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Blake Canning and his Bottle Collection

If you live in Toronto and are in the industry, Blake Canning is likely a familiar face. Sometimes he’ll be holding his motorcycle helmet. Sometimes he’ll be talking whisky as he is the Canadian National Brand Ambassador for Bearface Whisky. He’s always around, out and supporting anyone and everyone. He’s always excited about something. He is simply one of the friendliest guys. Throughout the past few years we have seen whispers of his home bar, The Bitter End Bar, but we had yet to see it in real life. These little sneak peeks made us wonder just how this bottle collection could be hosted in a condo in Toronto. We recently had the pleasure of spending some time with Blake and his home bar and we have to say: if you ever get the invite to go, do not pass it up.

 

Bartender Altas: Do you remember the first drink that you ever had in a bar?
Blake Canning: I have been thinking about this one and I honestly can’t.

BA: Do you know where you were when you had that drink? City, bar, wherever?
BC: It was probably somewhere in Europe, I spent a lot of my teen years there.

BA: Okay, just, you know, that small continent. Haha.
BC: Well, one of the first spots that I dropped into in Europe was Germany, so it could have been a stein at the Hofbrau House. You never know.

 

BA: When did you start working in bars?
BC: Pretty much the day I was legally allowed to.

BA: Where were you then?
BC: My first bartending gig was, as so many are, at a golf course.

BA: Did you start on the bar at the golf course or were you the guy that everyone was firing at on the driving range first?
BC: I started on the bar because I essentially just said “yeah I know what I’m doing” and no one looked twice. I mean I also saw a manager shake an Old Fashioned while training me so even with no experience I don’t think I was their worst employee.

BA: Do you remember the first proper cocktail you ever made?
BC: It would have probably been at A Toi before it opened because as soon as they saw me make a cocktail, they never let me work there. I never made it to the open.

BA: Do you remember what cocktail it was?
BC: Probably a Daiquiri, and probably the most unbalanced one ever made.

BA: Not everyone gets it right the first time. What so far has been your longest stint behind a bar?
BC: I believe it was at the Cloak Bar.

 

BA: Tell us about the bar. Where was it and what were you making? What kind of bar was it?
BC: It was the best bar on earth. I still commit to the statement that the Cloak Bar had one of the best atmospheres in the entire city. It’s where Goodnight Cocktail Club is now. If I remember correctly, me and Kris Girard were hired there around the same time. And Kris was obviously infinitely better than me, so they started me on brunches upstairs at Marben until I hung around long enough to be able to earn my spot down there. Really good cocktail menu, but we also did a lot of freestyles. It was the first place that I really cut my teeth and was given the chance to really learn, experiment and fall in love with cocktailing.

 

BA: How did you start amassing your bottles?
BC: I started with nothing but a small bar cart because my father is a single malt drinker and he gave me a really nice one. He goes “now you can build your own little collection”. Then when lockdown hit and I had the idea for The Bitter End, I went all the way down the rabbit hole. I started reaching out to small craft distillers around Canada with the world’s worst pitch like “Hey I’ve got pretty much no following and no reason to think this would work, but nobody’s doing anything except scrolling Instagram right now… if you want to work together, if you want me to put this on a video, etc etc”. Then a really surprising amount of folks were super into the idea and it worked out great for everybody. That boosted the collection pretty quickly.

 

BA: So you mentioned Scotch, single malt specifically, but was there or is there a spirit that draws you in and that keeps you excited and keeps you collecting? What pulls you toward continuing to build out this wild part of your apartment?
BC: Is saying whisky too broad of a genre?! Pretty much all whisky. Obviously, I have taken a serious interest and passion in Canadian whisky and Canadian spirits in general. I think our country has a lot to offer in everything that they make, whisky especially. But you can’t know everything unless you try everything. So I’ve been fascinated by that entire genre.

BA: Is there a person that has been kind of the proverbial devil on your shoulder that keeps saying “buy more bottles. Make more of a bar out of this”?
BC: I think I’m the devil on my own shoulder! Sometimes I feel like the devil on all my friends’ shoulders too. I don’t think there really is someone who’s been on me. In fact, if anything, most people are going, “Are you done? Are you sure that’s not enough?”

 

BA: At what point in amassing this collection – and you’ve got your Instagram following where you’re making cocktails with all these independent distillers – at what point do you decide, this isn’t a collection anymore, this isn’t an Instagram account, this is a bar?
BC: Well, it was always meant to be kind of like a fake “set” bar for educational videos but I wanted it to be fully functional so I could make drinks live. I used to go Live on Instagram from the bar during lockdown when I was noticing a big dip in the mental health of my industry friends who needed that social interaction to function or just needed that conversation. None of us were getting that, that closeness.

So I wanted to at least pretend we were at the bar together by chatting through this Live and hopefully sharing a drink. Then when the lockdown lifted, I realized I’ve got all the necessary stuff so as soon as we were allowed to, I started transitioning those meetups to real life. I was still working in bars and my spot would close at around midnight. So I’d get out of there by 1am, I’d stop for two bags of ice on the way home and at around 2am, I would “open the place” for a couple hours for any of the last call bartenders who wanted to just drop in, have a quiet drink and play around essentially.

 

BA: Tell us about how you run your [home] bar. How do you run it at this point? What hours do you keep? How do you invite people?
BC: These days we’ve got a better handle on it, there was a period where we were doing one service every week. That was…a lot. Now we celebrate special occasions and stuff where we’ll start early and we just say “Come after work”.

In terms of who comes, it’s mostly built on creativity. Like, for example, one of the first bartenders who came over here, we would just sit and try a stirred, shaken and a thrown Daiquiri to see if we can actually taste the difference. You definitely can, by the way. And then, of course, we’d drink all three of those daiquiris. We’d try an Old Fashioned with like, 3 different spirits, or 3 different amounts of bitters… let’s see if we can taste the difference. And then, of course, we drank all six of those Old Fashioneds. It was built on education, but also just having our own playground to experiment without worrying about getting in trouble for drinking on the job.

 

BA: Education is kind of at the base of it and conferring with whatever friends are around and willing to come and play around with liquor after work. How did you get from there to having your own draft tap?
BC: Well, I never felt good taking money from my friends who had just worked their butts off to make their tips, right? I don’t want their tips. I wanted them to relax and have fun. I don’t want you to have to pay me for that, especially because everything’s all ram-shackled together anyway.

Obviously though, in the hospitality industry, they don’t let you do that. So, one night I had a couple friends over and somebody saw this skull dish thing lying around over there and he picks it up and goes, “This is the tip jar! You know what to do!” and puts it on the bar. I just never moved it. Everything’s still free. I still don’t charge anybody for anything, but hospitality does what it does. Usually the tips would pay for restocking the rail, plus a little extra. Every once in a while I’d go out and get some nice sort of spirit to treat everybody with the next time they came by. But people were very generous. One of the most consistent orders was also “I just want a beer and a shot” so I thought, “How much would a draft tap be?” Eventually we saved up enough to be able to afford that, and it’s been a huge hit ever since.

 

BA: How often are you inviting people over present day?
BC: We toned it down a little bit. We used to do it mostly on Saturdays. I would usually have enough energy after a Saturday service to be like, hey, everybody come by if you want.

BA: That adrenaline takes a while to go away.
BC: Exactly. Everybody else who was working, got off around midnight, one or two, they’re the exact same way, right? Now we’ve sort of toned it down a little bit, but we’re trying to pivot back to that education again. So about one event per month on average. Starting a little bit earlier, trying to add the physical health aspect to the mental health one. We’re also thinking about doing things like paired tasting menus. A friend from a great bar with 4-5 creative cocktails based on a theme and a chef friend from a nice restaurant doing 4-5 small bites, then we do like four seatings of two hours each…. That would be fantastic. There’s a ton of possibilities and we’re exploring all of them.

 

BA: Are you familiar with the film, Ghostbusters?
BC: Oh yes.

BA: Your day job currently is working for Bearface Whisky. Have you ever experimented with crossing the streams and having a Bearface event at The Bitter End Bar? Because at the beginning of the movie, crossing the streams is very bad, but it sounds like you’ve put enough time and energy into this that you could cross the streams and this is actually the best way to proceed.
BC: I’ve definitely thought about it. Although, and I know this may sound cheesy, almost every event is technically a Bearface event already. Bearface is our rail whisky, I use it for pretty much any whisky cocktail, and we’re constantly trying the different expressions, doing mini tastings. I’ve got a couple of the expressions of it here that aren’t available anymore, so sometimes that’s a special treat.

BA: You can say you didn’t cross the streams. That’s allowed. Egon said that would be bad.
BC: Egon’s a smart guy, but I think they’re more like parallel streams. But yeah, this place is great for us geeks after work but I like to spend our brand money where our partners get the most out of it, right?

 

BA: The whole time we’ve been talking and you’ve been talking about The Bitter End bar and experimenting what you’ve been doing and having people over whatever, you’ve been using the “WE” instead of the “I” inviting people over who’s the “we”?
BC: Oh man, so many people have asked me about that. I started using the definite article because I did want The Bitter End to be its own thing. If it’s a bar it should hypothetically have a bar team and I didn’t want any one person to take credit because it seemed too blusterous to me. It seems too egotistical so I just wanted the bar to be its own entity. That’s why I always say “we”. Because realistically the bartenders who come in here and play around and get creative with me, they’re part of the team too. So all of them are part of The Bitter End and we like to give the best experience we can to all of our temporary staff.

 

BA: Can I work at Bitter End Bar?
BC: I would be honoured, I’ll grab you one of our t-shirts before your first shift.

BA: What can I get you?
BC: My god I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that here before, I’m drawing a blank! I’m starting to realize why everyone likes a beer and a shot so much.


We asked Blake to choose three bottles from his shelf and tell us about them.

 

BC: That was the first bottle that my dad gave me to start my single malt collection. It may have even been on my 25th birthday. That would make sense, but I can’t quite remember. All I remember is that it was my first. You’ll notice it’s not full, exactly. My dad and I had an…interesting relationship growing up. We had a tough time seeing eye-to-eye until I was really an adult. This was something that we could kind of connect on finally as adults. It was something we sort of grabbed onto. And boy, did we ever. So yeah, I’ve had this one since the beginning. It’s still not empty. I don’t know if I ever will empty it because I only open it on the most special, special occasions, and usually only with him.

 

BC: So this is my infinity bottle. I think this one is single malts. That’s why it’s in an Islay bottle. I’m working on one for American, Canadian and Irish whiskies as well. Maybe even Japanese if I ever build up my collection enough. But every time I get a new single malt and I crack it open, the first two ounces go into this bottle. When I was first doing some of the Bitter End stuff, I would work with any number of people who wanted to promote their stuff. For example our first tool sets were from Garnish Barware in Victoria, I believe. One of the other folks we worked with made labels for Infinity Bottles. There was one with Danny DeVito on it and Bill Murray, and I think they were all plays on the Pappy Van Winkle label. They sent us these for a giveaway. And I was like, this is awesome – but I’m definitely keeping one of these because I absolutely love Bill Murray. So as soon as you said Ghostbusters, I was there with you.

BA: Do you keep track of what’s in there? Do you have a spreadsheet? Do you have a notebook?
BC: Do I look like a man who can read a spreadsheet?

 

BC: This one’s special, because it’s signed by all the folks that participated in one of our last pop-ups at Good Night Cocktail Club, which of course used to be the Cloak Bar.
BA: It used to be your home. What’s the story with the medal?
BC: Oh yeah, this is just one of the recent medals that we’ve won. Bearface Whisky won gold at the New York International Spirits Competition. The Triple Oak, we’ve won double gold at San Francisco, I think four years in a row now. Unfortunately, they don’t send us those medals, but those ones are great. We also just won Corn Whisky of the Year two days ago at the Canadian Whisky Awards.
BA: Congratulations!
BC: Yeah, I’m waiting for them to send me that plaque. *smirk*


This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Posted February 4th, 2025