May 10, 2021

154/3504) Home:  Mingle (April 2021) by Badlands Brewing of Ontario:  ****; 6.5% IPA; Mingle is an experimental series where Badlands blends varying hops, in this instance Mosaic and XJA2/436 from South Africa;  pours positively swampy; dank and earthy aromas with citrus zest; more bitter than many of Badlands' offerings;  citrus, resin with citrus zest;

May 9, 2021

153/3503) Home:  Florida Man by Cigar City Brewing of Florida, U.S.A.:  ****1/2; 8.5%, 80 ibu Double India Pale Ale, named for the "world's worst superhero"; brewed with barley, wheat and oats; pours hazy; nose of apricots and tropical fruit; tastes of apricot, peaches, tropical fruits; fresh and fruity with an ever so mild dry edge; scant hint of the abv.;

May 8, 2021

152/3502) Home:  Numb Mouth by Orange Snail Brewing of Ontario:  ****; an 8.5%, 105 ibu Double IPA brewed with lactose; the label cites four different hops including DDH Amarillo and Sabro; pours translucent; dank, bitter, earthy nose; tastes bitter with notes of citrus; I am not detecting the coconut suggested by the Sabro hops which is not necessarily bad; very old school; hides the abv. very well;

May 7, 2021

151/3501) Home:  Imperial Stout by Orange Snail Brewing of Ontario:  ****1/2; 9.0%, 56 ibu; dark with a pale tan head; boozy nose with roasted malt and chocolate;  boozy with chocolate and roasty notes; it's not the barrel aged version, which was listed a while back, but I am not settling for second best here, this is outstanding; a slow sipper for what will likely be one of the last cool evenings for several months;

May 6, 2021

150/3500) Home:  Apocalyptic Elf by Orange Snail Brewing of Ontario:  ****1/2; 7.3%, 17 ibu Christmas Winter Warmer brewed with local honey, vanilla and cinnamon; they may have been kidding about dry hopping it with candy canes but some of the beer rating sites repeated the line;  pours a dark copper colour; mildly sweet nose with "Christmas" spices; tastes of dry cinnamon with mild sweetness from the vanilla; I wish I had come across this earlier, I picked up one of their last bottles;

May 5, 2021

149/3499) Home:  Sinzibukud by Orange Snail Brewing of Ontario:  ***; 6.5%, 15 ibu; Sinzibukwud derives from the Algonquin word for maple syrup; billed as a Tree Ale; a golden ale with locally produced maple syrup from Mozzocato Maple Farm; golden, nearly clear appearance; earthy nose with a touch of fruit; earthy flavours with only a hint of maple syrup;

April 29, 2021

I do not mean to be regularly picking on Left Field Brewing but it goes to show how even an act as simple as drinking beer can be robbed of its pleasure by Toronto's south-of-Bloor (s.o.b.) crowd.

In re-releasing Disco Demolition Night IPA, Left Field declares that the event in question, perhaps one of baseball's more ill-conceived promotions, was "homophobic, racist and sexist".  This comes directly from wikipedia, which until 2019 had credited Barbara Amiel with one more husband than she actually had, according to her autobiography.  But what would she know?  It took several decades to think this one up.  No one was saying anything of the sort at the time.

While I was not in Chicago on the 12th of July, 1979, I was very much alive and the issue people had with disco had nothing to do with anyone's demographic.  For starters we did not know what most disco performers looked like.  Believe it or don't, no one had access to the internet in 1979 and music videos were a rare commodity, largely restricted to Don Kirshner's television show if you could stay up that late.  Many albums did not feature photographs of the performers and we did not have much of an idea as to what people in the music industry got up to in private, nor were we interested.

Disco was the purple loosestrife of music, an invasive species which squeezed out more meritous music from rock, pop, jazz, classical radio and beyond.  Its pinnacle was the wealth-ridden emptiness of Studio 54.  

The accompanying Spotify playlist does a better job than I can of highlighting how very shallow, lacking and inadequate disco music was.  Expressed as gently as I am able, it does not reward repeated listening.

It is such a shame that people believe they can fool others into thinking better of themselves by denigrating other people from several decades earlier for what they fantasize they were thinking at the time.