The Bar Towel

From today's Toronto Star:

MPPs and Queen’s Park staffers recently tasted 48 beers from 15 craft breweries and chose seven to highlight at the Legislative Assembly dining room and other Queen’s Park venues in 2010 and 2011.

Golden lagers & pilsners:
Beau’s Lug Tread Lagered Ale (Beau’s All Natural Brewing Co.)

Refreshing ales:
Cameron’s Cream Ale (Cameron’s Brewing Co.)

Amber lagers, ales & honey beers:
Flying Monkeys Hoptical Illusion Almost Pale Ale (Flying Monkeys Craft Brewery)

Malty dark lager or ale:
Muskoka Dark Ale (Muskoka Cottage Brewery)

Bold-flavoured ale, stout or porter:
Ploughman’s Ale (Grand River Brewery)

Wheat beer & specialty:
Mill Street Lemon Tea Beer (Mill Street Brewery)

Speaker’s selection:
Railway City Dead Elephant Ale (Railway City Brewing)

All jokes about their categorization aside, this sounds like a damn good selection. Many bars in town could take a page out of their book. I just have two questions:

1) How do I become a Queen’s Park staffer so I can waste our tax dollars sitting around tasting dozens of beers?

2) How can I get into this Legislative Assembly dining room to hang out for a drink?

As a StoneHammer Rep, I attended this event at Queen's Park hosted by Speaker Steve Peters. It was a fantastic event, hosted by the speaker in an effort to support and encourage the consumption of Ontario beers and foods. The speaker is a great and proud supporter of Ontario Craft Beers and we are happy that he does the work that he does.

While there is still much work to be done, having him so passionately on our side certainly helps our cause.

Some staffers were there simply to drink, and didn't care much about the industry, but based on my experience, the vast majority of MPPs and staffers were very interested in learning more about craft beer.

But more specifically, to answer your questions:
1. I hear Queen's has a decent PoliSci program
2. I have no idea!

shintriad wrote: 1) How do I become a Queen’s Park staffer so I can waste our tax dollars sitting around tasting dozens of beers?

Join a political party and suck up the MPP's. Make sure you have no opinions of your own on any issue. Once a party develops a policy, you agree with it (even if you agreed with the contradictory policy of a year before). Oh, always respect The Leader too. Eventually you'll get a job if you want one. Staffer jobs suck though, you probably don't want one.

The next time they have this event, they should march them out the door to the nearest beer store and ask them how many craft beers they can pick out of the selection.

Tapsucker wrote:The next time they have this event, they should march them out the door to the nearest beer store and ask them how many craft beers they can pick out of the selection.

I was at the event, and the Speaker made some barely veiled jabs at TBS during his speech and in one-on-one chats. He obviously had to be, well, "politically correct" about it, but it was pretty clear that he would like to see TBS do more to promote and support craft beer.

Not that it's gonna happen while the big guys own the place, but still nice to hear him say it.

shintriad wrote:2) How can I get into this Legislative Assembly dining room to hang out for a drink?

The dining room is called 'In Camera' and I think it's theoretically open to the public (though only for weekday lunch), but you might want to contact them.

Join a political party and suck up the MPP's. Make sure you have no opinions of your own on any issue. Once a party develops a policy, you agree with it (even if you agreed with the contradictory policy of a year before). Oh, always respect The Leader too. Eventually you'll get a job if you want one. Staffer jobs suck though, you probably don't want one.[/quote]

That's provincial and federal politis in a nutshell.