How Covid has Improved Beer Drinking in Ontario

We’ve all spent the last few weird and awful months wondering how we got here and where we’re going, and, just like you might if you were confined to the storage compartment of a Hyundai for a length of time, you probably feel like you could use a fucking drink.

But there is an upside to this — if you’re the kind of person who can find the upside to a viral pandemic increasing our substance use – and it’s that the vigour with which we’ve all embraced the drink has actually had an affect on the availability, politics, and culture related to beer. Yes, this pandemic is a lot of things, most of them terrible, but it also might just be the best time to drink beer in Ontario

Yes, in light of the pandemic and ensuing lockdown, Premier Doug Ford has — perhaps predictably given his affinity for policy that opens up our access to the drink — changed rules so that restaurants and bars can sell alcohol with takeout food orders; offering the struggling hospitality industry a much-needed lifeline during dire times.

Licensed establishments seized on the opportunity and, as a result, the drinking public was afforded a handful of new options. London bar Pub Milos, for example, which offers one of the best draught lineups in Ontario, took to canning that draught in 950ml containers and likewise opened their extensive beer cellar for retail sales. Toronto’s Birriera Volo, a craft beer haven in the heart of Little Italy, pivoted to become Bottega Volo, tapping the owners’ other business as importers to fill the former bar and tap room with unique bottled imports for take-away. The result is that, in London you suddenly have the ability to order a Schnitzel dinner and take home something hard to find like a Reverence Barrel Works offering from Cambridge. Or, in Toronto, you can take out a bottle of Cantillion Rose de Gambrinus with your charcuterie.

Of course the change doesn’t just benefit upscale craft beer bars. Even shitty restaurants and bars can currently sell you beer to go so that if, for example, you want a couple bottles of Molson Canadian with your buffalo chicken quesadilla, you can call your local Crabby Joe’s and knock yourself out.

Brew pubs and breweries have even used these new rules to sneakily usher in “cross-selling,” an issue about which Ontario’s craft brewers have been lobbying the government for years. Toronto brew pub Indie Alehouse, for example, now offers bottles and cans of other breweries’ beers for takeout along with their own and Ottawa brewery Dominion City has introduced “Friends of the Dominion,” allowing Ottawans the opportunity to take home some great beer from across Ontario if you order from their food menu (which is literally just a bag of chips). It’s not exactly the Ontario Craft Beer Stores we’d all like to see, but seeing craft brewers offer up beer from their colleague breweries definitely feels like a crack in the 80 year old dam of prohibition era nonsense liquor legislation.