After a long day at work and a few fussy hours with my kid, I finally managed to sit down and crack open my bag of beers from that list of the top thirty local brewers in last week’s issue of NOW. With The Daily Show on and my feet up, I got down to work on the challenge I’d set for myself.

Not a bad start! This wheat beer is brewed in Etobicoke, but it’s true to the Bavarian style. It’s a hearty and colourful brew, not too heavy, and fine straight out of the can. Perfect, in fact, for the end of a long and exhausting day.

Shortly after nodding off in the middle of The Colbert Report, I decided one beer was enough. It was time to go to bed, get some rest, and wake up ready to tackle the question of how to keep a blog about drinking by a new parent who doesn’t get out much from becoming a boring downer.

“The best presidents,” he writes, “were open-minded, and generally open to a drink. The nondrinkers, at least over the last century or so, were terrible presidents.”

At the heart of the story is the “beer buddy threshold.” Egan believes it’s “nonsense,” but he also argues that sobriety, “laudable in many respects, does imply rigidity of thought.” The nondrinkers he leans on are Jimmy Carter (“who earned his one-term status”) and George W. Bush (“who seems doomed to have his name forever followed by the words, ‘and we know how that turned out’”).

From there, it gets a bit muddled. Egan notes that “Franklin D. Roosevelt was a martini drinker… and an extraordinary president.” He claims that Mount Rushmore is “instructive,” but he undercuts the argument by noting that Teddy Roosevelt “was a very light drinker” and Abraham Lincoln “was rarely seen with a drink himself.” He repeatedly asks if there’s a connection between drinking and presidential performance in these many cases, but he’s happy to leave the question hanging.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney, the point at which the argument completely falls apart. Romney’s Mormon faith, which prohibits drinking alcohol, is the launching pad for Egan’s piece. “He doesn’t have to share a six-pack with us to prove that he’s human,” Egan concludes. “But given his temperance, he could show a little more of the tolerance of presidents who liked their grape, grain and barley fermented.”

Here’s the thing: Romney may be the picture of sobriety, but he’s not exactly known for his “rigidity of thought.” If his biggest failing on the campaign trail has been his perceived inability to relate to the common man, then surely has second biggest has been the wild inconsistencies in his campaign promises and voting record. That’s up for debate, I’m sure, but it doesn’t exactly make him a poster boy for Egan’s argument.

Thanks to Disinformation for the link. And thanks to Disinformation’s comment community for keeping the tangents about marijuana prohibition and the ruling elite to a minimum.

I had a plan, and I was ready to stick to it. I’d even picked up a small selection of beers from the list of local brewers in this week’s edition of NOW, in the hope of enjoying one or two as a reward at the end of the day.

If you’ve ever had a newborn, then I guess I don’t have to tell you that any plan which isn’t flexible is futile. The kid wouldn’t feed or sleep, and after an hour of crying we were both pretty inconsolable. My wife, whose class had been cancelled, managed to calm her down, but she couldn’t get her to sleep for another couple of hours.

Kate had picked up some wine, and she suggested I relax a little. But I don’t like to drink when I’m tired, and I don’t like to drink when I’m in a bad mood. Instead, I put the beers in the fridge, left the wine on the counter, and took a nap that segued into a fitful night of sleep.

Today began with a happier baby and a pile of unfinished work. If we get to the end of the day, and we can say it’s been a good one, then maybe that’ll call for a celebration. A Wednesday night celebration at home, sure, but we’ll take what we can get.

Lifehacker credited Liquor Cabinet’s rich database of recipes and “whimsical UI” for helping it clinch the top spot. Second place was award to a pair of cross-platform apps, Mixology and Mixologist, which earned 27% of the vote. If you’re an Android user, then those apps are your top option.

I’ve been using Liquor Cabinet ever since. It tells you what you can mix with the liquors you’ve got on hand, it recommends drinks and mixers to help you expand your repertoire, and it tells you how to mix what you’ve got for the best results. Many of the drinks in this app are bound to make future appearances on this blog, so do feel free to install it today and stay tuned for more.

I wasn’t a big fan of this one, but I think it was just a case of bad timing. Cider was a fine option at the end of a long and productive day, but it’s not the way I would have gone if it wasn’t one of the only options in my fridge. It was this or a can of the Lemon Tea Beer from the Mill St. Brewery, and my wife is a much bigger fan of the latter than I am.

Frankly, I was in the mood for something more substantial. I’d worked hard all day, you know? I’d just finished exercising and doing a load of laundry. I’d capped off the night with a rather intense half-hour in the world of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned. By the time I sat down to read about what to expect from my newborn daughter during the “four to six months” stage, a can of cider just didn’t seem like the drink with which to do it.

To be fair, I’m not a big cider drinker. Not only am I judging this one harshly because I wasn’t in the mood for it, but I’m also probably unqualified to judge it in the best of times. I’d say it was fine, as far as ciders go, but that’s admittedly a pretty ill-informed opinion.

If you’re a cider drinker, then I’d love to hear your thoughts and recommendations. I’ll probably give this one another try in the summer; if you know of any others I should try for the sake of comparison, I’m all ears.

Also, what’s the best way to take out that convoy with the rocket launcher? I’ve been trying to do it from up on the hill just outside of the airport gate, but I’ve found that only gives me a really brief window of opportunity.

The catch, before you get too excited, is that the vast majority of Mr. Dell’s days are behind him. The Strawberry Gardens in Fleetwood chose to honour the ninety-four-year-old Dell because he’s been a regular for seventy-six years.

“Nowadays for my first drink, I’ll get half a mild and a whisky,” says the World War II naval veteran, “and then after that I’ll have just whisky, they’re only wee things so I’ll have about eight.”

Well done, Mr. Dell! Thanks for adding an item to my lifelong “to do” list.

Well, that’s not strictly true. In fact, my wife and I managed to break at least three of the province’s former “Sunday Laws” in a single trip to Ikea yesterday (purchasing goods, traveling in a car, using profane language in public).

If this sort of thing doesn’t float your boat, then don’t fret; Lifehacker’s got you covered with a whole list of things you can do with leftover wine.

“Beers brewed within 100 miles of Toronto aren’t necessarily totally green,” writer Graham Duncan concedes, “since most commercial hops and barley are grown outside Ontario. But for many Toronto drinkers there’s undeniable allure in supporting local brewers whose beers and business culture reflect who we are and where we live.”

The idea has its roots in The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, a 2007 book by Canadian writers Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. For a year, the authors restricted themselves to foods grown within a hundred miles of where they lived. The idea has crossed into the realm of drinking before; Torontoist wrote about a 100-Mile Liquid Diet back in 2009, for example, and a blogger in Vancouver launched a now-defunct site at 100milebeerdiet.com that same year.

What do you say we put NOW’s recommendations to the test? I’m always looking for big, broad challenges to spice up this blog, and making my way through this list of beers would be a good one. Stay tuned to this blog tomorrow, in fact, for a list of some of the others I’ve got in mind.

In the meantime, what do you think? Have you tried any of the beers on this list? Did they miss any of your favourites? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

That’s the lesson at the heart of this public service announcement, which was produced by the Ontario Ministry of Health in 1984. It may not have aged well, and it may have “limited public funding” written all over it, but its message is important all the same.

As adults, it’s easy to shrug at an ad like this. We all know the dangers of alcoholism, and we don’t need a hammy portrayal of an angry dad, wallowing in his fake living room, drunk beyond the realm of basic motor skills, to hammer those dangers home.

But look at that poor kid, you guys. Look at his hurt little face!

I was roughly that kid’s age in 1984, and I remember seeing this PSA back when it aired. Obviously, at the time, I didn’t know much about the negative effects of alcohol. It wasn’t until I watched the clip again as an adult, in fact, that I realized the dad was drunk. All I knew when I was young was that he was mad, and he was yelling at the poor kid, who hadn’t done anything wrong.

That’s how kids relate to alcoholism, and that’s why I hated this PSA when I was a kid. Let that be a poorly-acted lesson to us all.

This clip was posted to YouTube by the good people at Retrontario, your definitive source for “lost and treasured memories of Ontario TV broadcasts from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.” At the time of this writing, the top “related video” is this classic sketch from a 1993 episode of The Kids in the Hall. I don’t know what we’re all supposed to take away from that dialectic, but there you go.