Beer review - Millennium Buzz Beer

Canadian, Lager
5.0 % Alcohol content

First up: the cannabis logo. It's the first thing you, it's the first thing you'll think of, and since it's still illegal to actually sell marijuana in this country it's your first warning that - like most products stamped with the logo - the contents are weakly organic crap designed for a target market of "buys anything to do with being stoned."


Under no circumstances should you find this near anything you drink.
The promised organic taste is delivered entirely in the form of dirt. Earth. Mud. Buzz beer pulls off the extraordinary feat of tasting like a mouthful of soil while remaining watery and bodyless, a true Zen state of terrible opposites. The earth is because it's based on hemp, and beer isn't usually made of hemp for a variety of very good reasons (every single one of which you'll understand if you drink some Buzz). The entire point of this liquid is to harness the cannabis crowd, it was made out of whatever was needed to qualify for that and taste wasn't a even a secondary consideration - it wasn't even on the table.

The water is because the dread words "cold-filtered" apply to this weakness. A brewery proclaiming a beer to be cold-filtered is like a carpenter boasting that he used chipboard - the whole point of cold-filtering is to reduce time and cost for the manufacturer with the direct and unavoidable effect of killing the fuck out of the beer. In fact, Buzz beer proves that cold-filtering doesn't just murder beer, it can even kill the taste of weeds or chunks of the ground itself dug up and dumped in your glass.

I suppose the combination of earth and water makes this the ultimate hippy beer, a combination of the elements required for plant life. It also represents hippies because it's extremely weak, smells like dirt, and totally sucks at its job.

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Beer review - Bell's Expedition Stout

The best stout I've had.
10.5 % ABV, Michigan USA, CAD$11.89 / 355 ml


The compass on the bottle usefully indicates which way is up after a few.

Bell’s Expedition Stout gives the lie to the claim that all American beer is tap-water that’s been lightly pissed in. Its rich flavour and strong ways show that Bud light and Labatts only exist due to the flaws in American democracy - they know how to make the good things, but most people are content with cheap swill (the McBeer effect).

This wonderful stout pours like the T1000, liquid metal glistening and thick. You almost expect to find dinosaur skeletons preserved in the rich, tarry texture of a full glass. When you drink it it doesn’t just demand respect – it smashes a chair of flavour over your tongue and stamps it’s boot on your throat (from the inside) with a powerful, long-lasting aftertaste. One that says “You’re a real beer drinking man now, my son”.

It isn’t for everyone. If you enjoy stout then you must make sure this is the next Expedition you embark on; but if you’ve ever found any stout too strong then give it a miss. The same applies to anyone sick, infirm, pregnant, unable to deal with rich deep flavours or simply not concentrating 100% - back off until you’re ready to handle this.

NXNE Music Festival

I talk about rocking out over at CampusX. Direct links to reviews for Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Conclusion: Fun Factor Five.

Review - Thai Bangkok restaurant

412 Spadina Avenue

Should you find yourself here, your best bet is to try eating those plants in the window.

The Thai Bangkok is a lot more decorated than the usual chinatown quick-lunch joints, as it actually has decorations. Wall paneling, paintings and enough (carved) elephants to keep Tony Jaa happy for a month. Then you notice the dirty spots and peeling paint around the edges but for a moment you had the impression you were somewhere nice for your six dollar lunch: enjoy that impression because it's all your money is buying you.

Despite the themed trimmings this eatery does exceptionally poorly on the nationality test (fraction of customers from the same culture as the food), with a total of absolutely zero Thai present (counting the fact that even the visible staff weren't Thai, the place earns negative points). It was pretty easy to check the home country of the eaters too - for most of the meal I was the only one there and I'm Irish. At lunchtime in a spadina/college restaurant that's just tragic.

Hungry and hurried I ordered lunch special #1 (hard to get any faster than that) and it's a damn good thing I did because lunch special #1, at lunchtime, took twenty minutes to arrive. If I'd ordered anything else I might still be there. The upside was that the extra time allowed me to fully appreciate the highly excitable menu:


That's three exclamation marks! This is the most excited menu of all time!


Whoever wrote this urgently needs to be sedated. Anyone who finds the concept of rice coming with Thai food exciting might explode if they see something truly astonishing, like a window or a barking dog.

I honestly cannot review the spring roll because I inhaled it, having become so hungry my body was trying to photosynthesize or absorb the tablecloth through osmosis. This lessened my crippling need for food enough to appreciate the hot and sour soup, much to my regret. When the most basic starter possible for any chinatown restaurant takes twenty minutes to prepare you expect something special. Hand polished tofu with beansprouts plucked by specially trained experts, carefully ladled into a platinum bowl and mixed precisely by multimillion dollar perfectionist robots. You do not expect a bag of starch dumped in hot water by the chef during a break in Judge Judy. The spicy beef was an an exemplar in lazy food, a paragon of a spicy meal made wrongly: tough lumps of meat with chunks of flavourless plastic masquerading as peppers glued together by a thick and utterly effortless sauce. I don't mean effortless as in "the masterful chef effortlessly created a wonderful taste", I mean "the person who happens to work in the kitchen expended absolutely no effort in making this". Turning the plate over I expected to find "Screw you, stupid foreigner, you don't know real food anyway" written on the bottom. Of course I didn't - they had no need to waste ink when they'd clearly expressed that message in the food.

Every time I see this place it's deserted. Keep it that way.

Review - Moonbean coffee

30 St Andrew, Kensington Market


Don Guiseppe relaxed. With the ear of their leader nailed up as a warning sign, the Metal Men would bother his legitimate business no more.

In the chilled district of Kensington Market, you'll find the second hippy-est cafe in Toronto - Moonbean Coffee. (The absolute hippy-est is around the corner, the Kensington Cafe, which wins the title with it's awesome swingseats).


Moonbean has so many coffees, and so little space, it's not actually possible to fit them all in one shot. However the top row are flavoured coffee beans and therefore do not count.

Coffee is very important to me, without it I would stumble around known only as "That guy who falls asleep when asked who he is". Moonbean provide an excellent and ever changing selection of beans for home grinding, and when I find myself choosing between blends like "Devils Brew" and "Colossus" I know I have found a business that understands my morning coffee needs exactly. The cafe has all the advantages of the non-chain coffee shop, a sense of individuality and character. The occasionally cramped seating and wobbly tables is an acceptable price for the fun feel and unique clientele. Plus I love coffeeshops where 'Grande' is just the title of a mexican-themed wrestler.



I'm making modern art pieces. I call this work "Sleep is for pussies"

You have to visit once if only to try the 'Herculatte'. Bear in mind that the Godfather Marlon Brando could beat someone to death with their own severed arm for preparing his latte incorrectly, and he would still look girly for having ordered a latte. But Moonbean do a good job of manlifying this milky drink by serving it in a mug the size of a childs face and pumping three shots of espresso in there. If one of these doesn't wake you up, please report directly to your nearest Emergency Room and inform them that you are dead.

Review - Rong Hua restaurant

478 Dundas St


I can't read a word or even see inside - let's eat here!

It scores highly on the "foreign restaurant" stakes since it
a) does not appear to have even a letter of English to its name* and
b) it's backed off the street, looking pretty shady so that
c) basically it's the kind of place a lone hero enters and has to fight the entire clientele, after throwing a knife-wielding chef through the plate glass fronting.

* - It actually has an English sign, but overhanging the pavement so far out you can only see it from the other side of the street. The idea is perhaps that once the English-speakers venture too close, they are already lost.


Rong-Hua-man cursed. With that silver station wagon in the way, he would never get the Rong-mobile back into the RongCave

Any ethnic restaurant can be judged on the nationality test: how many of the diners are actually from that culture. Fukian snacks scores over one hundred percent there - not only was every single guest chinese, they were such Fukian regional chinese that even Xin (a chinese national fluent in both mandarin and cantonese) could not penetrate a word of their dialogue beyond "Yep, that's heavily accented Fukian dialect all right".

Another element of the "small chinese restaurant feel" is how food is the priority. The ONLY priority. The restaurant consists of a kitchen for food-making, store rooms for food-keeping, and then some space for those troublesome people who keep arriving and taking it. As you squeeze past the counter and walk through a store room to get to the bathrooms, you realise they're only there because they are absolutely legally required - though they are usably clean unlike the excellent-food-but-nothing-else Kom Jug Yuen around the corner.

The sweet and sour lychee pork was good since it was actually sweet and sour, not the sugarised-syrup meat chunks that often get passed under that name. Xin ordered some strange salty-water-and-little-clam stuff, but assures me that it was quite well done salty-water-and-little-clam stuff. I couldn't tell, because it was pretty much salty water. And little clams. Service was nice and fast, with the usual chinatown "What do you want right here now go" brusqueness rather than the "How may we help you" speed some may expect. I enjoy this confidence because it's well earned: these people know their food is good and if you don't want it, you're welcome to not come back.

This restaurant does exactly what it claims to but nothing else. If you want good cheap Fukian food it's the place to go - if you want anything else at all, it isn't.