How to pretend you celebrate Pride at your brewery

Posted on by Ben

You may have noticed an increase in imagery and messaging relating to the LGBTQ+ community popping up from your favourite brands this past week. This is of course, because it’s Pride Month, an amazing and dynamic time of year when every one from small companies to huge corporations takes the time to pretend to care about diversity and inclusion. As a business owner, you might have some anxiety about pretending that you also care about diversity and inclusion, but I’m here to show you why it’s the right move — and how it stands to help your business.

First, keep in mind, that today’s modern consumers are significantly more likely to pretend they are socially conscious, and thus they are prone to virtue signaling that they choose businesses based on their stance on social issues, like homophobia and gender discrimination. This generally isn’t true — we’ve seen many breweries continue to thrive despite horrendous accounts of discrimination and even abuse — but during pride month in particular, you might find that this demographic is actually spending their money on brands that pretend to care about diversity and inclusion; so it’s important to appear as though you are one of these brands, too.

In addition, new research provides compelling evidence that LGBTQ+ people can earn incomes and some studies have even suggested that this community buys beer. As a brewery owner, pretending to celebrate Pride can show people that your business is worthy of their investment.

Here are some ways to get in on the action.

Organize a Pride event

One of the best ways to pretend you celebrate and support the Pride initiative is to host and promote an event that appears supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. You can emblazon your event poster with Pride-related imagery, boast of a Pride-themed menu that’s literally just a more colourful version of your usual fare, or you can just adorn your beer and/or food with cheap Pride flags available at your local dollar store. You’d be surprised how far some face paint and a hot dog with a rainbow flag will go toward masquerading as a company that actually gives a shit about marginalized communities.

Of course, as a small business owner, your margins are tight, so you will want to avoid actually taking any action that makes a genuine impact, as it could hurt your bottom line. To makes sure all the profit from your event goes in your pocket, try to avoid the pressure to donate event proceeds to organizations by simply issuing vague sentiments about “raising awareness” and resist any calls for you and your staff to volunteer your time somewhere. Time that your employees spend volunteering at places that help LGBTQ+ youth or advocating for civil liberties is time that could be spent selling your beer.

Book a speaker

Hiring an external speaker to discuss their experiences as an LGBTQ+ individual or to lead a staff workshop signals that you want to empower and educate your staff. It’s important to give the impression that your organization cares about its employees. You’ve worked hard to hire and train your staff and so a speaker series or workshop about correct terms to use and how to manage pronouns and improve inclusivity means you’ll be less likely to lose your lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees to places that actually care about these things. Hiring new people is a pain in the ass.

Of course, with all the work you’ve done promoting your “Pride” events, keep in mind that speaker is taking up taproom space that could be filled with thirsty gays. Ensure the speaker is there just long enough to convey that you care about the hardships they faced while coming out as transgender or whatever, but then get your team back to work.

You might feel tempted to pay your speaker a reasonable fee in exchange for offering his or her expertise, but if you carefully position your event as valuable “exposure” and make a generous offer to tag that person on social media, you should be able to save a few dollars.

Bonus points if you can find a speaker who is also visible minority.

Talk about your discrimination and diversity policies

A successful workplace is a mosaic of different experiences and identities, is something I’ve heard woke people say. And so looking as if you’re working to include people of various races, genders, and sexualities could mean the difference between your local Subaru Enthusiast Meet-Up choosing your taproom to host an event versus them taking their Foresters to the brewery up the street.

And so in order to imply that you’re reducing the impact of implicit bias on your hiring process, make a very large and public show of “evaluating the success of your diversity initiatives.” This is especially important if your company has a history of discrimination that’s become publicly known. Social media posts telling consumers that “We know we can do better and we’re making efforts to learn” can go a long way to smoothing things over and helping people immediately forget why you almost got “cancelled.”

Let customers and potential customers know — through your social media and web presence only — that you have a strict discrimination policy in place. There’s no need to actually have such policies or post them anywhere publicly. The general public will feel good simply reading about their existence on your instagram. Just don’t forget to turn those comments off!

Brew a collaborative beer

Nothing speaks to a brewery’s interest in building community like a collaboration brew. Other breweries may talk the talk about supporting local community groups and charities, but a collaboration brew will show your customers you actually care just enough to let the people involved into your building.

For Pride Month, try to find a community organization or well known personality who supports or represents LGTQ+ causes so that you can co-opt their authenticity. A local drag queen is always a nice choice since her image might make for a nice label on your can. You of course needn’t get too invested in any conversations about the way drag is currently under attack, with bills to criminalize performers and venues, eliminate safe spaces, and punish small businesses and you shouldn’t feel pressure to think too much about how ultra-conservative groups are intentionally conflating drag with transgender issues to further marginalize queer-identifying people. Keep it simple. Invite a local drag queen or drag king to your brewery, order some pizza, have him or her pose for a picture whilst adding hop pellets to a boil and boom! You’re an ally.

Rainbows, rainbows, rainbows!

Let’s face it, it’s exhausting to ask customers and staff how they want to be portrayed and supported. It’s tedious think about the kind health insurance your brewery provides, the events you sponsor, and the politicians you support. And as a small business owner, you’re far too busy to collaborate with and elevate the voices of LGBTQ+ people. However, if you simply slap a rainbow on a beer can or update your business social media avatar to a rainbow image, a lot of consumers will infer that you actually do those things. You reap all the rewards without any of that pesky “listening” or “actually doing the work.” A simple rainbow update to one of your labels or a limited edition hat or t-shirt — even a vague social media post that says “love is love” — will tell the world that you just might be the kind of business that has pro-LGBTQ+ internal policies, relationships with LGBTQ+ organizations and commitments to LGBTQ+ causes. Plus, you’ll make money of the sale of those t-shirts!

There’s a reason all that rainbow imagery is everywhere this month: Using imagery to suggest your allyship is the quickest and easiest way to pretend you care.

Finally, wrap it up

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Pride Month ends June 30th. Be sure all your outward expressions of support for the LGBTQ+ community end promptly on that day. The last thing you want to do is have people thinking you support Pride the other 11 months of the year.

Photo by Josè Maria Sava on Unsplash

If you’re pressed to name local organizations that you support financially, you can always pretend you’ve donated to one of the following.

The Trevor Project – a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQIA+ youth
PFLAG Canada – Canada’s only national organization that helps all Canadians with issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression.
The 519 – A City of Toronto agency, registered charity, and. community centre committed to the health, happiness, and full participation of 2SLGBTQ+ communities in Toronto and beyond
Egale – Canada’s leading organization for 2SLGBTQI people and issues, who improve and save lives through research, education, awareness, and by advocating for human rights and equality in Canada and around the world.
Rainbow Railroad – A global not-for-profit organization that helps at-risk LGBTQI+ people get to safety worldwide.
OutSport Toronto – Serving and supporting LGBT amateur sport and recreation organizations and athletes in the Greater Toronto Area.

In defence of Drinking alone at a bar

Posted on by Ben

 

If, for some reason, you’d like to have this blog post read to you instead of reading it, you can listen to Episode 76 of the Beer and Bullshit podcast, below.

#87 – Heritage variance signage – Beer and Bullsh*t

Ben and Chris welcome Nick Baird and Adil Ahmad to the studio (no, really, there’s a studio now!) to discuss the end of Beerlab! and the brith of Supply and Demand — the duo’s pizza and live entertainment-based rebrand. Plus they talk traditional decoction methods, David Wilcox, hand-selecting hops, constructive criticism for homebrewers, and, for some reason, basic economic principles. 
  1. #87 – Heritage variance signage
  2. #86 – Martin Short is a national treasure
  3. #85 – The Secret Goldfish
  4. #84 – Marzipan stout vs. jalapeño kolsch
  5. #83 – Hump and dump

Drinking alone at a bar is much maligned in fiction.

The clichéd trope usually features our hero, beaten down by the world, having lost his family/partner/coaching career/platoon, seeking refuge in the bottom of a bottle. He’s hunched over a sticky bar on a corner stool, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray next to him, and he’s staring blankly at a game playing quietly on the TV in the mid-day din of an old, dark, wood-paneled bar.

Inevitably, this is the setting into which someone from the hero’s past arrives, casting the blinding glare of the outside world on the bar as he or she arrives to wrench our main character from his Wild Turkey-soaked-funk, butt out his smoke, and send him back to his family/the murder case/the ballpark/the Saigon jungle to exact revenge.

Cue the comeback montage.

But here’s the thing about this tired trope: Not only is it a lazy shorthand for despair,. it’s factually inaccurate. Because to me that nicotine-tinged, stale-beer-scented, mise-en-scène doesn’t seem like a place to be rescued from. To me that sounds fucking lovely.

In fact, I can think of few better places to spend a few hours in solitude than a divey bar. And if you’ve ever done it, I’m sure you’ll agree: Drinking alone at a bar is actually pretty awesome. It really is something akin to self-care and it’s  shockingly effective at curing your loneliness and boredom. Haven’t chatted with another human in a while? Wandering around your house or apartment aimlessly? Head to your local and strike up a conversation with a bored bartender or some other solo drinker. Learn something new about composite flooring or sustainable endoscopy or whatever dumb thing it is they do for a living. Regale them right back with stories of the dumb shit you do for a living. You’re meeting a new person. There’s beer. It’s great!

On the flip side, drinking alone at a bar is also a great cure for overstimulation. Is your house a toy-cluttered shitstorm of noise, sticky surfaces, and offspring? Sneak off to the bar around the corner when everyone is asleep. Have a pound of wings. Watch a west coast game you normally wouldn’t give a shit about. Turn off your brain and Just. Sit. There.

Oh yeah, baby.

And in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of local bars and restaurants are hurting right now. In addition to the rising costs of pretty much everything, the lingering effect of the pandemic seems to be that a lot of people seem to have forgotten the simple joy of going somewhere just for the sake of going somewhere. It’s something I’m only rediscovering now as a germaphobe with a now three year-old pandemic baby. I don’t think of it as wasting hard-earned money on drinks I might have had more cheaply at home, I think of it as doing my part to stimulate the local economy. Yes, the word hero gets thrown around a lot lately, but in this case, I’ll accept it.

So here’s hoping Hollywood might get the message and stop misrepresenting the sublime enjoyment of a fresh pint or a well-made cocktail sipped in solitude in the dusty confines of a neighbourhood bar. Instead of some asshole wrenching our hero from his alone time and pulling him back to whatever hellish nightmare he’s seekingt to avoid, even just for a few hours, lets instead see that asshole pull up a pull up a barstool and order a shot.

The End of The Beer Store’s Monopoly

Posted on by Ben

 

“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”

~Revelation 18:2

The days of The Beer Store’s monopoly are over, and I fear we are the poorer for it.

For months now, we’ve known something big was coming from our Dear Premier, Douglas Clortho Ford. There had been rumblings that an announcement about the province’s retail beer system was forthcoming and my sources at Queen’s Park were increasingly troubled by Dofo’s anxious, aggressive behaviour. They tell me he’d been eating an inordinate amount of mint-flavoured toothpicks from his favourite Etobicoke diner and aides were calling out sick in droves, fearful of his restless energy. “He has been pacing for hours,” one told me a few weeks ago under the strict condition of confidentiality. “He’s worn through two pairs of double-wide loafers and he’s sweat through half a dozen ill-fitting wool blazers.”

Indeed, he was excited. And now we know why.

Because two weeks days ago, steeped in Dep gel and bounding through the automatic doors of a convenience store like the demon dog from Ghostbusters bursting out of Louis Tully’s bedroom, Ford announced that the province wouldn’t be renewing the Master Framework Agreement, which currently limits the number of grocery stores that are allowed to sell beer and prevents anyone but The Beer Store from selling beer in formats bigger than a 12 pack.

Yes, the days of The Beer Store’s monopoly are over, but I fear we are the poorer for it.

Obviously, killing The Beer Store’s stranglehold on the exclusive ability to sell Ontarians packaged beer is a good thing. The Beer Store, conceived of as a cooperative of Ontario’s breweries, became a farce once the biggest breweries on earth commenced their ruthless strategy of buying up or pushing out as many independent breweries as possible in the name of bland, yellow, carbonated capitalism. Now the erstwhile co-op is owned by three of the earth’s biggest beer-marketing machines and has lumbered on as the dusty, conveyor-belt-and-malt-fart-scented offspring of the shittiest parts of Canada’s beer industry; a biproduct of unchecked greed kept alive by stupidity and laziness.

Continue reading “The End of The Beer Store’s Monopoly” →

Loyalty

Posted on by Ben

Burritos, as we all know, serve an important function in a well-rounded individuals diet. A well-made large burrito can sustain a grown human for most of an entire day. The right burrito can make the perfect lunch before an important afternoon, or with some topping adjustments can become the precursor for an epic nap. In a pinch, when there’s no time to get home after work or sit down for a proper dinner, a burrito can lay the perfect foundation for a night out and, of course, a big, sloppy post-last-call burrito can be the ultimate way to cap off a night of drinking to soak up some of the beer in your belly.

If you live in an urban setting for any length of time, you will naturally develop habits related to how, where, and when you secure and consume good burritos. It is also only natural that you will develop strong opinions about the burrito-based businesses in and around the areas you live and work and, if you are anything like me, you will make important social and meal-planning decisions based on the geography of your preferred burrito spots. Continue reading “Loyalty” →

The Uncanceled

Posted on by Ben

 

The Kitchener-Waterloo Region is home to a plethora of great breweries — and almost none of them have founders who were charged with two counts of assault and one count of assault with a weapon.

Off the top of my head, the region boasts Barn Cat, Bitte Schön, Block Three, Jackass, Rural Roots, Stockyards, Together We’re Bitter Co-op, Wavemaker, and Willibald and — to my knowledge — none of these breweries were founded by a man who was captured on video striking his girlfriend with an object and who subsequently faced charges for the act.

It is unfortunate then that, when the City of Kitchener recently opened up their Requests for Proposals (RFP) process to find a “non-premier brewery partner” to serve beer at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium Complex and Kitchener Golf Courses, they awarded the contract to Four Fathers Brewing Company in Cambridge. Unfortunate, of course, because in 2018 Four Fathers founder and University of Guelph Professor John Kissick actually was charged with two counts of assault and one count of assault with a weapon. Those charges were ultimately dropped in 2020 when Kissick entered into a peace bond with the party who brought forward the charges, but to craft beer drinkers and any feeling humans who watched video of the (alleged) assault (myself among them) the incident likely left a bad taste in their mouth.

Indeed, for many in the craft beer community, especially women and folks who have been marginalized, this relatively high-profile “partnership” will likely lend credence to a prevailing sentiment that I’ve developed lately about the industry’s desire and ability to police itself, namely the realization that no one actually gives a fuck. Continue reading “The Uncanceled” →

The rise, fall, and sale of Side Launch Brewery

Posted on by Ben

*UPDATED 11:40am October 20: Details provided by Equals*

Side Launch Brewery has been sold to Equals Brewing Company.

Nothing has been announced yet, but I have heard from enough sources with enough insight into the company that I feel comfortable posting this. I will of course update this post when it inevitably creates a need for a press release. *UPDATE: Equals brewing has confirmed the purchase of Side Launch. Full statement from Justin McEllar, the President of Equals, has been added to the end of this post.*

Equals, for the uninitiated, is a contract and co-packing business right here in London Ontario. They likely already brew a handful of your favourite contract beers, including Triple Bogey, and they have become a go-to spot for local breweries that need occasional help with capacity. They also offer private label brewing and have a couple of their own brands, including Shake Lager, and the downright excellent Bangarang hard seltzer (Seriously, it’s really good).

Side Launch, as most will know, is a once-great brewery in Collingwood that has continued to make head-scratching decision after head-scratching decision as the board that runs the company tries to maximize profits and, in recent years, clearly position the place for a sale. Continue reading “The rise, fall, and sale of Side Launch Brewery” →

How I learned to stop worrying and love chicken wings

Posted on by Ben

In my late teens and early 20s I worked in various service industry jobs, including a stint as a line cook at a mid-tier franchise restaurant; the sort that typically has a cheap wing night on Tuesdays. 

For much of my early tenure at this mid-tier restaurant I was relegated to “fryers,” which is exactly what it sounds like: I would stand at a deep fryer for hours and oversee the submersion of French fries, mozza sticks, battered haddock, and all manner of beige-brown, fatty shit to be cooked in dirty oil with my only respite being regular cigarette breaks. Fryers was an absolutely shit station and it was roughly one rank above Dish Pig, the entry-level back of the house role in the degenerate world of restaurants upon whom everyone heaped abuse and unpleasant tasks.

On Tuesdays though, the person working fryers would likely happily trade places with any dishwasher and swap out fry baskets for scalding water, clogged sinks, and coked-up, oversexed servers shouting for more clean cutlery. Because on Tuesdays the person working fryers would be tasked with overseeing obscene amounts of chicken wings through their grotesque restaurant life-cycle: From frozen brick of wings, to semi-flaccid and thawing in a big sink of running water, to cold and raw and stored in their own congealed juices in large plastic bins, to baked on forearm-singeing trays, to deep-fried and tossed in sauce.

Continue reading “How I learned to stop worrying and love chicken wings” →

Why buy the cow?

Posted on by Ben

I like Kurt Vonnegut’s work a lot.

I’m not unique in this regard, of course. Vonnegut, with his darkly humorous satire is arguably one of the most important and well-read contemporary American writers.

Still, as I was seeking out tattoo ideas to mark the occasion of turning 40, having a second child, and surviving a couple years of what now seems an infinite pandemic, I returned to the work of one of my favourite authors and had “So it goes,” a quote from his seminal 1969 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, inscribed on my forearm.

I am, again, not unique in this regard. Turns out this is kind of a popular tattoo.

So it goes.

The same year, knowing of my fondness for Vonnegut, my younger brother Tim sent me a first edition copy of Vonnegut’s 1982 book Deadeye Dick from Regina where he lives with his partner Marika and a couple dogs. Deadeye Dick was actually the first Vonnegut book I ever read and then I worked backward to consume essentially all his works.

Continue reading “Why buy the cow?” →

We don’t talk about craft beer at the Rogers Centre

Posted on by Ben

The first rule of selling your beer at the Rogers Centre is
that you don’t talk about selling your beer at the Rogers Centre.

Historically, the fan experience at Blue Jays games has sucked.

If you look past your pre-pubescent / adolescent Joe Carter-soaked nostalgia for the Sky Dome, you know it’s true. The stadium is a Toronto monument to the last gasps of ugly, concrete, brutalist architecture and the marvel of — wow! — a moving roof has long since lost its lustre. It was always a little too dark and, when the dome was closed, a little too quiet.

It had all the charm of watching baseball in a shitty shopping mall.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. The stadium formerly known as the Sky Dome and the in-game experience there consistently rank among the worst in all of baseball. A 2022 “voice of fan report” analyzed 130,000 fan reviews to rank Major League Baseball stadiums based on Food and Drink, fan experience, family experience, and the facility and found that, overall, the Rogers Centre was the third worst and, in terms, of food and drink it was dead last. Continue reading “We don’t talk about craft beer at the Rogers Centre” →