First, the beer love:

61. Under the heading “Breakfast Twists,” the magazine delivers deserved accolades to the tasty Founder’s Breakfast Stout. Imagine what they might have written had they tasted Canadian Breakfast!

88 – 90. Under “Beer Innovators,” the magazine shines the spotlight on Baird Brewing in Tokyo, Brasserie 4:20 in Rome and the new Moerder Lambic bar in Brussels. The last in particular has me still contemplating a visit to Belgium for the sole purpose of drinking there!

And now, Toronto:

3.  Yes, you read that right, number 3 in the list is Toronto’s secret dining club, Charlie’s Burgers. And based on the lone Charlie’s meal I’ve been privileged enough to enjoy, it is indeed a deserved position of honour.

86. In the “Innovative New Bars” section, F&W gives a shout out to our own Frankie Solarik (pictured right) and Barchef, the coolest bar and bartender in central Canada.

Congrats to all!

Ireland’s Beer Nut offered his rejoinder, decreeing that beer does not truly matter, while young Mark Dredge of the U.K. chimed in with a contrary view and fellow Canadian Alan McLeod offered his view that…well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what his view is. And from the look of things, he may not be, either.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself and felt the need to chime in on my other blog. But I felt that this topic was in need of a distinctly Canadian spin, too, and so I am here to tell you all that, absolutely, Canadian beer needs higher prices and more cult beers. Here’s why.

Ask almost any Canadian craft brewer and they will tell you how hard it is to survive in the current environment. Margins are tight, they’ll say, and distribution is difficult unless you make a ton of any one brand. But that’s because most of them are producing solid but generally unremarkable ales and lagers. I say that more of them need to think like American craft brewers!

(Which is why, incidentally, I’m delighted to see a strong Ontario contingent en route to the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago this week.)

Especially around our major urban centres, which is where most craft brewers are based, there now exist more than sufficient beer fans who will travel distances and pay good money for special releases and one-offs, à la Dark Lord Day. Hell, the LCBO in central Toronto sold 20 cases of $18.40 a bottle beer in a matter of hours without any advance press whatsoever! You think a whole whack of extraordinary, limited edition bottles of some bizarre but delicious hybridized style of over-the-top barley wine or IPA or Belgian-inspired lunacy wouldn’t sell just as well? Of course it would.

And here’s the kicker: such special releases not only add to the bottom line, they also tend to attract the media, thus resulting in great publicity. It’s the exact strategy pursued by Boston Beer in the U.S., and they are now the largest craft brewer in the country.

Brewers get money and hype. Beer drinkers get greater variety and more exciting brews. It’s a classic win-win!

The first that came to mind was eisbock, which rattled the perceptions of Ontario beer drinkers when Niagara Falls Brewing first brought it out way back in the early 1990’s. But that wasn’t an innovation so much as a (very capable) revisiting of an old and almost obsolete brewing style. There was dry beer, of course, but Molson simply ripped that off from the Japanese, who in turn had taken the idea from the German diät pils, so no laurels there.

Hemp beer started in Fredericksburg, Maryland, before it arrived in BC, so that’s not on, and while Blanche de Chambly was indeed the first Belgian-style wheat beer brewed in North America, it was hardly anything new in the world view of things. (Same for Unibroue’s mulling beer, Quelque Chose, which was both predated and inspired by Liefmans Glühkriek.) Likewise, spelt and buckwheat beers were more revivalist brews than innovative ones.

That leaves what? Labatt’s patented ice brewing process? Please, don’t get me started. Nope, so far as I can figure, the one true Canadian brewing innovation thus far has been coffee beer, of all things, which was born at Toronto’s C’est What before migrating to Durham Brewing in Pickering, Ontario, and taking off as one of the first flagship brands of Ontario’s Mill Street Brewing. I do believe that the C’est What Coffee Porter predated all other coffee beers in North America, and I think also the one in Prague, and so might be claimed as a real Canadian brewing innovation.

What do you think? Any innovative beers that I’ve missed? Let me know through the comments section.