Matthew J. Bellamy

This is a comprehensive account, heavily endnoted but all the same quite readable, account of the rise and fall of Labatt’s as an independent Canadian enterprise. It traces the company’s fortunes from its founding by John K. Labatt to its disappointing absorption into Anheuser-Busch. Along the way we see the decisions made or not made, the successes and the false starts, against the broader history of Canada and the global marketplace.

I appreciated the structure of this book. The introduction lays out clearly what is going to be covered in each chapter; each chapter begins with some key questions that will be answered in the course of the chapter; the chapters end with a conclusion that sums up what has just passed and paves the way to the next one. The structure goes a long way to making this smooth and readable. The text is supplemented with photos and the odd table. The tables are not essential to the understanding of the text, so they do their job well (to provide extra information for those who are interested). And for the even more interested reader, there is an extensive bibliography.

What struck me as the most interesting was the silly things that Labatt bought to try to diversify itself in the 1970s. Sports teams I can understand, because sports = beer, but getting into dairy and chocolate are not moves I would have anticipated. The saddest part was reading that Budweiser was the best-selling beer in Canada at the time of writing. Really? You can do better than that, Canada.

The book only lightly touched on the rise of the brew pub and the blossoming craft beer scene, which in a way is a return to the early days of brewing in Canada: lots of local brewers supplying a smaller market with niche products. And indeed, that is the sort of beer I tend to drink myself. I drink maybe 1 beer every 3 weeks, and I tend to go for the ones with funny names or cool labels, which the craft brewers excel at creating. I would have liked maybe a bit more on that, although one could argue that the topic of craft breweries warrants its own book, which I might read.

I would also most certainly read an alternate history in which John Labatt II leaves the company to his eldest daughter, Catherine, instead of to John S. Labatt. The author argues that Catherine was the most capable of John Labatt II’s children, but because of social mores at the time of his deciding on the inheritance, she would not have been able to actually manage the company. Instead it went to John S. Who knows what decisions Catherine would have made if she’d had free rein, or even if John II had decided to arrange things so that Catherine made all the decisions but John S. was the public face of those decisions?

This book would be of interest to those who like histories of food and drink or lesser-told stories of Canadian history. I paired this book with a Labatt 50, because why not.

This book came to my attention via 49th Shelf’s fall 2019 preview.… (mehr)