When I wandered out east to the University of Western Ontario in 1990 to study journalism, it seemed a Golden Age of Beer.
Not only did I seem to drift through life atop an ocean of cheap university pub draft – my main food group in those days – but beer had suddenly gone from dull and grubby to cool and sexy. I, as a young man, was there to see the glorious evolution out of stubbies and away from garbagy beers that dominated the early 1980s to what I thought must be a peak of beer coolness.
Instead of beer seeming to be attached to greasy factory workers, it had attached itself to things that a young man might find interesting, such as this one I remember being completely entranced by in the year I headed east.
What”s not to like about that? Here’s a cooler, Quebeckier one.
Not only were beer bottles and images getting cooler, but they tasted better too. At Western we developed tastes for fancy, expensive domestic beers, one of which – Sleeman – I blame for my post-university poverty.
During the first class of our TV news production class we were specifically warned that ONLY ONE GROUP of us in the class would be allowed to head up to Guelph to do a TV feature on the Sleeman brewery. Apparently every year every guy in that class would come up with the unique idea of doing a feature on this cool beer factory, and they were getting very sick of us. And so were our instructors. I wasn’t part of the lucky group that year. At least not to my recollection.
Of course since then beer has evolved much, much further, and become much, much more cool. And now that I have three young children I am much, much poorer and can’t afford to buy much of it any longer. But working at this paper allows me to still live with beer and brewing, if only in an analytical way. And thus it was last week when I visited the Brewing and Malting Barley Research Institute here in Winnipeg, right across the street from my office.
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And that allowed me to see just how much further beer has evolved, not just in styles and number of specialty breweries, but also in demands on researchers, brewers and farmers in coming up with specialized malting barleys.
At one time almost everyone would accept Harrington barley, and then Metcalfe. But now brewers have split off in all sorts of directions, some using lots of adjuncts and some using 100 percent single-variety barleys. No longer is barley barley. Varieties and specific qualities have come to dominate.
For the industry to work right, researchers have to develop the right types of varieties, farmers have to be able to grow them right, and brewers have to use them right. That means a bunch of communication is necessary, and that makes the role of organizations like the BMBRI essential, if just to make sure everyone knows what everybody else is demanding. The signals being sent from one part of the industry have to get through well, or Canada’s role as one of the big barley providers on the planet won’t last.
It might not survive like it has: right now total barley production is almost 40 percent lower than it was a decade ago, and most of it has died in the U.S. Other crops are often more attractive, and malting barley’s got to bring a good price to make it worth a farmer’s while to take the gamble at growing it.
But it’s one of the crops that dominates the prairies, so I hope the signals flow well enough to keep it a big and thriving business up here.
Industry signals are generally dull, but they’re essential, and farmers are going to need to be good at reading them in the future so they can get the biggest gain out of barley if they stick with growing it.
For me as a young man, it was pretty easy to read the signals from beer ads: “Drink this. It will make life seem cool. Don’t think of the money you’re spending.”
And that was frighteningly effective signaling, because it worked for too long.
But at least I have the memories. Not of anything exciting that happened while drinking any of the overpriced stuff. But I have clear memories of the ads.
