inertiaboy wrote:Tapsucker wrote:I asked a knowledgeable friend who told me to get in my car and drive several km to the nearest decent store. Not exactly as easy or sensible as our local LCBOs.
Tapsucker wrote:...a local going to the store for their groceries and maybe a sixpack is confronted with the same limited or worse choice than we have.
There are a couple of good points here about the dep / SAQ system not necessarily being better in all places. But I still think that the retail system for Quebec beers lends itself to being very supportive of the provincial brewing scene. While there are vast areas without a good depanneur, there are some amazing ones with great selection. That is definitely a first step that is missing in Ontario - allowing someone to open such a shop or add it to their existing store.
A co-worker dropped by a Loblaws in St Jovite a few weeks ago and picked up a mixed 12-pack from Dieu du Ciel. Just being able to say that puts that segment of Quebec's retail system way past ours.
The real distinction is that many of the Quebec and US brewers wouldn't exist but for the possibility of selling in a few local stores - a possibility that does not exist in Ontario, or at the very least is a much bigger headache than selling in privately operated stores. Ontario's, and many of Canada's provinces, retail and regulatory system keeps breweries from ever getting started because you have to start-up on a much larger scale than you can in Quebec or the US.
Aside from the retail aspect, NS has a rule that you need a minimum annual capacity of 20,000 litres, and I suspect other provinces have similar rules. With that rule in place you'd have to have a 15 gallon system and brew every single day to make it. Even a 1 BBL (117 litres) system would need to be brewing almost every second day. So you have to start big and/or you've got to do it full-time, just to get a license. To achieve the scale you need to get into government retail, you've got to be even bigger. I'm betting that scale scares a lot of people away from ever starting - which is one reason why QC has more brewers per population than just about anyone else in the country.
Ontario brewers also feel the need to have a "safe" style of beer that tends to be in the LCBO. Quebec brewers can push the envelop a bit more (admittedly they are also helped by the fact that depanneurs can't sell imports that aren't represented by a local brewery). Even here in Halifax, Propeller and Garrison started experimenting a lot more when our private shops opened - they had a better, smaller scale avenue to sell their seasonals.
So yes, you'll get "pockets" where beer selection is better than others with a private system. But the alternative is that breweries (good and bad) never get started.