The Bar Towel

Well, Alberta is not Ontario.

Should I care about Alberta beers & Albertan trade equity with Ontario, or is this a move to infiltrate what is rapidly becoming a reasonably good brewing center of Canada - and one which evidently has at least some demand Canada-wide?

Appreciate opinions, thanks.

Does anyone know if Ontario breweries also pay the lab testing fees? If so it's not really going to be a great argument that they are unfair barriers.

It would be nice to get more imports from across Canada frankly, but personally I'd also like to see mandatory date coding in that case.

Lotsa fluff in that article. I'm pretty sure Ontario brewers pay the lab fees too. The meat of the complaint must be this:

In his letter to Ontario Trade Minister Todd Smith, Bilous complains that Ontario gives local brewers access to stores over Alberta brewers, gives Ontario beverages preferential shelf or refrigerated locations, requires Alberta brewers to provide commercially confidential information to their larger competitors to be listed and gives Ontario small brewers a significant discount on listing costs.

Which seems pretty legit.

Craig wrote:Lotsa fluff in that article. I'm pretty sure Ontario brewers pay the lab fees too. The meat of the complaint must be this:

In his letter to Ontario Trade Minister Todd Smith, Bilous complains that Ontario gives local brewers access to stores over Alberta brewers, gives Ontario beverages preferential shelf or refrigerated locations, requires Alberta brewers to provide commercially confidential information to their larger competitors to be listed and gives Ontario small brewers a significant discount on listing costs.

Which seems pretty legit.

When you factor freshness and economities of regionality it really does. There are probably enough good brewers here that I want the best ones well-represented (have we even tried them all?) and beyond that I need at least some reason to care that much about any other province's beer.

Plus green panic. The province can't virtuously impose some silly carbon tax on our (often unavoidable) use of energy, and then go and promote unnecessary shipping just to play trade politics. It's contradictory.