For the last year, I’ve been writing biweekly updates for the province of Ontario’s beer scene. It’s with some chagrin that I’m forced to announce that this will be the final edition of The Growler’s News and Notes column. In fact, it’s the final missive from The Growler Ontario in total. 

The Growler Ontario has had a pretty good run. We’ve been through four editors over the course of seven years of publication from 2018. As a co-author of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide, I can say that it became the functional successor of that book as a guide to the province’s breweries. It’s a significant irony of the success of craft beer that as the number of breweries expanded within the province, the audience for subject matter related to craft beer dwindled, at least in print. 

In retrospect, it cannot possibly have helped to have launched a magazine just before a pandemic. When you consider that the magazine was, practically speaking, a travel guide for a time period when people were cautioned to remain indoors, it makes some sense that we dwindled from four issues a year to two. With the move from print editions to online at the beginning of September, we moved from two issues a year to zero. Once you’ve reached zero issues a year, you’re not so much a magazine as an empty rack. At that point it’s quite difficult to justify outgoing expenses like continued existence, especially in this economy.

As Editor, I’m philosophical about the magazine’s conclusion. I came on board as listings editor several years ago because I maintain a database of extant brewing entities in the province and the previous editors would sometimes ask me questions. I continue to maintain that database and will continue to indefinitely. I will probably also do a little more writing now that I don’t have to comb through several hundred newsletters every couple of weeks. 

What have we learned from this experience? Well, Ontario is a really large place with a lot of slightly disparate beer scenes and that it could probably stand to be more coherent. We’ve got a lot of great beer out there for you to discover. We’ve got a lot of really passionate people plying their trade. We’ve also learned that most of those people are too broke to buy advertising. It’d probably help if you bought some of their beer in the run up to Christmas. Their kids need presents.

A magazine is nothing without writers, and we’ve had a number of terrific contributors over the years. Thanks to Rob Mangelsdorf, Ben Johnson, Robin LeBlanc, Jordan Duff, Rebecca Whyman, Kristina Mameli, Ted Child, Tristan Bragalia-Murdock, Erica Campbell, Michael Kissinger, Max Morin, Mark Solomon, David Lee, Sean Mallard, Gary Gillman, Santiago Ampudia Vasquez, Mel Iads, Ceridwyn Thibert, Mark Hajek, and Stephen Beaumont (who snuck in just under the wire). Special thanks to Sabryna Ekstein who handled our food pairing column through most of my tenure and who always got her copy in early and didn’t really require editing. 

Thanks to Gail Nugent, our Publisher, and Tara Rafiq, who has been in charge of layout. Both of them have been on board for the magazine’s entire run. I’d also like to thank previous editors, David Ort, Crystal Luxmore, and Tara Luxmore, all of whom did a bang up job. Special thanks goes to Michelle Hempstock, who has managed our social media and has had to broadcast my nonsense for the last several years. 

Assuming you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably very serious about beer. While I have the platform (and before I hit the breadline) I’m going to suggest you check out the Beer Certificate and WSET Beer programming at George Brown College in Toronto. I teach all of those courses in person and online and, yes, I’m actually like this in person as well. You can also follow along at St. John’s Wort, where I somewhat improbably continue to blog. We also have a beer map to the province. 

Thanks for reading. I hope to see you soon. 

—JSJ