Your Reviewer
Stephen Beaumont has been reviewing and writing about beer and spirits for over thirty years. During that time, he has written for publications as diverse as The Globe and Mail, Esquire, Whisky Advocate, Global Drinks Intel, and Playboy, among many others, and authored or co-authored fifteen books, including the multi-award-winning international best-seller, The World Atlas of Beer (with Tim Webb) and the definitive Canadian distilleries guide, Canadian Spirits (with Christine Sismondo). From his base in downtown Toronto, Stephen frequently travels the world in search of great breweries and distilleries, often presenting lectures and tastings along the way to audiences numbering from a dozen or two to several hundred
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Equally passionate about spirits and beer, Stephen has judged in many of the world’s most prestigious drinks competitions, including the World Beer Awards and the Brussels Beer Challenge, Spirits Selection by Concours Mondial de Bruxelles and the International Rum Festival. Since its inaugural event in 2022, he has also served as organizer and head judge for the Canada Beer Cup.
By any measure, Stephen is today one of the pre-eminent voices on beer and spirits in not only Canada, but around the world. He created Beaumont Drinks to be a unique and central source for authoritative reviews of beers and spirits available in Canada.
A More Personal Note
On March 9, 1991, my first column on beer appeared in The Toronto Star newspaper, close to a year after I had published my first unpaid beer writing and over two years since I began training myself in the brewing sciences and the art of tasting. I have never looked back.
In 1994, I published my first book, The Great Canadian Beer Guide, for which I travelled the country and tasted and reviewed almost every beer brewed in Canada, and around the same time I began writing about whisky and other spirits. Shortly thereafter, I completed my three-plus years of writing for the Star to focus more on magazine writing, for such publications as Saveur, Wine Enthusiast, Whisky Advocate, Hemispheres, and Food & Drink.
Since the late 2010s, I have noticed an increasing reluctance on the part of editors to publish honest, unsponsored reviews of beers and spirits, particularly in Canada. Yet at the same time, prices of almost everything, including quality ales, lagers, wheat beers, whiskies, gins, rums, and other potables, have skyrocketed, which to my mind means that intelligent purchasing is all the more important.
Beaumont Drinks exists to help out with such decisions. While it would be easy to say that I’m here to drink the bad stuff so you don’t have to, and I will certainly do that from time to time, the real reason for this site is to alert you to the wonderful but perhaps underrecognized beers and spirits available to Canadians, and shine a spotlight upon the truly great products among them.