 800! The tasting notes are all my own, and this time out, virtually every bottled beer in Canada was tasted under "blind" conditions.
The ratings have changed, too. In the first Guide, only two beers merited a three-and-a-half star rating and none scored four stars. In the new book, five breweries garner three-and-a-half stars for their beers, and one is awarded my highest rating of four stars. To my mind, this is further evidence of how the Canadian beer market has evolved and matured over the past decade.
But like the first Guide, this book isn't meant to be strictly about ratings. As I note in the introduction:
"At the end of it all, I sat down to sketch a literary portrait of this brewing nation. What I found was an industry as diverse and regional as the country itself. In areas like Newfoundland and New Brunswick, the craft beer market still sits in its infancy; in British Columbia, a protracted period of intense competition has left long-standing breweries wondering where next to turn; and in QuŽbec, the excitement of innovative and experimental brewing continues to build. In Canadian brewing as in Canadian politics, it would appear, there are no generalizations.
Except perhaps for one: We love our beer. And it was for the love of beer that I embarked upon this exhaustive journey of discovery. You hold the results in your hands. Enjoy."
To order The Great Canadian Beer Guide, Second Edition, visit BeerBooks.com.
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