Beer historians and writers Alan McLeod and Jordan St. John have tapped the cask of Ontario brewing to bring the complete story to light, from foam to dregs. Ontario boasts a potent mix of brewing traditions. Wherever Europeans explored, battled, and settled, beer was not far behind, which brought the simple magic of brewing to Ontario in the 1670s. Early Hudson's Bay Company traders brewed in Canada's Arctic, and Loyalist refugees brought the craft north in the 1780s. Early 1900s temperance activists drove the industry largely underground but couldn't dry up the quest to quench Ontarians' thirst. The heavy regulation that replaced prohibition centralized surviving breweries. Today, independent breweries are booming and writing their own chapters in the Ontario beer story.
Alan McLeod writes A Good Beer Blog, covering the detailed history of Canadian brewing and international beer history. He's an avid researcher and writer and has gotten conversations going about the history of North American brewing, working up quite a following , 22, 000 Google Reader followers and 3, 300 Twitter followers. Alan is quoted on the online "about us" section of Taps, Canada's beer magazine. Ontario Craft Brewers, a network of thirty-two province brewers, sponsors Alan's blog. Jordan St. John blogs at St. John's Wort and writes a weekly beer column for the national Sun Media newspaper chain. He studied brewing at Niagara College and published his first book, "How to Make Your Own Brewskis, " with Barron's in 2012.