Hi!
If you found this page then you are one of the first. Possibly THE first. Thanks for checking it out! So why did I start this blog? You might have seen my "about" section which will give you a quick answer to that question but today I'm posting the long version. I've been a beer fan for a long time. When I think back to the times when I first started introducing alcohol in my life beer was always my drink of choice. It was usually Richard's Red or Heineken. The first craft beer I recall ever trying was Waterloo Dark. I loved it, drank it all the time. It was only when I went to beer fest for the first time (2008, if I recall correctly) that I really discovered something different; Nickle Brook's Green Apple Lager. It was never easy to find at that time and when I did, I bought everything on the shelf. In 2013 I discovered Untappd. To be honest, I don't remember how. Maybe a friend recommended it? Either way it became a cool tool to use so I knew what beer I had tried and I could save what beers I wanted to try. I was also gifted a Brooklyn Brew Shop 1 gallon home brewing kit. I enjoyed learning how beer was made and it made me understand how we got these different flavors and what the different types of beers were. In this same time period Alexander Keith's released their Hop Series. I recall there being 4 beers in the series and that is where my love of hoppy beers really got started. It wasn't too long after that I tried Muskoka Brewery's Detour. After that, I was "off to the races" always looking for new beers to try at the beer store or the LCBO. In 2016 I was out for a random drive to Elora, Ontario with family. We chose to stop for lunch at the Elora Brewing company and I ordered a flight and got my first Untappd check in at a brewery. I went home with my first growler as well. It wasn't much longer than 2 weeks that I ventured down to Toronto's Great Lakes Brewery. During the summer of 2017 I moved to Hamilton, On. Hamilton has a pretty good craft beer scene and, being familiar with Collective Arts, I visited them often but it was really when I discovered Fairweather Brewery that it clicked in: some breweries have beers that you can only buy either on tap at a restaurant or at their bottle shop to take home. The Beer Store and LCBO doesn't sell everything! That changed the game for me. Suddenly I was following breweries on social media as much as possible to learn about limited releases and I started visiting a lot of spots in the Greater Toronto Area. After a summer Saturday (in 2018) in the Niagara region and Buffalo, checking out some more breweries, I decided to go on google and see if I could find a spreadsheet that I could download so I could mark down where I've been (or where I plan to go), list the name, physical address and, web address. It's a work in progress that I expect will always be part of this project. Having shared this spreadsheet with friends, I had a friend suggest that I should start a blog. So, here I am. Sharing this spreadsheet with anyone who reads this and journaling my adventures along the way.
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