On April 1, a tax increase on alcohol known as the “beer tax” will come into effect, meaning Canadians may soon pay more for their beverage of choice.
Sorry - Beer is our “Beverage of Choice”? Pretty sure we drink more tea than beer and more coffee than tea… and more than either that sweet sweet water.
I don’t even particularly associate Canadian culture with beer, we make some darn fine ones but Cider tends to dominate our alcohol culture (or maybe Fireball).
What a weird call for empathy.
I assume they meant alcoholic beverage of choice.
Also, while beer has been losing market share since around 2008, it remains the most popular alcoholic beverage nationwide, as well as being the most popular for every province except BC and Québec (who both prefer wine).
“Ciders, coolers, and other refreshment beverages” account for only around 10% of the market share, behind beer, wine, and spirits, so I’m not sure where you get the idea that cider is the most popular alcoholic drink.
That’s fair, that might be BC bias - a lot of ciders come out of the Okanagan.
Not lately. Shit was on fire, yo (almost including the vineyard I laboured in the summers at picking grapes).
Unpopular opinion - good. It’s a known carcinogen. Add onto that the social issues it can cause and I think it makes some sense to tax it more that other things to bring in those external costs that were being “passed on” to society in the form of healthcare and social services.
Time to bust out the homebrew kit…
If you are looking to save money, take the fraction of a cent price increase in stride
Signed: guy who has spent thousands of dollars on home brewing equipment
Depends on the volume you drink. If you can save a buck a beer and drink 2-3 tallboys a day you could offset the cost of the gear in a year.
Yes, but that is also contingent on you placing absolutely zero value on your time.
An absolute bottom of the barrel recipe (10lb 2 row, 1lb c-10, 1oz hallertau, s-04) will run you about $30-40 per 20L batch. So after you spend hundreds of dollars on equipment, you are only saving like $40 per 10 hours spent brewing
placing absolutely zero value on your time
I see you’ve met my boss!
Is it 10 active hours or a 10 hour period during which you nanny an ongoing process? I started turning 2 days a month into bread baking/meat smoking/laundry day. Each job only needs an hour each of active time but spread out over 4-6hrs. I could totally squeeze in an additional project…
Brew day is ~8 hours, I would say it’s half nannying, there’s usually 2 hours where you can full on walk away, but the rest is either active cleaning or you have to press a button or stir a thing every 10 minutes so you are glued to your pot
Bottling is another ~2 hours or so (sanitizing bottles and capping them, cleaning the used fermenter) - you can cut this down to half an hour if you forego bottling, but that’s another $1500 in capital costs for kegging equipment
Hmm, that would be a big jump in the workload but it would fit with the twice a month schedule. I’ll have to take some time before I grok this problem.
Oh no, your boss values your time very highly. They just want to keep all of that value for themself.
14-21 tallboys is 19-29 “standard drinks” a week.
That’s a lot of alcohol.
I know, Maybe if we had proper healthcare, and a government that works for it’s people instead of corporations, Canadians wouldn’t have to kill themselves just to sleep at night.
brew create --cask molson
I hope their goal is to help me quit drinking. In which case it’s great for me, but RIP small craft brewers
Where else are we supposed to generate tax income? Surely the dry husk of the working class has more to squeeze out of!
You know what is amazing: They can index taxes to inflation, but they can’t be damned to index minimum wage to the cost of living increase.
You don’t need to do anything to index percentages of sales prices to inflation, when inflation results in increases in sales prices.
Raising the tax rate is not indexing taxes to anything.
I’m mixed on this one.
As a detterrent to drinking, great. Fuck alcohol.
As a serious source of taxation, I hate any sort of tax that disproportionally burdens the poorer members of society.
