TAPS Beer Magazine

Over the last couple of months, I have been working with a number of people trying in vain to get the TAPS beer magazine back up and running. It has been a challenging task, but fortunately there will be issues rolling off the press soon.

TAPS was a quarterly magazine that featured articles on beer, spirits, sports, and also included TAPS girls. It had columns from around the country and even some that were from aboard such as Belgium and Paris. I remember picking up my first copy of the magazine in Halifax and thought that some of the content was really good but that the pictures and features that had nothing to do with beer brought the magazine down. The TAPS girls were a distraction and the columns on roller derbies and golfing were out of place.

Well, a year later and with new owners, TAPS Beer Magazine is back. Rob Engman, a self described "good beer" fan, has recently taken over ownership and is taking the magazine in a whole new direction. Gone are the TAPS girls that took up too many pages; gone are the whiskey and vodka stories and gone are the car and sport stories.

This magazine will focus strictly on BEER!! There will be stories on Ontario Breweries, new beers, pub profiles, people in the industry, book/blog reviews, industry insiders, pub jokes, and a bartowel.com page. We have and will be visiting beer events like Cask Days, Independent Boast and Toast and Press Releases and reporting on them. We will be showing up at breweries and taking you, the reader, on a tour without leaving your house. We will talk about what is happening all around the province in regards to new beer releases, new pub openings and really anything we can think of. There are some great writers that will be working on content for the magazine that have been in the beer industry in some capacity for years. Each one is passionate about growing the beer segment in Canada and love the challenge of being a beer writer.

The re-birth of the magazine is slated for the middle of December and it will feature the highlights from the judging at the Canadian Brewing Awards as well as highlights from the Gala itself. Other stories will cover some events already mentioned and more. We are working hard to ensure that this can and will be the best beer only magazine in Ontario and possibly one day in Canada.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, comments or would like to advertise with the magazine, please contact me at troyburtch@gmail.com for more information. Also, check out the website www.tapsmedia.ca and sign up for the podcasts. Currently there are 22,000 subscribers and we will be releasing more in the future.

Cheers!!