Glass menagerie

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This article was published 29/09/2016 (2759 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, if one of those bottles should happen to fall… no problem, there’s plenty more where that came from.

Wayne Leaf is a founding member of the Great White North Brewerianists — a Winnipeg collectors’ club dedicated to all manner of suds-related paraphernalia, including labels, advertising material and tap handles. The 36-member troupe’s 28th annual show and sale takes place today, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at Anavets Assiniboia A.N.A.F. Unit 283, 3584 Portage Ave. Admission and parking is free.

In addition to a basement annex stacked floor to ceiling with aluminum beer cans, Leaf, a territory manager for Pratts Wholesale Limited, has dozens of vintage compact bottles, more commonly referred to as stubbies, which are handsomely displayed on homemade, wooden shelves in his rec-room bar area.

“I usually bring a few (stubbies) to our show, every year,” he says, wiping a film of dust off an unopened bottle of Cool Spring, a Labatt’s product that was popular in the mid-1970s, when it was produced in New Westminster, B.C.

“It never fails. I’ll have a couple of (stubbies) on the table in front of me and some young person will wander by, stop in his tracks and ask, ‘Uh, what’s that?’”

Good question; in their book 300 Years of Beer: An Illustrated History of Brewing in Manitoba, co-authors and self-described “beer geeks” Dave Craig and Bill Wright devote an entire page to the stubby, which they describe as “an icon of the industry” and “as Canadian as maple syrup.”

“Not to knock other collectors’ groups, but if I’m outside on a hot summer day and I’ve just finished mowing the lawn, I can’t see myself coming inside and licking a stamp.”

-Wayne Leaf

“It all started in the late 1950s when the consolidation of the Canadian brewing industry was nearly complete,” the pair writes. “The Dominion Brewers Association felt the need for a standardized bottle that could be interchangeable between all breweries.”

According to Craig and Wright, not only were stubbies 25 per cent lighter than their long-neck counterparts when they hit the market in 1961, they didn’t break or chip as easily.

Also, the bottles’ glass was tinted amber, which protected the contents from ultraviolet rays.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In 1983, after the stubby’s 21-year-run as Canada’s “national beer bottle,” ale sales in Canada were as flat as last night’s Bud Light.

Marketing experts blamed the decline on the stubby, labelling its portly shape as passé. By switching to a sleeker design, they hoped their industry would get the shot in the arm it needed. (In a Globe and Mail “eulogy” to the vessel, columnist P.T. Jensen wrote, “Stubby was unpretentious. No glamour, all function. Stubby was egalitarian. Millionaire or mooch, you got your brew in a stubby.”)

Leaf began his hobby in 1978, during a high school trip to Europe. The two-week excursion was drawing to a close, he recalls, and although he’d already picked up mementoes for members of his family, he hadn’t bought any souvenirs for himself, yet.

“We were at a train station in Italy and there was this guy standing there with a tray of beers, kind of like those cigarette girls that used to walk around in restaurants,” he says.

“I bought a couple (of beers) off him, threw them in my luggage and, after I got home, decided to keep the cans. Later, when my brother started going to the States with his buddies, he always brought beer back with him. I started keeping the most interesting-looking of those (cans), too.”

Leaf joined an American-based beer can collectors’ club in 1983, after receiving a beer-can price guide for Christmas. Five years later, he and Rob Horwood, whom Leaf met after running a newspaper ad looking for other collectors in Winnipeg, formed the Great White North Brewerianist Club.

At first, Leaf was content to swap doubles with members of the group. But after reaching a point where there were fewer and fewer cans he wanted and/or needed, he moved onto other trappings.

“At one time I had as many as 800 stubbies but I’ve whittled it down some,” he says.

“In the beginning it was all about quantity, not quality… I wanted everything. Even now, somebody will see my bottles of Uncle Ben’s and say they all look the same. But if you look closer you’ll see that one label says it was brewed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, another will say it was brewed in Transcona, Manitoba, while another will say Prince George, B.C. The differences are subtle, for sure, but they’re there.”

Leaf laughs when he recalls a private collection of three dozen or so bottles he lucked into, years ago. A woman’s husband had died and she contacted Leaf, wondering if he’d be interested in his cache.

“They were on display behind the bar… not in the usual fashion. They were hanging in the air after being pushed through the material in the suspended ceiling. I thought I had seen it all; it took me hours to clean the gunk off the necks, but it was well worth it.”

In terms of monetary value, Leaf isn’t counting on his stubbies to make him rich, any time soon. Molson Canadian and Labatt’s Blue bottles are “a dime a dozen,” he says. Furthermore, their value doesn’t increase that much if they’re still full.

“A couple of years ago I had about 50 stubbies with me at the show — priced between $2 and $3 — and there were next to no takers. The funny thing was, after I got home from that show, I took a bunch of the bottle caps off (the bottles), put those up for sale and was suddenly getting $6, $7 and $8 a piece.”

(“I poured it down the drain,” Leaf says, when a scribe asks he did with the brew that was in the bottles. “There was a bunch of sludge at the bottom — they wouldn’t have been drinkable — but it still smelled pretty good.”)

While not everybody who collects beer-related products enjoys the taste of a cold one, Leaf says that definitely doesn’t apply to him.

“Not to knock other collectors’ groups, but if I’m outside on a hot summer day and I’ve just finished mowing the lawn, I can’t see myself coming inside and licking a stamp,” he says, taking a swig of his Fort Garry Pale Ale.

For more information on the Great White North Brewerianist Club, go to http://www.gwnbeercollectors.ca.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca