In this 24th instalment, I chat with Josh Vanderheide (aka JV), founder of Field House Brewing in East Abbotsford and downtown Chilliwack.

Josh was chosen by my last guest, Gary Brucker from Barn Owl Brewing, as the next interviewee in this ongoing “tag-you’re-it” style series. Although this was our first time connecting, our conversation via Google Meet felt like we were sharing a beer in person. We covered everything from Field House’s beginnings in 2015 to Josh’s thoughts on the future of BC craft beer.

It’s a longer read, but full of insight — so grab a pint and enjoy.

And if you’ve missed any previous interviews, you can catch up on them here.

Kim: I always find it interesting to hear how people got started in the industry. Josh, how did you get started in craft beer?

Josh: Yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of different pathways to craft beer. Mine started not in brewing but on the marketing side of things. My career was in marketing. It’s what I went to school for, and then I moved into graphic design, then branding, and brand strategy. I had a boutique design studio called Also Known As in Gastown with my business partner Jesse Bannister. We worked with hospitality businesses, and we ended up specializing in consumer products, including wineries, distilleries, and breweries. Early on, we did the branding for Yellow Dog and Twin Sails. We did a rebrand for Fernie. We did some work for Russell and Steel & Oak. We also helped Small Gods with their branding. I suppose I made my way around the industry in this way early on, before I decided to take the leap and start my own brewery.

We were watching this industry evolve, and we were like, man, this looks like fun. One day, we were on a road trip to the Great Canadian Beer Festival in Victoria because our clients were there. On that trip, Jesse asked if there were any breweries in Abbotsford, and when I realized there weren’t any, he suggested that we open one. By this time, I had moved from the city back to Abbotsford with my family, and thought, yes, let’s do this.

So that was really the first conversation about the possibility of opening a brewery. That was in September. I wrote the business plan in November and December, and then my wife, Gina, and I launched the business. Within a year, we found the building, raised the funds, completely renovated an old car garage, and opened Field House.

With my background, I knew what we needed to do to get open and get all of the permits, and I had some great industry connections to help get through the process. At that time, there was a reason there wasn’t a brewery in Abbotsford. It related to an older bylaw that you could have a brewery, but you couldn’t have a tasting room. But then City Council modernized the bylaw, and three of us opened up within about a year. Field House, Ravens Brewing, and Old Abbey Ales.

For me, coming from the brand and marketing side, of course, we needed a great brewer. So, my first hire was Parker, our head brewer, and he’s still with us 10 years later. He’s been an awesome partner and collaborator for a long time now.

What we went through back then is a bit different than what breweries have to go through today to open a new brewery. I feel like everything has gotten a lot more complicated and much more expensive. At the time, we could open a brewery for $600-700K. Now, new breweries are looking at more like $1.5-2 million to open.

Kim: I understand you built your brewery with crowdsourced funding. Tell me more about this.

Josh: We were running a lean budget. We were putting our money into the business, along with money from whoever we could find that would come along with our crazy idea. With my marketing background, we decided to do a Kickstarter to find more people who would be willing to support us. It was really fun. It’s still online and it features my wife’s ‘Dutch Oma’. She’s the main character in the video, and she’s quite a fun person. We intentionally made it look low-budget to actually make it look like we needed the money. The reality is that we didn’t have lots of money, so it was easy to make it look that way.

You can watch the video by clicking here, or click on the graphic below.

If you watch the video, it actually came right after one of our lowest points. We were in the middle of renovating, and we had ripped off the roof. We had this small window to do the repairs and re-roof it. But in that window, it started pouring rain. And we ended up with a foot of rain in our office area the day before we were going to film inside. I knew we couldn’t show this. No one would believe that we could open the brewery because it was so bad.

Kim: So, is crowdsourced funding a model that you would recommend to other breweries? Was it worth it in the end for the investment of time you put into it?

Josh: I do. Our goal was to raise $20K, and we ended up raising almost $30K. We really needed those funds. Other breweries like Firehall, Persephone, and Container have also gone with a crowdfunding model.

We’re actually looking at another one as we expand our business. We’re looking to go back to crowdfunding again to raise capital, but in a different way. I think if you look at the economy right now and the state of the industry, it’s really hard to convince people to invest in a brewery today.

So, yes, I would encourage it. But you need to know that it’s going to take some work and time, but you can reap the rewards of that work and be a bit more efficient from an equity perspective. We did a Kickstarter campaign, which is great for a small crowdfunding project in the $30-50K range. There are other good crowdfunding platforms out there, too. I’d say there’s also been an evolution of crowdfunding. It’s actually a mix of your crowdsourcing campaign, investment from your friends and fans, and also people who are actually real investors that are writing significant cheques.

Kim: Your brewery has been around since 2015. What makes Field House so special?

Josh: Well. Good question. How do I say these things in the most humble way? I’m not the brewer, but I do think our beer program stands out in the industry. We still release one, two, three, or six new beers on a regular basis. We released nine new beers in a week for our anniversary.

Apart from that, every week we have a new beer or two. It might seem exhausting, and I don’t know that there’s anybody else who can keep up with the pace of innovation that our team can.

And again, I say this humbly, but I really feel like with all of those beer releases, none of those beers are ever a miss for me. There’s very rarely a beer that we try and think it is not up to our standards. That’s because the beers all build on each other. We’ve developed expertise in sours and IPAs, and we have good technical expertise with these styles. We are still trying new things and innovating with techniques and ingredients – pushing the limits on flavour and innovation. I’m super proud of the team and how they can continue to innovate at such a rapid pace, while also maintaining quality. I’d say that’s probably why I think we’ve been successful over the last 10 years.

I think what we do is quite unique in the market. I’d say Backcountry is probably similar to us. We probably make about the same amount of beer, give or take. And we probably have about the same amount of new releases, and we make some awesome beers, and kill it on the marketing side of things as well.

In addition, another thing I think makes us special is that we have another whole area of our business. We’re expanding right now and building out our portfolio. We just acquired NiceLife Cocktail Company through a merger last year, and so now we’re doing the same thing with cocktails. We’re releasing innovative, high-quality craft ready-to-drink cocktails under the NiceLife brand. We’ve launched four new brands in the last three months since that acquisition. We have a new tequila RTD line called The Sunrise Hotel. We have a new cider line called Rest & Recreation Cider. We have a new full Gin & Juice line-up with multiple products.

Now we’re building out our non-alcoholic portfolio, which is up next, and we’re really excited about it. We’re a bit late to the party, but we have been testing a lot of things, and we just released our first product.

While we continue to innovate on the beer side, we are pushing the portfolio wider, and in each of those portfolios, we are going deep as well.

Kim: Wow. That is absolutely incredible. Being in the industry myself, I know what it takes to keep releasing new products, and you guys are doing it every week. Are all your new releases packaged, or are some of them draft only?

Josh: There’s the occasional beer that we release from our Chilliwack location, which is our R&D brewery, that we do draft releases only, but it’s usually on top of another packaging release. Otherwise, all the releases are packaged. The team really pushes the envelope of what can be done at that pace and frequency. It’s been cool to watch it and just try to keep up with it. Honestly, I don’t even drink every beer that we release. I can’t even track them all down.

We used to have a really fun program when we had our smaller test system. We called it “crew beers,” and anybody could propose a concept for a beer. Then that crew member would work with one of the brewers to refine the idea and make the beer, so we always had a new crew beer as well, which was really fun. Then, when we released it, we’d have a party, and the crew would invite their friends and family down. It was a really cool program. Unfortunately, it just became inefficient to keep using this smaller test system.

Kim: Not only do you have multiple brands, but you have multiple locations. How do you manage two separate locations?

Josh: Abbotsford is our main production brewery. Our Chilliwack location is more of a smaller brew pub, and this is where we do our R&D brewing. We also have a brewery at our farm. We have a 5-acre farm, 10 minutes from Abbotsford, where we have our barrel room and all of our wild stuff. We also have fruit and various ingredients on the farm, which we use in our beers. Plus, we have wine grapes, which we’ll be using for a new product we are launching this fall. And we also have the NiceLife site in Port Coquitlam. So yes, I guess you could say we have a lot on the go.

Kim: What else are you working on?

Josh: We are creating a new warehouse distribution hub. We’re going to be running a new direct-to-customer online store so people can buy all of our products online and have them shipped direct. It’s sort of a decentralized model, which means we can produce small batches of different products. This gives us a lot of flexibility to run the innovative beer program that we have. We can produce a lot of beer, but it’s not a lot of one beer, and I think this will help us maneuver and be more innovative.

Kim: You talk about being ‘purveyors of the good life’. What does a good life mean to you?

Josh: The good life concept has been part of our concept since day one. Our original tagline was ‘good beers + good times’. We expanded that when we started our food program to ‘good beers + good eats + good times’. And then that became what we referred to as ‘the good life’, so when we combined beer and cocktails and now these new brands, we needed an umbrella name, hence the Good Life Brand Collective – which is how we refer to the portfolio now.

The Good Life brand sits as the umbrella over Field House, NiceLife, Rest and Recreation, Sunrise Hotel, and the new brands that are coming.

Conceptually, the good life for us is the coming together of the simple, but good things in life. If you just need a win during the week and that looks like grabbing a pizza and a beer, hanging out with friends or your kids and family… or bringing your dog down to hang out with, that can be a win … that’s the Good Life. To enjoy simple moments with high-quality products. I feel like it’s really important to create those wins for our community.

Kim: Amazing. So now I want to dig into JV here. So, how do you define a good life for you, personally?

Josh: Well, that’s a good question. I think I’ve had to learn that life is not about silos. If you’d love your work to be here, and your friends to be here, and your family to be there, and you could just focus on those things, that’s one thing. But I’ve learned that life is more like an integrated concept where you flow in and out of things. You can enjoy that thing, but move to the next thing and enjoy that. So, I think that’s how I’ve had to learn to ebb and flow in my life. And I think the good life is being able to do all those things.

For example, I was just at my daughter’s track meet during ‘work hours’, and I was able to work in between her races. I love that my work allows me the flexibility to do that. Sometimes my team needs me, and I say to my family, I know it’s Saturday, but they need some help down at the brewery. So, I think it’s the ability to do the things that are important and move through those things as effortlessly as possible. It’s not always perfect, and sometimes it’s a little bit of a hot mess. Having said that, I’m super grateful for all of those buckets of my life, and how they work together.

Kim: How important is it for you to work with local ingredients and ingredients that you grow yourself?

Josh: Well, we bought a farm in the valley, and we’re in an agricultural and food community. When we built the food program specifically, we realized it wasn’t just about buying local and saying local. We realized we had to understand what that actually means.

Farming is not an easy job, and agriculture is not easy. The original Field House name referred to the house next to the field where you work in the day, then you go back to the house after work. Here you have a meal or a beer, and it tastes so much better because you earned it after a hard day of work.

Our commitment to the farm and understanding what local farms do, and the challenges they face, has really helped us embrace working with other partners and other local suppliers. Because we’ve walked a mile in the same shoes as them, we can tell an authentic story. We can take you to the farm and show you where this stuff comes from, and you can meet the farmer who grows it. It feels really good to go to that level.

We know we’re not going to change farming. We’re not going to change agriculture. We can’t do that. But we believe we can act as a megaphone for why it’s important. I’ll give credit to Josh from 33 Acres. He said something I remember reading years ago, and it stuck with me. He said that beer is part of the conversation, but it’s not the whole conversation. And the conversation’s about community. It’s about food. It’s about culture. It’s about building great businesses that can contribute positively. And beer plays a huge role in that. And if you follow us on Instagram, you’ll see that it’s not just beer. It’s a lot of different storylines around our people, around our community, around our food, around our farm, and around all the things we do.

Being 100% local is not really that sustainable from a business perspective, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We need to have a balance between running a healthy business and being sustainable, and we want to land somewhere in between.

Kim: Gary mentioned how collaborative you are and how much you are willing to help other breweries. Why do you think the craft brewing industry is so collaborative?

Josh: Yes, it is unique. I think we’ve realized that when you’re not fighting each other, it’s in your best interest to help each other to establish the industry. The other reason is recognizing that the craft beer drinker is not truly a loyal drinker. They don’t just drink one flavour of beer or one brand of beer. So we don’t have to say drink ours and not theirs, and instead we can say you should drink ours and theirs. I think we’re really lucky to be in an industry that allows us to say that, right?

We’re in the collaboration over competition era, which is a healthy model. Craft beer has proven that it works. We wish other people would pay attention to that.

Kim: So, tell me about what’s next for the Good Life Brands?

Josh: We have a lot to say about what’s next. We are coming into our 10-year anniversary, and we had to do a gut check. We had to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, What have we done? What can we be proud of? We had a conversation with our team and said we should high-five ourselves, but not just rest on our laurels. We can’t assume that whatever we did for the last 10 years is going to work for the next 10.

We looked at the shifts in drinking habits and behaviours, and we looked at where the market’s going, and we realized we needed to expand our perspective. So that’s when we got into discussions with NiceLife. This is where we go back to the Jesse Bannister story. Jesse was one of our original investors in Field House. He went on to found NiceLife Cocktails and was doing something great there. Like us, they were focused on innovation and quality. Everything that NiceLife did really aligned with what Field House was doing, so we decided to merge under the same umbrella. But we weren’t doing this to stay static; we did this to grow and create new opportunities.

Very quickly, we integrated the team and then launched these new brands. Jesse is now our Director of Growth and Business Development, and he works with Parker, our original employee number one, who is now our Director of R&D. They work together on all the R&D projects. So, it’s nice having a team that is actively working on what’s next, while we’re working on solving today’s problems.

Originally, our goal was to offer one of the best craft beer experiences in BC. And we worked really hard to hopefully earn our spot there. With the merger, we had to reset, and we asked, “What is our next big goal?”

So, our next big goal is to develop a leading portfolio of brands and beverages across Canada. Over the next 5 to 10 years, we are trying to broaden our portfolio of craft beverage brands, all with a focus on innovation and quality, and then bring those to as many communities across Canada as possible.

While this is a big goal, we know we grow from being in those uncomfortable spots. When we looked at why we should grow, it was because we wanted to take care of our people and their families, give them great jobs, give them a chance to stay in this industry, make a good living, and work for a good company. So, we have to grow to do that. And we’re trying to do it in the most authentic way possible.

The next portfolio for us is non-alcoholic beverages, and we’re definitely behind in that. But we’ve been maxed at production capacity for about 18 months, so we haven’t had any tank space to put out non-alcoholic beers. We’re starting to explore more brewery partnerships to brew liquid in different spaces.

We already brew in a few different contract brewing situations. We realized that we’re not going to be able to make it in-house, so we’ve got to create some good partnerships.

Kim: You talked a lot about what’s happened over the last 10 years. Where do you think the industry is going in the next 5 to 10 years?

Josh: Craft beer has established a foothold, and I don’t think it’s going away. Having said that, I don’t think we’ll have as many independent breweries as we do right now. I think that number will go down because we’ll see some mergers and acquisitions, and there will probably be some fallouts, and the frequency with which people are opening new breweries will go down. With that, I think that the number of craft breweries will normalize to a proper number. You see this in the US as well.

On the beverage side, I think we’ll continue to see innovations. But I’m really curious about what the next big jumps look like. Where does the industry make fundamental shifts, and what are some examples of that? Hazy IPA is a great example. When we started our businesses, Hazy IPA wasn’t the IPA, but it is the IPA now, from a sales volume perspective.

There are lots of theories around what the biggest trends will be. But I think one of the insights I learned about a year ago at the craft beer conference was that we used to think of people as non-drinkers, cocktail drinkers, or beer drinkers, but the actual data is saying that beer drinkers drink cocktails, and cocktail drinkers drink beer, and beer people sometimes choose non-alcoholic drinks. It’s a weird, interesting mishmash, and I really love that.

I think the biggest trend will probably be cannabis-based beverages. If you look down south, there are THC and CBD lifestyle beverages. In BC, those drinks come with a lot of large warning labels. While it’s not my drink of choice, I can see why people are going to it from a health benefits perspective.

I think there will be some notable changes in hospitality as well. It’s been kind of the same for a long time. But we’re seeing a lot of really cool, experiential concepts coming out of the States right now that just haven’t hit Canada yet. I would say a leader in hospitality concepts in BC is BNA Brewing. They’ve been providing really unique experiences in hospitality, and I think we’ll see more concepts like that.

Human beings always want to gather somewhere, and we moved from gathering at bars and lounges to gathering at craft breweries. But I think there will be a new version of gathering. It’ll look different, but the purpose will be the same – for humans to gather. And I think it’s really important in a very digital world that we still gather as human beings, not digitally gather together.

So, I don’t know the answer. If I had it, I’d be building it right now. But I have a notebook of random theories, and maybe one of them is right.

Kim: Tell me about your favourite beer.

Josh: It’s cliche, but I will order an IPA, or a hazy IPA is really my preference. I will usually drink the IPA that’s on tap wherever we are. That’s my go-to. A stand-out for me is Superflux. They have a good reputation for a reason. I also like Small Gods on the Island. Chris has been in the industry forever, and Johnny, who came from Deep Cove, they are so good at what they do, and their products are honestly so good. They had this California IPA that I loved. I think Small Gods is making some of the best beers in BC. They’ve got some great accolades right out of the box, and it’s really fun to see them succeed.

Kim: And when you’re not drinking beer, what are you drinking?

Josh: I love cheap white wine. I don’t like sweet white wines, but if it’s cold and dry and if it’s cheap, I’ll drink it. There are also some adaptogenic soda waters with some interesting flavours and ingredients that I’m interested in.

Kim: What are your thoughts on the non-alcoholic trend?

Josh: I’ll go out on a limb, and it’s okay if I’m wrong, but I think this is more of a trend than a permanent thing. I like to anchor back to things that have been around for decades and decades. Alcohol is one of those things. I think it is somewhat trendy to be sober-curious. But I do think it’s brought about some good alternatives and healthy products. And I think it’s leading to more mindful drinking.

In the non-alcoholic space, we just made our first non-alcoholic Salted Mexican Lime Lager. One of the insights we learned is not to try to make these taste exactly like beers, but rather to make them taste like really good drinks that give you the feeling of drinking a beer. On the craft side, I think it’s really important to look at non-alc, and ask if it’s a good beverage, not if it’s a good beer.

Kim: What do you love about the craft beer scene where you live?

Josh: If you look at Field House and our fellow breweries out here, Farmhouse Brewing and Old Yale, we all have these big open spaces. Whether it’s an indoor play area or a backyard space, the breweries out here give people open spaces to hang out and chill. And I think it’s very reminiscent of having wide open agricultural fields and land, so it kind of fits with that.

Kim: If we step outside the craft beer scene, what do you love about the area that you live in?

Josh: The shift that happened in the last 10 years is that we were moving from these rural areas that were well-designed for families and livability, but they didn’t have any cool businesses. We had the mall, the big box stores, and the strip malls, but we didn’t have cool, trendy things that you would see in Gastown in Vancouver. But now, 10 years later, we have really cool coffee shops, cool breweries, new wine bars, and cool boutiques. We have all the things that Vancouver had. In Vancouver, they have all those things, but they’re not very connected because Vancouver is so big. What’s really unique about the business community we have is that we’re all independent craft businesses, and we’re all very aware of what everybody’s doing. We support each other, tell stories, and recommend each other.

So now we have all the cool businesses, but all those cool businesses are kind of your friends, which is kind of cool.

Kim: And what do you enjoy doing with your family that’s not work-related?

Josh: We definitely have an outdoor playground out here. Chilliwack has this amazing offering of trails, rivers, and mountains. So, in 10 minutes, you can be at a trail head, or you can go to a lake or ride your bike.

I think we can have a really complete community because we are family-friendly, but we also have these outdoor things to do. And now we have these creative businesses that you can go to after a hike for a beer or a great meal.

Kim: Is there anything else you want to share?

Josh: I think it’s important to talk about the fact that it’s been hard for small and medium-sized businesses. I don’t want to be whiny, but it’s been a long haul. It’s been over 5 years since the good old days of 2019. And I think everybody’s tuned out to the support local messaging, which is kind of sad. We’ve all heard it over and over again. But at the same time, if you want to have coffee shops and breweries in your community, a portion of your money has to be spent in these businesses.

The economy has been tough. People are going out less and spending less money, and there are just not enough visits to go around for all the restaurants and the coffee shops that we have. We need to ask ourselves if these businesses build the communities and the culture that we want. That doesn’t just magically happen. If you look at all the businesses closing, there’s only one reason that they’re closing, and it’s because they don’t have enough customers.

It doesn’t really take a lot to be a customer in our industry. A beer is still an affordable luxury.

I don’t want people to feel guilty about shopping at Costco or Amazon, but just make sure that you’re also spending a portion of your dollars locally as well. If we can do that, we’ll be able to save a few more local businesses. So, I think it’s important that people are really mindful of this.

Kim: Anything else you want to put out there?

Josh: We are excited to really start sharing the story about the Good Life Brand Collective in the next six months. Everybody kind of knows Field House and NiceLife, but we’re going to take people on this journey with us. Going back to your earlier question, we started with crowdfunding as a way to take people along on the journey of building a brewery. And we’re planning to do that again with the Good Life Brand. We’re going to use a crowdfunding model and hopefully get people to come along on this next crazy journey with us.

Kim: I would normally end this interview by giving Josh a chance to pick who I will interview next. But this time I’m planning to do something different. Josh is my 24th Hops Among Friends interview since 2017. The next one is the big 25, and I’m going to do something different. A bit of a retrospective. So, the person Josh recommends will be number 26. You’ll have to wait to hear who Josh picks for me to interview once the 25th blog is live.

Stay tuned for the 25th instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends with Josh Vanderheide of Field House Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Melanie MacInnes from Locality Brewing. At the end of our discussion, Melanie recommended that I speak with Gary Brucker from Barn Owl Brewing for my next Hops Among Friends interview. Gary is one of the co-founders and the managing partner at Barn Owl Brewing, which was established in 2019 in Kelowna on the Kelowna and West Kelowna Ale Trail.

Gary and I have met several times because we are both based in the Okanagan. We met in person for this interview at Detonate Brewing in Summerland. I had a great time chatting with Gary, and it was really awesome to be able to talk face-to-face over a beer

You can read through all of my previous Hops Among Friends articles here. It’s been an absolute privilege to interview so many amazing leaders in the craft beer industry over the last few years.

Kim: How did you get started in craft beer?

Gary: Accidentally. I grew up in Southern Alberta and I became a lover of beer through my curling experience, and then later on through my men’s fastball league. Beer was always a part of our social experiences. I was very much a lager and pilsner drinker. When I moved to the Okanagan, 1516 from Okanagan Spring became my go-to beer. Then I tried Boddingtons through a friend who was selling this international brand for Labatt. I began to realize I had a wide palate and that I’m willing to try any style of beer.

Having said that, I still also enjoy getting razzed by my friends for enjoying a Saskatchewan Old Style Pilsner. It takes me back full circle.

Myself and a couple of friends were all looking ahead to the next 20 years of our lives. None of us had ever owned our own business before, but we all loved craft beer. It was a unity of spirit, if you will.

We had been joking about craft beer for some time, but when the barn became available, we thought it was a great fit. I wanted a space where we could provide a craft beer experience. It was very important to all of us that we created an experience for our guests. That has really helped shape who we are.

From here, Barn Owl Brewing was born. It was founded by three beer-loving friends—a doctor, a teacher, and a church worker. I was the church worker. In fact, I remained a church worker for the first four years that we owned the brewery. One piece of advice we got early on was to not give up our day jobs for the first few years of owning the brewery. Thankfully, we listened.

We are located in a restored 1920s heritage barn. When we first saw it, it had a dirt floor and a ladder to the loft. There were 21 applicants for the building, but we were selected. We had a home builder help us with the plans and then they built it, complete with a vaulted loft, a fireplace, antique furniture, shuffleboard, board games, and plenty of seating.

It was 10 months from the time we applied for our liquor license until opening day. We took over the space on Feb. 1, 2019, and we opened in July. We had eight months before the COVID shutdown, which allowed us time to figure some things out. It also endeared us to the community, so there was definitely understanding from the community when we had to lay off our staff. Even in that short time, we had great community support, and people would line up on Saturdays to buy our crowlers to support us. This really accelerated our role as a community gathering place.

After about a year, we realized that the three of us founders had different visions. For the sake of the business, we had to make a shift, and we ended up moving to two owners, myself and Tim (the doctor). Tim and I make it work because we have very different portfolios and areas of responsibility, and we each stay in our own lanes.

We like to say that between myself and my partner, we’ve had over 100 years of beer-drinking experience. Our wide palates are reflected in the brewer we hired at Barn Owl, and the variety of beer styles, and the experiences we offer.

When I think back to the early days, before we even opened the brewery, we spent a lot of time visiting other breweries. I wasn’t just a consumer, I had my eyes wide open to everything. I remember visiting Field House Brewing in Abbotsford numerous times. I saw the employees hanging out together. The staff were hugging each other. It was a family.

I said often in the early days, that we would know we were on track when we reached a point where our staff would want to bring their friends to our place. By year three, this is what we had created, even during COVID. It was and is amazing to see.

Kim: Tell me more about the Barn Owl theme.

Gary: We wanted to be able to say “We’re going to the barn”. We had a long list of possible names that tied to “the barn”. The night we were planning to make the final decision on the name, an owl was sitting on the neighbour’s roof the entire evening while we had dinner in my backyard. Additionally, the barn was known for having all sorts of different breeds of owls in the space. And from there, the Barn Owl name came to be.

Our logo was created by a beer lover in Edmonton. We ran a contest on Instagram. We selected the logo she sketched out, and we had a graphic designer finish it.

The more we learned about the history of the barn, the more interested we became in its rich past. It was the largest working dairy farm in the entire Okanagan Valley in the 1920s. In the 1930s, the farmhouse (most recently a salon) became an eatery called the Ritz Diner for those building the KVR (railway). It even became a brothel for the railway workers.

When the barn was a working dairy farm, the building that was right beside us and attached to the barn was the milk shed where they milked the cows. We have taken over this space now as well, and we operate it as the Milk Shed Coffeehouse.

Kim: What makes Barn Owl unique?

Gary: We were going to do live music once or twice a month, but during COVID, our liquor inspector talked to us about bringing in more live music as a way to support musicians. We’ve been having live music twice a week, every week since then.

We’ve become the community gathering spot that we envisioned. Maybe even more than we envisioned. We get some tourism traffic, but our location is far enough away from downtown that we are truly a community gathering spot for the locals who live in the Mission. The coffeehouse has enhanced that even more.

Also, it’s important to us that we are reflective of the community. We have four quality wines on at any time. We have local Kombucha, Karma Sodas, and alcohol-free beer. Plus we have Grey Fox gluten-free beers.

We have crib nights and a running club. There is no room for a kitchen here, but we have four restaurants across the street that people can order in from. And then we have food trucks that draw their own crowd (6 days a week in the summer months). We also have the Little Tokyo Ramen food truck onsite every weekend year-round.

Back when we interviewed our brewer candidates, we ended up selecting Colin Pistawka who was brewing at Swans in Victoria. He was from Kelowna, and he wanted to move back home to Kelowna. He understood what we wanted. We have 14 of our own beers on at any time. We know that it’s a bit crazy to have this many beers in our little facility, but we like to have a broad range of beer styles available.

Colin is a constant learner. He was a biochem major, heading to be a doctor, but realized he liked brewing more. We know that beer is science. And he loves it. He loves learning about brewing beer, the process, and the beer market. His greatest satisfaction is when people come in saying they don’t like beer, and by the end of their time with us, they’ve found a beer that they like. That’s in part because of the wide range of beer styles that we offer. Colin is now a shareholder in the business.

Kim: Tell me about some of your proudest accomplishments at Barn Owl.

Gary: People tell me they love our beer and the experience of the Barn. That’s all we need. We can barely keep up with beer production. We are 5.5 years in now. Colin feels like he’s found the recipes people love, the ingredients he loves, we have the history to know what we need seasonally, and we have the flow in the brewing space. Colin doesn’t need awards. He’s very proud of what we are doing.

For me as an owner, what I’m really proud of is that we are a community gathering space. Families come in together. You can see the kids playing a game, while Grampa’s having a beer, and Gramma’s having a glass of wine. Having created an intergenerational family gathering space is really rewarding for me. Last night we had a retirement party in our loft, and last week we hosted a baby shower and birthday party. It’s amazing to see the range of people coming in for events.

We are also very proud of the consistency of our staff. Other than students, we have not had much staff turnover in the last 5.5 years. Our staff tell us they are treated well by us and by our customers. They know our regulars. The consistency of our team has helped build our brand.

Kim: Let’s talk about your community involvement at Barn Owl. 

Gary: Early on, the food bank came to us and they said they always have leftover donated whole grain bread. They get so much donated bread and they can’t use it quickly enough before it goes stale. They explained that other food banks in Europe were partnering with breweries who were using the leftover donated bread to make beer. So, we started taking the food bank’s leftover whole grain bread and using it to make Breaking Bread Amber Ale. Our brewer roasts the bread and uses it in the mash. We give $1 from each beer sold back to the food bank. We’ve donated around $15,000 now back to the food bank from this beer. This really connected us with the community.

We said from the beginning that we wanted to be a contributing member of the community.

We have had other collaborative partnerships too. We have partnered with Mamas for Mamas. We have a partnership with our local radio station, New Country 100.7, and we brew a Casey Clarke Show Kölsch. People would come in for this beer alone.

We have also collaborated with the Bridge Youth and Family Services and another local radio station to produce our Beach Radio Blonde Ale.

We’ll have one or two community brews on at any time, where we give a portion of the proceeds to a community organization that aligns with our values.

Kim: What do you have planned at Barn Owl for this winter? 

Gary: During the winter, we are continuing with our Monday night run club. We have a lot of runners in our community.

We are also going to do a bit more food in our kitchen. We can now do limited food offerings in the Milk Shed in the evenings after the coffee service ends.

We are trying to make this a year where we maximize everything we are doing. We feel like we are working well in our niche. We are going to keep doing what we do well.

The biggest boost for us is using the loft space for events. We can have 54 people for an event in our loft. Events do really well.

We are also planning to run another two Barn Bites and Brews events. This is where we partner with a local chef who pairs our beers with a variety of dishes.

Kim: I understand you use an innovative BREWHA brewing system to make your beer. Can you please tell me more?

Gary: The BREWHA system allows us to operate within a much smaller brew space, so we can have a larger variety of beers available. It also contributes to environmental sustainability by using less water, chemicals and energy. It’s pretty cool because when other breweries are looking at a BREWHA system, the manufacturer recommends that the brewery folks come and spend a day with us to learn.

Kim: We are in a period of uncertainty around the world right now. What keeps you up at night?  

Gary: Honestly, nothing. If anything were to keep me up, it would be our debt load. But, I have a lot of peace. Kelowna’s real estate market is strong. And we’re confident in what we’ve built. It’s more than just beer. If it was just beer, I’d be terrified. I remember Ken Beattie saying something along the lines of ‘if you’re just about beer, you’re probably going to fail. Gone are the days when it’s just about beer.’ We’re confident in what we do, and we’re grateful for that.

Kim: If you had one piece of advice for someone wanting to get into the craft beer industry, what would it be?  

Gary: Sometimes you don’t know what will work until you try. Just try some things and see what works. Experiment and find your lane. See what sticks for your neighbourhood and your business. Don’t be afraid to fail. Try it, and learn from it.

I’ll also share the same advice we got when we started: don’t give up your day job. It’s important to keep a steady stream of income.

Lastly, I would say, surround yourself with people that know more about everything than you and use them. When people learn that we have never owned a business before, they are surprised that we have been so successful. But we surround ourselves with people who know more than we do, and that has really helped us.

Kim: What is your favourite beer to enjoy in the winter?

Gary: I’m a weirdo. I have no consistent style. I will have our blueberry sour, an IPA and then a stout. And I enjoy all three. My consistent go-to beers at our place are our Headturner Hazy IPA and our Don’t Give a Hoot Pale Ale. Or our Blueberry Beret Berliner Weisse. This is the only beer that I’ve specifically asked our brewer to make. I wanted a beer with blueberries in it.

Kim: What are you drinking when you aren’t drinking alcohol?

Gary: Water. Tap water. And one coffee a day. I will drink the occasional non-alcoholic beer also, such as an Athletic IPA. I’m all about balance.

KL: What do you love about the craft beer scene in your area?

Gary: We were the seventh brewery to open in Kelowna 5.5 years ago. Then the industry here really blew up. We now have 22 craft breweries in the Greater Kelowna area. Everyone is really trying to find their alleyway. Everyone is trying to find their way in the community without going down.

I truly believe that gone are the days when you could just make good beer. Kettle River relies on their amazing food offerings. For BNA, it’s their smash burger and bowling lanes. For Red Bird, it’s their live music and offering the younger person’s party vibe. Everyone is just trying to find their way. And no, I don’t think everyone’s going to survive.

Kim: Can you tell me about some hidden gems in your area? 

Gary: Well I love to run. So I would say go for a run. I suggest going for a walk or a run along the waterfront.

Hike Knox Mountain. Within 20 minutes you have incredible views of the lake. You can see down the lake to Peachland and up the lake to Vernon. I’d also say rent a bike and go for a ride along the trestles at Myra Canyon. It is definitely worth doing.

There are numerous great spots for amazing food and cocktails. One of my recommendations is Skinny Duke’s Glorious Emporium. It’s like walking into your grandma’s place. They have amazing cocktails and great food. Born to Shake is my new favourite cocktail place. They are creating an amazing cocktail experience.

There are so many fantastic dining experiences here. The unique, smaller local places are very special.

And of course, you have to check out our incredible craft beer scene.

Kim: Is there anything else you want to share?

Gary: We’re still learning and growing. Mostly we’re thankful for places like Cannery Brewing and Field House that have been so open with us and share information and advice.

It’s an industry where people are more on your side than against you. We’re all trying to survive.

Also, our fun collabs with Mel and Andy at Locality Brewing are life-giving. I love that we can share wins and losses and grow together. People often wonder how we connected with Locality because they are in Langley. It’s a funny story. I was working at the Coast, and I got chatting with a beer Instagrammer who suggested I go to Locality, and that’s what I did. They were closed, but I called and Mel and Andy told me to come by. Andy suggested we do a Farm to Barn collab. And that’s where it all began.

Kim: You get to pick who I speak with next. Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Gary: I’d like you to speak with Josh Vanderheide at Field House. They built their brewery with crowd-sourced funding. I don’t know if they truly realize how much of an impact they’ve had on this industry. Josh is so great. He wants to help the industry in general. Even though he had already won Brewery of the Year a couple of times, Josh always made time for me when I was starting our brewery. He set the standard for what customer service in craft beer looked like and that was very inspiring to me.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Josh Vanderheide, the founder of Field House Brewing in Abbotsford, on the Fraser Valley Ale Trail. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends with Gary Brucker of Barn Owl Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Alex Jopson from Another Beer Co. At the end of our discussion, Alex recommended that I speak with Melanie MacInnes from Locality Brewing for my next Hops Among Friends interview. Melanie is the owner and general manager at Locality Brewing, which was established in 2021 in Langley on the Langley Ale Trail.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Melanie. She is very passionate about craft beer, relationships within the brewery industry and community, her family, and her role as an Indigenous female farm brewery owner. I hope you enjoy learning more about Melanie, Locality Brewing and her love of the Langley area.

Kim: The MacInnes family has owned and operated a farm for many generations. How did you get started in craft beer?

Melanie: That’s a big question. I grew up on this farm. It was a dairy farm and feedlot. Today, the barn is where our tasting room is located. We sold the cows in 1992 when free trade came into effect, and then we got into horse boarding. Over many years, we kept searching for the best way to operate the property.

One such way was through a government agricultural program to plant cottonwood trees for renewable plant fibre, so we planted 36 acres of the trees. We continued with this until the Scott Paper Mill shut down about 20 years ago, and there was no one to sell the trees to. So, we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves… what can we do to keep the family farm?

One day, some movie location scouts flew in an airplane over the farm, and they thought it looked like Pennsylvania. They asked if they could film a movie called Scary Movie 4 on the farm. It was intended to mock the thriller movie, The Village. They managed to film over a month of the muddiest, rainiest weather, but it was successfully completed. When they finished filming, like many film sets, they were going to dispose of the buildings in the landfill. We thought these buildings could be reused and perhaps they could be used for some student films and lower-budget productions. Other films did come, one of which was a movie named Beyond Sherwood Forest, directed by Peter Delius. One of the horse wranglers on the production suggested moving the buildings and building a Western Town. We did that and we called it Jamestown. Producers and directors would come and look at it as a possible filming location.

My brother Kevin reached out to Brian Bird, a producer, who was looking for a location to pilot the Hallmark series When Calls the Heart (WCTH). He and Michael Landon Jr. came out and looked at our property, and then decided to film the series here at the farm. Every season, the viewership has increased and although each year has faced challenges, the show has gone on. It’s been 12 years, and it’s still being filmed on the farm. Canadians can watch WCTH on Super Channel via Prime or Cable.

My husband Andrew is from Australia. So, along the way, we ended up living in Australia for three years. While we travelled and worked around Australia, we loved going to breweries and wineries that incorporated open spaces, and the farm-to-table concept. We enjoyed the idea of being surrounded by the ingredients that we were eating. Some of the breweries there had green spaces where families could hang out.

We came back from Australia in 2012 and were surprised that there were not many farm breweries here in BC other than Persephone and Crannóg. We loved the experience of going to wineries and seeing the grapes, but we didn’t see breweries on farm properties with barley and malts showcasing the key ingredients in beer. We thought about opening a brewery at the time, but the idea of opening a farm brewery seemed like such a huge undertaking.

Instead, we kind of decided to trick ourselves by starting small, and we planted some hops and an acre of barley to test it. We hadn’t seen others grow barley in the Lower Mainland, so we wondered if it would work here. We also planted blight-resistant hazelnut trees. Plus, we grafted cider apple trees in 2016.  We also decided to take a beekeeping course and we added honeybees to the farm plan.

The barley grew and turned golden and was ready for harvest, but we didn’t have the equipment to harvest it. So, we went to the BC Farm Museum in Fort Langley and met a fellow named Wally. He grabbed two 1890 scythes from the wall for us. We borrowed them, returned to the farm and hand-harvested the barley. We sent the barley in for testing, and it hit the malting specs perfectly.

So, we planted five more acres of barley. We kept going on the hops. Plus, we had six acres of cider apple trees and six acres of hazelnut trees.

Our friends Richard and Kira introduced us to Iain and Christina from Strange Fellows. (Note from Kim: Iain’s Hops Among Friends article can be read here). Iain was with us when we first planted the barley, and he was very realistic with us. He came out to some harvests as well, and it was very helpful to get his input. Our relationship with Iain started here, and we contributed our malt in a collab with Strange Fellows for a “100-mile beer”.

Andrew, being an engineer, built a half-ton malt house. We were able to hit malting specs. Then we got involved with the Craft Maltsters Guild and we continued to learn. We are one of very few certified craft malt breweries in BC.

By this time, we had the ingredients, and we had the malt house, so now it was time to complete the “Field-to-Glass” journey, and we decided to start the farm brewery. COVID-19 delayed the plans, but we eventually managed to open mid-COVID. We first worked on some pilot trial batches with brewer Nick Hendrickson, currently the brewer at Four Winds, and Erik Jensen. Then we hired Karen Cheshire, a brewer who graduated from Olds University and had a biochemist degree from UBC, who previously worked at Steamworks Brewing. With her help, we finished building out the brewhouse. Then we added some great marketing and front-of-house support. I would like to give a shout-out to Lori Fields and Ivan Eytzen for their help here. We opened our doors at the end of July 2021.

As an aside, as we were working on our own brewery, The Beer Farmers and Barnside Brewing also opened, and they were also growing their own ingredients. We’ve learned it’s really full circle in this industry. We do a collab beer with them every year. It’s called Grainstorm, and 100% of the ingredients come from our three farms.

Around this time, we also met Tim LaHay from The Barley Merchant. We started hanging out with Tim, having long chats in the barley fields as we talked about the struggles and delays we were all facing as we were trying to open our businesses during COVID. We ended up opening within a week of each other, and we’ve had a great relationship with Tim for many years.

Kim: What makes Locality so unique?

Melanie: We are like an onion. Every time you come here, you peel back another layer and learn something new. It’s such a wild place. (As an aside, our location can be difficult to find, so it’s best to use Google Maps GPS and type in Locality Brewing, rather than the address.)

We are fortunate though, as people love our space. We have a pond, and we added a stage on the pond this year for live music events.

Even as a farm, it is a very unique space. We have a trail around the pond where you can take your dog for a walk. We had an otter swimming in the pond this year. There are beavers and hawks and lots of different birds and wildlife. We have Stampede Burger onsite. It is Metis-owned, and you can have a bison burger there. We also host events with the Waceya Metis Society.

Additionally, you can tour the malt house, and you can see the hops growing up the hop bines beside the picnic area.

Tucked behind the hop bines is our indoor “Secret, not-so-secret, Skate Bowl”.  Every year, we host a skate comp with HMI Skate Park Society with Hippie Mike, and we do a beer collab with a skate apparel company. We have worked with Time Bomb, Etnies, Well Kept Sustainables and Devil’s Toys.

We also hosted an awesome evening with GrlSwirl, a worldwide skate club where people can meet up to skate together. I love to surfskate myself. Andrew and I met through our mutual love of snowboarding and surfing, and we love to travel to surf locations. Farming restricts the amount we can travel, so we decided to bring our passion for board sports to the farm. We will be working with Hot Girl Skate, Shred Catz and Surfskate Vancouver to host meet-ups and create a fun, loving, and safe space for people to find community through skating and surfskating.

We are very different and provide very unique experiences; very different than the experiences at most other breweries.

Kim: Tell me about your first collab beer at Locality.

Melanie: My first love of craft beer was because of Trading Post‘s West Coast IPA. People kept suggesting I try lagers, but I didn’t really get into them. Then I tried Trading Post’s Saison, and I really enjoyed it. But then I tried their West Coast IPA, and I realized that this was my beer. That was my moment. The moment when I discovered my love for craft beer.

So, I was very stoked when we did our first collab beer with Tony at Trading Post for a Women’s Day event held at Farm Country Brewing. At the time we brewed the beer for the event, it had to be brewed on a one-hectolitre pilot brew system, so we brought our system to Trading Post. This was right before we opened. We made a table Saison. It was very sweet of Tony to do this with us. He took a chance with us, and it really meant a lot.

It was two years before the Locality/Trading Post collab when I first met Nancy More and other women in the industry. At that time, Lance and Tony hosted women from Kwantlen Polytechnic Univeristy (KPU) and the brewing industry for a Women’s Day collab, only weeks before COVID shut the World down. It was amazing to be so warmly welcomed and to be supported by such legends.

Kim: What do you have coming up at Locality?

Melanie Every year we do a couple of collabs with Barn Owl Brewing from Kelowna. We think they are very cool people. When they come for a visit, we like to brew a collab beer with them.

On their last visit, we brewed a seasonal IPA called Uncle Eddie’s Festive IPA with cranberry and orange peel. It was released in late November, exclusively on tap at the two breweries.

We also have another exciting beer release coming up. This one is a collab with Another Beer Co., (Note: one of ABC’s owners is Nadine, an Indigenous business owner who also owns Heartberry Soda). This collab is a Fresh Hop beer named Askî Oci, which means “From the Land” in Plains Cree. It’s a Brett Saison that is hop forward. It will be coming out in mid-December in 500ml bottles.

Also in December, we are launching a new collab beer called Beer Goggles with Dragon Alliance Canada and Time Bomb Apparel. It’s a hazy, New England IPA (NEIPA) with Cryo Sabro and Elani hops. It’s unfiltered and double dry-hopped, with light bitterness and a juicy finish. We brewed it to enjoy after spending time outdoors this winter. It’s a great choice following a perfect run on the mountain.

Kim: What else are you working on at Locality? 

Melanie: We just launched a Mexican Hot Chocolate Porter. This was a collab with A Rocha Farm Store and we used their hot peppers in this beer.

I should also mention that both our brewers are female. Karen is our head brewer and Emily Comeau is our assistant brewer. Emily went to KPU, so we had a few of the other KPU students out and they brewed a Toasted Coconut Porter.

The other beer that will be back again is our Cranberry Enchantment Sparkling Ale. It’s in Champagne bottles and it’s always a big hit. These beers will be available on-site at Locality Brewing from Thursday to Sunday and at our After Dark In The Lodge from 6-9 pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and at the Thunderbird Equestrian Centre Christmas in the Country and Fort Langley Christmas Market. We just released this for the season. It’s a really limited-release beer, although we did brew a double batch this year.

Kim: What do you love most about the craft beer industry?

Melanie: For me, it’s definitely all about the relationships. The relationships with the other breweries, and our customers, and my family, and neighbours.

Our breweries create community.

I grew up on this farm. It’s beautiful, but it’s also very isolating. Having our brewery here is a way of building community on rural land. I think a farm brewery is like a modern-day community hall. It’s similar to where our parents used to hold farm dances.

Kim: How is it for you as an Indigenous woman working in BC’s craft beer industry?

Melanie: I see being an Indigenous woman business owner as a great responsibility. We were nominated for and won the Indigenous Led Business of the Year at the 2022 BC Food and Beverage Awards. When we were first nominated for this award, we had to really think about accepting the nomination. Winning this award escalated things for me as I wanted to consider the impact of what we are doing going forward. With this award, we now have a platform where we can stand for all Indigenous businesses. I think part of this platform is highlighting Indigenous people.

With regards to Truth & Reconciliation, I believe we have a responsibility to teach and a responsibility to learn. We have an opportunity and a platform to work with each other and boost each other up.

I am fortunate to be connected with other Indigenous-led businesses and businesspeople. For example, Stampede Burgers is Metis-owned. There is also Nadine from Heartberry Soda. I find that working with other amazing Indigenous women is wonderful.

When I think of other amazing connections, I think of Inez Cook from Salmon n’ Bannock. Inez has been such an amazing mentor for me. There are two Salmon n’ Bannock restaurants in Vancouver. One of them is in the International Departures area at the Vancouver Airport. Our beer is there. And that was all created by relationships.

We did a collab beer with Salmon n’ Bannock and Spirit Bear Coffee – a Hazelnut Coffee Cream Ale.

Every time an Indigenous person is connected with another Indigenous person or business, it makes each business stronger. I think of Darnell Stager from Indigenous Tourism BC. He was amazing at connecting us with other tourism-related Indigenous businesses.

I also think back to two of our original connectors: Darian from Jelly Marketing and Bernard from Farm Credit Canada.

I recently went to a fundraiser for Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week which was held in November. It’s open to everyone, and I highly recommend it. I have huge dreams of hosting a future Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week event here at the farm where we have a floating catwalk set amongst the barley. I’m meeting more and more people who are helping me see this as a possibility in the future.

Being an Indigenous female owner of a farm brewery presents me with opportunities that I wouldn’t have otherwise. What this means to me is that with my role comes great responsibility.

Hearing the different stories from these Indigenous people is really amazing. Today, through learning and connecting, everyone is finding their own way.

Kim: We’ve seen some changes in BC’s craft beer industry lately including some brewery closures. What are your thoughts on this?

Melanie: It is incredibly hard. The cost of everything is up. Consumer buying is down. It seems like we all have to work ten times harder to make the same amount. It’s tragic. With each brewery that closes, it is a community lost. Every brewery is a place where people go, so when a brewery closes, that signifies a loss for that community.

It’s a difficult time for craft breweries. Knowing how much passion each brewery brings; I know it’s never easy to make the decision to close. BC’s craft beer industry will make it through this, but it’s definitely a tough time right now.

Kim: What keeps you up at night?  

Melanie: My kids. Honestly, I’m so busy being a brewery owner and trying to be with my teenage boys, and we’re still working second jobs. Life and family balance is hard. I hope we get there at some point.

It’s becoming evident how quickly time flies now that they are teenagers, and we want to focus on spending more time together with our kids in the year ahead.

My kids are involved in the brewery. One of my sons, Sebastian, helps with the design of the labels. Our other son Lachlan knows how to fix equipment, drive the tractor, fix roofs and more. He’s very much a farm kid. But having said that, they are teenagers, and they have their own interests, and they want to do their own things besides work with us at the brewery!

Kim: You have a huge property. If budget wasn’t an issue, if you could have any musician or band perform on the new stage by your pond at the brewery, who would it be? 

Melanie: I would have said Tragically Hip. But for now, with Andrew being Australian, he has a vision of having Xavier Rudd play here. He’s a very popular Australian one-man band. We saw him in Whistler and he’s amazing. I’ll put that out there because we would love to have him play here.

Kim: What are some of your favourite beers in winter?

Melanie: Going into this season, I am excited about our Beer Goggles collab as we get ready for the snow season up on the mountain. I am a lover of both West Coast IPAs and NEIPAs.

You know how some days you brew the perfect pot of coffee, and you try to replicate that each day? I feel like this about our West Coast IPA. When I drink it, sometimes I just think it’s so incredible, like that was the perfect batch.

Kim: I saw that the 8 Langley Loop breweries and The Barley Merchant are collaborating to feature Langley beers at the Langley Events Centre. Tell me more about this.

Melanie: Yes, it’s really exciting. It’s been in the works for quite a while. Some of the individual breweries have had their beers in the building in the past. A while back, Rachelle Cashato introduced me to Dale Saip, the Senior Vice President of the Vancouver Giants. He mentioned the idea of having a variety of different local beers available at the games. So, for the last year, we alternated between the breweries and would switch beers from each brewery at one of the smaller concession stands.

Since Tim from The Barley Merchant does such an amazing job advocating for Langley breweries, it made sense for him to be the umbrella for this and be the connector that strengthens all of our relationships. It was important that it was Tim from The Barley Merchant, so it’s not a single brewery leading it. Tim really cares about all of the breweries.

Every six games or so, we rotate to a different style of beer. The idea is that with eight breweries, we are each promoting people to go to the home games at the events centre. It’s a cool way to create community there. You can go to the local hockey game and drink amazing local beer. I think it’s the most amazing thing ever.

It was a pipe dream to have more local craft beer presence there, so this is all so very exciting. I could not ever imagine seeing people drink our craft beer in the building. Tim did such a great job working with Dale and Erin to get this across the line. It was a real joint effort. Everyone played a part in getting it to this point.  If you want to come to a Giants home game this season, you can get tickets here and use the discount code: langleyloop.

And speaking of the Langley Loop, we also have Langley Craft Beverage Week in May. This was our second year of running this. We draw a name to see who hosts the collab beer. So, stay tuned for more from the Langley Loop and Langley Craft Beverage Week.

Kim: What are some hidden gems in the Langley area? 

Melanie: I think Fort Langley is just the coolest place. There are awesome coffee shops and great restaurants. It is very walkable. They have night markets on Friday nights in the summer, and it feels like a Hallmark movie. They have a beer garden and artisans selling their arts and crafts items. Also at Fort Langley, there is a restaurant called Tradish the Ancestor Café. They have delicious traditional Indigenous cuisine there like Bannock Tacos.

Plus, there is the historic fort you can go into and see what fort life was like back in the day.

I definitely recommend that people stop for dinner or lunch at The Barley Merchant. It’s also a great way to try all the Langley beers.

There’s also the Historic Otter 248th Trail. There are a variety of cool farms and businesses along the trail. JD Farms Specialty Turkeys has the best turkey sandwich ever. There’s also the Thunderbird Show Park, which is an equestrian centre. Most people don’t realize that you can go and watch incredible show jumping. Plus, Kensington Prairie Farm has alpacas.

There’s also the Circle Farm Tour with so many cool farm businesses to visit. Langley is also a great place to visit in the fall for pumpkins, plus we have lots of cool Christmas tree farms around here.

Kim: What else do you want to share with me? 

Melanie: This really is a family business. My parents Wendy and Rod are a huge part of all of this. I am very lucky that my parents are both alive, healthy and very hard-working. Without their support, none of this would happen. My dad is a powerhouse. The saving grace with my kids is that they have their grandparents around to support them.

My brother Kevin runs the filming side of our business. Both of his daughters, Ivy and Isy have worked at the brewery. It’s a real family affair – we are all working together to make this happen. We couldn’t have done this without all of our family.

Andrew, the Maltster, idea generator, and engineer of the operation keeps things exciting and is very supportive of me running and leading the brewery. Of course, my boys, Sebastian and Lachlan working with us and putting up with the time demands of a family business, they are my world and I love them so much. I also can’t forget Atlas, our family dog and greeter of all. I think more people know Atlas than us and he is also our emotional support dog on those super tough days. I also have a great appreciation for all those who have passed and supported us in life and through spirit after.

We have so many people besides just our family to thank for getting us here today. Our first beer was our Thank You Honey Lager. On our first can, we thanked all of the people who were integral in helping us open the brewery.

Kim: Who in the craft beer community would you like me to interview next?

Melanie: I would like you to speak with Gary Brucker from Barn Owl Brewing in Kelowna next. We’ve been doing collabs together for some time. They are very cool. I pick them because they are so community-oriented, and really good people. I trust them so much. They care about the community, their family, and the beer industry. They came to Langley when we started talking about the Langley Loop to help us and to learn.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Gary from Barn Own Brewing in Kelowna on the Kelowna and West Kelowna Ale Trail.

Since 2017, this series has showcased more than 20 amazing members of BC’s craft beer community. You can read through all of my previous Hops Among Friends interviews here.

The post Hops Among Friends with Melanie MacInnes of Locality Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Tessa Gabiniewicz from Land & Sea Brewing. At the end of our discussion, Tessa recommended that I speak with Matt West-Patrick and Isaiah Archer from Whistle Buoy Brewing for my next Hops Among Friends interview. Matt is Co-owner and Head Brewer, Isaiah is Co-owner and Sales & Marketing Manager at Whistle Buoy Brewing, which was established in 2019 in Victoria on the Greater Victoria Ale Trail.

Matt and Isaiah are doing great things at Whistle Buoy Brewing and it was a really interesting discussion. I enjoyed hearing more about their commitment to featuring local ingredients in their beers.

This interview also reminded me that it’s been too long since I’ve been to Victoria. The last time I visited Victoria, I had the opportunity to peek inside the windows at Whistle Buoy Brewing before it opened in 2019.

I’m super honoured to share that this is my 20th interview in this series over the last 7 years. You can read through all of my previous Hops Among Friends articles here. It’s been an absolute privilege to interview so many amazing leaders in the craft beer industry.

Kim: What was your first experience with craft beer?

Matt: Growing up in Victoria, my first experience with craft beer was seeing Phillips Brewing boom as I came to be of legal drinking age. They were the big player in the craft beer market here and doing lots of great stuff. They were my inspiration to later on chase the craft beer dream.

Isaiah: I moved to Victoria when I was 19. I think my first real craft beer experience was going to Sombrio Beach to surf and driving home through Sooke. We would always stop at 17 Mile House Pub after surfing, and we’d eat chowder paired with Race Rocks. This nice, hearty beer from Lighthouse Brewing was part of the whole experience. It was so different than just drinking a cheaper, commercial beer. Then I got introduced to the different beers in the mixed pack from Phillips and the White Bark Witbier from Driftwood Brewery.

Kim: How did you get started in craft beer together?

Matt: There were three of us that started this project together. We founded the company, and then we brought in two more partners during the process. Isaiah, Iwan and I were the three original founders. We spent a lot of time together in 2016 and 2017. We all really enjoyed the coastal life – freediving, spearfishing and other outdoor activities. I was working at Spinnakers at the time. Isaiah had previously worked with Phillips, and we started talking about opening a brewery.

The three of us started to put together our business plan in 2017. We started going to banks in 2018 once we found the space that worked for us. I am the head brewer, Isaiah handles our sales and marketing, and Iwan looks after business development.

As we were dealing with the banks, we started talking about the need for extra investors, and so we brought on two more partners. Colin and Nina were in Windsor at the time and wanted to move back to Victoria. They came on board and Colin is our front-of-house manager, and Nina handles our financials and HR. In the beginning, though, it was all hands on deck, and everyone helped with everything.

Isaiah: Iwan, Matt and I got together based on our mutual interest in craft beer, playing on the same softball team, and our love of freediving and spearfishing. Freediving is a bit of an obscure sport that all three of us were interested in. That shared interest led the three of us to some fishing trips in Bamfield. We were diving near a spot marked by a nautical beacon, which is called a whistle buoy. That is what inspired our branding and logo.

Kim: Tell me more about the Whistle Buoy theme.

Isaiah: The theme really resonated for all of us because of our love of outdoor adventures and our natural and inspiring environment. Plus, we are located in downtown Victoria, which is also a coastal environment. We are young professionals working downtown in the city, but we also have a keen interest in the outdoor environment. So it’s a balance of opposites. We are all about embracing our vibrant, downtown community, full of culture and hospitality, while also making sure we get outside and explore everything that the outdoors has to offer.

A big part of what we try to get across is reflecting the quality of the place that we are in. We are on the southern part of the island, which is a very productive growing region. We want our beers to reflect the growing climate here, and the variety of things that grow around us. We are looking to connect our brewery and beers to our local community in this way. We look at our taproom as an “experience centre”. People can come and try a taste of Vancouver Island.

We have a clear vision to make sure we are buying ingredients that are grown here first, and we work with a lot of local producers before we go elsewhere. A lot of value that we offer comes from this philosophy. It differentiates and highlights the place we are in. We are a tourism destination and we like to reflect the good stuff that is coming from our community. Our beers are made for the people who live here and our visitors.

An example is using bull kelp in our Under Sea Gose. The kelp is from the ocean just up the road from us. The grain for most of our beers is grown near BC Ferries on the peninsula. For our sour beers and fruit beers, we look for local farmers for these ingredients too. It’s important to us to use quality ingredients that are grown as close to home as possible.

Matt: I was at Field 5 Farm today, which is about 20 minutes away from our brewery. They grow and malt their own grains there for us. About 95-98% of the grains that we use for our beer right now are coming from them.

I think it’s also worth noting that we won two silver medals back-to-back in the 2022 and 2023 Canadian Brewing Awards in the Historic/Regional Beers category for our Backyard IPA and our Garden City Fieldberry. Then we won a bronze at the 2023 Canada Beer Cup for our LoJo Lite in the Canadian Grain-Forward category. These awards reflect our commitment to working with local suppliers and featuring local ingredients, so it’s very cool when we win awards for this reason.

The seed to glass film above talks about Whistle Buoy’s commitment to working with local suppliers.

Kim: What makes Whistle Buoy unique?

Isaiah: Our commitment to local, sustainability and quality are front and centre. Another thing that makes us unique is our location. We are located on the courtyard level of the historic Market Square in downtown Victoria. We are able to have a light industrial business in an urban area, which is quite rare for a brewery. We have 170 seats in our taproom and year-round patio. Most of the beer we produce is consumed in our taproom space, and that is because we are in a high-traffic environment.

Kim: Tell me something you are really proud of at Whistle Buoy.

Isaiah: We are proud of creating an inclusive community space. We’ve had a lot of feedback over the last couple of years that groups of people from different backgrounds say they feel welcome in our space. We have worked towards this very intentionally. We have our values and our code of conduct really clear.

Intolerance and discrimination aren’t welcome here. We have fostered a nice community space where people feel welcome. – Isaiah

I’m also really proud of the progress we have made towards using local ingredients. This doesn’t just happen by chance. It was really intentional. It can be more costly to go with local producers, but we have made some very awesome beers because of that commitment.

Matt: It circles back to the awards that we’ve won for our beers. We set the intention to use as many local ingredients as possible, and we’ve done that. We’ve been lucky to have such great partners, like Field 5 Farm.

In addition to kelp, we also add blue spirulina to our Under Sea Gose. This was a bucket list beer for me to be able to make, and it won the silver award at the 2022 BC Beer Awards. To be able to produce this and have it be an award-winning beer is pretty cool.

Plus, we do all that we do in a very small space. Our production area is only 600 square feet. We really have to utilize our space to maximize output. People are always shocked when they see our small space. I’m pretty proud of how we are able to use our space and produce what we do.

We brew about 1,000 hectolitres a year. We are looking to increase that volume this year with our new single-head canning line. We’ve been running it now for about two months. It does about seven or eight cans a minute. It’s small and slow, but works for us. About 90% of our beer is sold through our taproom, and we intend to keep it that way, but our new canning line gives us more flexibility. Previously we were just doing 1-litre crowlers, so we couldn’t can in a way that allowed us to put cans into liquor stores. This new canning line now gives us the ability to package more of our beers in 473ml cans.

Kim: What do you have planned at Whistle Buoy for this winter? 

Matt: Because we just added our new canning line, we’ve been focusing on getting our core brands dialled in. We’ve had some core, flagship beers like our Coastality Pale Ale, however, most of our beers were previously experimental, taproom exclusives. But with the canning line and the ability to now roll out our beers to stores, we are looking to have more regular offerings of our core beers available to our stores.

We anticipate this continuing for the foreseeable future. With an 8-hectolitre system, our distribution is focused on the Greater Victoria area for now. Our focus is to be in all 50 local liquor stores in our community.

Isaiah: Having said that, we have shipped some beer to the Okanagan with some other small breweries. We will co-ship a pallet to interested stores. So this collective approach is the way that we’ll have beer available outside of the area.

In terms of other activities this winter, we do a lot of activations in our space such as comedy, quiz nights, film screenings and other weekly events. We are focused on staying busy and staying open for the people who are in town and want to come through. We are open every day from noon until late. We are staying open, staying consistent and staying inspired to continue offering people in our community things to do. We are planning for a good year ahead. We are anticipating a busy tourism year in 2024, so we are focused on being steady and being consistent as we plan for a great year ahead. Plus, we’ve got some cool collabs coming up.

Kim: What do you love most about the craft beer industry?

Matt: The community and the people that we get to work with. For me, from the outside looking in, you see the collabs and you see the camaraderie. You don’t see this in other industries. We are competitors that are working together.

Isaiah: For me, it’s the fact that we are able to really grow as people and entrepreneurs. There are so many different demands we face on a daily basis. We deal with logistics and shipping. We are leading hospitality teams and managing people. We are doing graphic design, working on packaging, manufacturing beer, and working with local producers. We are selling merchandise that we are designing. There are so many moving parts that make it challenging and yet also so fun. It’s so dynamic. We have a vision, then we execute it, and we make money doing something that makes people happy. It’s very special in that way.

Kim: What keeps you up at night?  

Isaiah: Lots. There is a lot of uncertainty right now. The industry is changing a lot and there are fewer people buying beer. People are making decisions for their health and drinking less alcohol, and that’s OK. The younger demographic is making different choices, and there is economic uncertainty. We are dealing with these changes and uncertainties while also trying to maintain a healthy business. We are working to keep demand for our products at a point where there will always be a market for what we are doing. I believe we are at a scale where this is sustainable.

I think it’s important to be really present to the changes that are happening, otherwise, the market conditions could change so drastically that if you aren’t paying attention you could really get into trouble. This is certainly an inspiration for us to stay on top of things and know why we exist. I think it’s important to know who your best customers are and what they are looking for. Some businesses let this slip, and they pay the price as they discover that their business models don’t work anymore.

Matt: Through this, we are now doing things like NA (non-alcoholic) beer. Five years ago that wasn’t on anyone’s radar. For me as a brewer, I resisted this.

Now I look at it like how do we make an NA beer the best it can be? It’s an interesting challenge, but I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to produce. – Matt

Isaiah: In our taproom space, we try to welcome all people from different demographics and different interests. So it’s always been a priority that we are a welcoming space with a diverse list of offerings. We have local wine, local cider, local kombuchas, craft sodas from Phillips, cocktails, mocktails and more. Whether you like drinking beer or not, we want everyone to feel comfortable. We want to offer something for everyone, and we want those who don’t drink beer or alcohol to be comfortable. We want to offer something for everyone who wants to be social. We are a hospitality company, so we think it’s important to be hospitable to all.

Kim: If you had one piece of advice for someone wanting to get into the craft beer industry, what would it be?  

Isaiah: Honestly, it would be don’t. If there is a town that doesn’t have a community gathering space, then maybe yes. But otherwise, the market is oversaturated and changing so rapidly right now, that my advice would be to wait until the dust settles on the cycle of what our businesses are in right now. I think it’s a huge risk to enter the craft beer market at this time.

Matt: I agree, especially if you don’t know beer. These days, you have to come with your A-game. The level of beer is so high right now and there is no room to make bad beer anymore. It used to be that you could be a home brewer and open a brewery and just figure it out. Now you need education or experience. You better be good because just making beer isn’t enough anymore.

This is maybe a bleak answer. But it is what we feel right now. Good breweries are closing that made good beer.

Kim: What is your favourite beer to enjoy in the winter?

Isaiah: It’s Stout season. I’ve been drinking our Stouty McStoutface, which is an American Stout, 5.8% ABV. It’s plain and simple, easy drinking. I also go to the Drake a lot, and I enjoy the Old Rasputin, a Russian Imperial Stout on nitro from North Coast Brewing Company.

I also like the 1019 Hazy Double IPA collab from Field House and Town Brewing. It’s really great. I like bigger beers at this time of year.

Matt: We just did a Dark Cold IPA as a collab with Another Beer Co. We used rice and tried to make it as light as possible, and hit it with some dark malts. It’s really interesting and one of my favourite beers of late. It was a challenge for us when we came up with the concept. You don’t see a lot of dark IPAs lately, but I was stoked about it. I like something to chew on in my beers at this time of year.

Kim: It’s dry February. What are you drinking when you aren’t drinking alcohol?

Isaiah: Water or SodaStream water with freshly squeezed citrus. I like lemons, limes and oranges with soda water. Having the carbonation is nice. And of course, there’s always going to be coffee involved too.

Matt: For me, it’s water first. We also have Culture Craft Kombucha on tap at the brewery, and it’s a nice alternative. It gets you and your guts feeling good.

Kim: Festival season is coming. What are your favourite craft beer festivals? 

Matt and Isaiah: Whistlemania. It’s our annual birthday party, which we hold on the last weekend in June. We’ve done two now. We host a small music festival with live, local wrestling. We take over the courtyard of Market Square and we have an all-day festival. We had about 650 people last year. We had food vendors and food trucks, drag shows, live wrestling, and other wacky stuff all day long.

Isaiah: Phillips Backyard weekend is great. It’s a good music event tied to craft beer. It’s a premier event in our city. Plus of course, GCBF is always fun, with breweries from all over BC and beyond. It’s a great way to celebrate the industry and try lots of different beers. It’s really an iconic beer festival.

Kim: If budget and space weren’t an issue, if you could have any musician or band perform at your brewery, who would it be? 

Isaiah: Taylor Swift.

Matt: Taylor Swift and Drake. Funny story. We were in Seattle for a Blue Jays game. Taylor Swift was playing next door that same weekend. The whole town was all about the Blue Jays and the Swifties. The Swifties caused an earthquake that night in Seattle from so many people dancing at her concert. It was registered as the equivalent of a 2.3 magnitude earthquake.

And funny enough, I was just talking about our new Dark Cold IPA collab with Another Beer Co. We actually called it Friendship Bracelet, and it was inspired by Taylor Swift.

Kim: Can you tell me about some hidden gems in your area? 

Isaiah: We’re on Lower Johnson (LoJo), which is a boutique retail shopping district in Victoria. There are tons of really high-end shops, clothing stores, coffee shops, amazing restaurants and more. Hey Happy is an amazing coffee shop in Market Square that we go to all the time. Some of my favourite restaurants are The Tapa Bar and Wind Cries Mary. Plus there’s Green Cuisine right next door to us. These are all great dining options in Victoria.

Matt: The Drake is a great place to start. You can see our patio from their patio. Eva Schnitzelhaus is 2 blocks away at the bottom of Chinatown, and it’s really great. Shuck Taylor’s oyster bar is really awesome. It’s a seafood restaurant with local oysters, West Coast seafood, lobster rolls, po boys, local beer, wines and spirits.

Isaiah: Beacon Hill Park has a great petting zoo. It’s like the Stanley Park of Victoria. It’s huge and right downtown by the water. I would recommend everyone walking around there and on the breakwater. It’s a protected area, so there are lots of cool fish species to look for.

I also recommend walking around the inner harbour area. Take the seawall walk from James Bay to downtown and you’ll go past the Empress Hotel and the Legislature Parliament Buildings. It’s also cool to check out the buskers and performers. Plus there are lots of great areas to explore by bike, downtown and beyond.

Matt: Oh and lots of breweries. There are 5 breweries within easy walking distance.

Kim: Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Matt and Isaiah: We want you to talk to Alex Jopson from Another Beer Co. in New Westminster next. We just did a collab beer with Another Beer Co. and Land & Sea Brewing. Another Beer Co. is a super tiny brewery. They are very experimental and they are producing very high-quality beers.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Alex Jopson, the Co-Founder and Director of Another Beer Co. in New Westminster, on the North of the Fraser Ale Trail. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Isaiah Archer and Matt West-Patrick of Whistle Buoy Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Connor Blanchard from Luppolo Brewing. Connor was able to pay it forward, and he selected Tessa Gabiniewicz, the Head Brewer at Land & Sea Brewing for my next Hops Among Friends discussion. Land & Sea Brewing was established in 2018 in Comox on the Vancouver Island Part II Ale Trail.

I enjoyed speaking with Tessa and learning about her career in BC’s craft beer industry. She also got me excited to start planning a future trip to the Comox Valley and to go out foraging with her for ingredients for a future beer!

This is my 19th interview in the Hops Among Friends series over the last 6 years. You can read through all of my previous Hops Among Friends articles here.

Kim: How did you get started in craft beer?

Tessa: I got my start at Nelson Brewing Company in late 2009. I applied at NBC because they were looking for some extra help. Mike Kelly was the head brewer at the time, and he hired me on the brewing side. While I didn’t have any experience brewing, I went to school for robotics and automation in Ontario, and I think Mike saw potential there.

As I hadn’t done any brewing, I did some on-the-job shadowing. I started right away filtering and brewing beer. My hands-on college background gave me the right mechanical aptitude for this kind of work. I got right in there and I was really quick to learn the hands-on stuff, but microbiology is definitely where I lacked.

I was at Nelson Brewing until sometime in 2014. Then I went to Sherwood Mountain Brewhouse in Terrace as a consultant and contract brewer. I helped them open up their facility, and I helped them with their recipes and equipment in a professional capacity. Then I moved to Vancouver Island, to Union Bay in 2016. I was the contract brewer and consultant for Beach Fire Brewing in Campbell River — Darren Finnerty was also a homebrewer, so I was able to provide them with my professional expertise.

I really enjoyed working at these breweries. Both contracts were designed so that I would work myself out of a job once I got them set up and started.

From there, I went to 33 Acres Brewing from 2017 to 2018 as their Lead Brewer for the evenings. I got to work with the legendary David Varga, and I was able to hone my brewing skills here. Especially after working at two small breweries, it was great to be at a production facility again.

This then led me to the job at Land & Sea Brewing in April 2018.

Jason and Hanna Walker contacted me and asked if I would like to be their brewer. It was pretty awesome for me. People had been asking me if I wanted to start up my own brewery, but I was reluctant to start my own business as I love what I do. With the Land & Sea opportunity, I was able to build this brewery from the ground up.

The third time’s a charm when building a new brewery. The difference was that here at Land & Sea, if I do a good job, I get to stay, as opposed to the contract roles where if I was doing a good job, I would work myself out of a job. Land & Sea is the fifth brewery I’ve worked at, and the third one that I’ve opened up, but I’m so happy that I get to stay at this one.

I was able to build the brewery how I wanted it. I designed where to put the plumbing, so I have no one else to blame but myself! In this role, I make all of the recipes. Jason, Hanna and I oversee the operations and we have a great team to help us run the show. It’s been such a positive experience. We’ve grown a lot, yet we have tried not to expand too much, especially during COVID. We are proud of what we have built as a very taproom-focused brewery. We really want people to come to Land & Sea to experience all that we offer.

Kim: What do you love most about the craft beer industry?

Tessa: The community. It’s so special. It takes a bunch of working pieces to solve problems and make it the great industry that we have. I think this industry is really unique. I have found in the brewing industry, there is so much camaraderie and I love that. You can be the best brewer in your facility, but the more you learn from your colleagues, the more tools you get in your toolbox, and the more you keep learning. It’s an industry where you can keep learning for the rest of your life.

Here in the Comox Valley, there are five breweries. We call each other up for help or to borrow ingredients. If we are having a problem, there’s always someone there to jump on a call and help. The way we look at it is that the better we all do as a whole in the Valley, the more we will each succeed individually.

Kim: What makes Land & Sea unique?

Tessa: We are very taproom focused. You can bring grandma here, or you can come here on a date. We have a big, bright open space with two large garage doors. We have a 72-person capacity, with an additional patio in the drier months. We have one bar that you can sit at and another bar that you can order from.

We only have a small pony wall, so you can see into the brewhouse and into the kitchen from wherever you are. Our guests often comment to us that you really can see everything going on here.

Also, we have an awesome food program. We just won the Peoples’ Choice Awards for the best brewery, best nachos and best wings with the Comox Valley Record. We were really pleased to win these awards. There are five breweries in the Comox Valley, and they are all wonderful, so this was very meaningful for us.

We have a great space with a nice atmosphere, great beer, great food, and great people.

Kim: Tell me about something that you are really proud of.

Tessa: I would have to say being chosen to go to JD Wetherspoon to represent Canada and brew one of my beers was a career highlight for me. JD Wetherspoon is a company that has almost 900 pubs in the United Kingdom and Ireland. They hold an international brewing festival, with brewers from around the world. Gary Lohin from Central City Brewing called me and told me about the opportunity. I went in February 2020 just before the lockdown. There were brewers from five breweries around the world including Italy, New Zealand, Canada, the US and Japan. I was chosen to represent Canada.

I sent them a list of all the beers I had brewed to date for their consideration. They really liked my recipe for our Estuary Session Ale, which has 5 KG of spruce tips in it. I like to get on my dirt bike and take logging roads up the mountain to find and harvest the spruce tips for this beer. I am really into foraging and experimenting with local ingredients.

My brewhouse capacity is 1,500 litres, so I don’t need many spruce tips for a small batch of this beer at our brewery. I was pretty shocked when they connected me with the host brewery, Hook Norton Brewery, and I learned that we would be brewing a 408-hectolitre batch! That’s 40,800 litres. I contacted a hop farm in the lower mainland. They worked with me to pelletize spruce tips and centennial hops and we shipped 80 KG of this blend to England from BC. That was very cool in itself. This process got the ball rolling with having spruce tip-infused hops available for breweries in BC to purchase.

I went to Hook Norton Brewery in Oxfordshire. I brewed with them over three days, and I was there in total for five days.

I spent almost two weeks touring around doing some PR for the festival. Brewing at Hook Norton was amazing. It is an older brewery, over 175 years old. It’s also a tower brewery, so everything was gravity-fed, and everything was open-top fermenters. It was the biggest, oldest brewery I’ve ever worked in.

When I returned home, I brought some cultured yeast samples from Hook Norton back to Comox and I was able to recreate this same beer here with their yeast and our Canadian ingredients. That was very cool.

Sadly, I didn’t get to try the beer. It was meant to go into around 900 pubs across the UK in casks and kegs. But unfortunately, all of these pubs were shut down shortly after I left because of COVID. Hook Norton made the decision to pull out the cask and kegs from the pubs, and they packaged all of the beer from the kegs and casks into bottles so that the beer wouldn’t go bad. They sent me a care package with samples, but the bottles with my beer were broken, so I didn’t get to try it. I heard it was very well received.

Kim: What do you have planned at Land & Sea for this winter? 

Tessa: We have our fifth-year birthday coming up in December. We’ll be celebrating this special milestone in January 2024. I’m brewing an imperial pastry stout with my assistant brewer, Levon Olsen, to celebrate our fifth birthday. It will be available on tap and it will be packaged in 473ml cans, which will be sold exclusively from our taproom.

Based on our tank space, we typically have six-to-nine different beers on tap in our taproom. However, at the end of January, I’m getting two made-in-Canada 700-litre foeders delivered from New World Foeder Craft in PEI. I was just in PEI to check out the building of them. We’ll use one of them for our saisons. The other will be for lagers.

It’s going to be awesome. They are made with new American oak from Quebec. They are going to go above my current tanks, so I’m excited about that. Then four-to-six times a year, we’ll release foeder-aged beers. I’m really excited for this new series. We don’t have the space for a barrel program so this will provide an elevated experience. People can expect to try the first of our foeder-aged beers in late spring/early summer, 2024.

We’ll also be using our own house culture for our saisons and lagers, and I’m excited to see how that develops over the years.

I am really into foraging and experimenting with local ingredients, so you can also expect more beers like this in the future.

Kim: What is your favourite beer to enjoy in the winter?

Tessa: I love a saison, any time of year, even during winter. Something like Saison Dupont, which I can drink all year round. I also really enjoy English-style beers including milds, bitters and heavier lagers like a doppelbock. But I’m also a sucker for a classic German lager. Apparently, I love beer!

Kim: If you aren’t drinking beer, what are you drinking?

Tessa: Wine. A natural wine, like an orange wine. Or a red wine with low intervention and deep, jammy flavours. I really like Plot Wines from the Okanagan. Their red wines have lots of character and variety.

I also really enjoy cider. In particular, Revel Cider, which is an awesome little cidery in Guelph, ON. Plus, I like Twin Island Cider. Both of these cideries offer subscription boxes.

Kim: How is it for you being a woman working as a brewer?

Tessa: I love it. I feel very supported. People ask me this question often, but I really don’t even think about it in my day-to-day, honestly. I have always felt like an equal through my experiences, and I am fortunate to say that.

I have always worked very hard, and I’m passionate about what I do. It takes a village to make this industry what it is. I think that’s why we all love working in this industry.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a brewer, a server, an owner or in marketing, it takes all of us to make it work. I can work as hard as I want at brewing, but if the person behind the bar isn’t engaged, it’s not going to be the same experience for our guests.

Kim: Can you tell me about some hidden gems in the Comox Valley? 

Tessa: I would recommend Mount Washington for skiing. If you want to go cross-country skiing, I’d suggest Strathcona Park, which is the oldest park in BC. From Land & Sea Brewing, it is 20 minutes to Strathcona Park, so it’s easy to go for a hike or a mountain bike.

We have rivers to swim and fish in. And of course, ocean fishing and the beach. We also have great roads for road biking. It’s very much an outdoor recreation community here. We have something for everyone. I would recommend doing a bicycle winery tour in the fall. Plus, of course, visit all of our local breweries.

Also, you can’t miss seeing the Comox Glacier from anywhere in town. It’s an iconic view. I see this stunning view on my drive to work. It’s gorgeous! I drive by the ocean, so I get an amazing ocean view. I also get a city view and the Comox Glacier.

A few other things I would suggest are to check out Comox Lake in Cumberland. Head to Comox Harbour and downtown Cumberland for some unique shopping. If you are looking for some delicious oysters, check out GiGi’s Oysters in Comox. We also have lovely walking trails to Nymph Falls, which are really nice. We have lots of great hiking and biking trails in the area.

Kim: Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Tessa: I’d love for you to speak with Matt West-Patrick (co-owner/brewer) and Isaiah Archer (co-owner/sales and marketing) at Whistle Buoy Brewing. They are great. They have an awesome team, and I’m very proud of them. They are innovators in the industry, and they are always doing something new and interesting with their brewing and their marketing.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Matt and Isaiah from Whistle Buoy Brewing in Victoria, on the Greater Victoria Ale Trail. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Tessa Gabiniewicz of Land and Sea Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Justin Larter from Barnside Brewing in Delta. At the end of our discussion, Justin recommended I speak with Connor Blanchard from Luppolo Brewing. Connor is the Lead Brewer at Luppolo Brewing, which was established in 2016 in East Vancouver on the Yeast Vancouver Ale Trail.

Luppolo (pronounced loop-o-lo), which is Italian for “hops” is known for their Italian-inspired craft beer and food. Connor and I had a great discussion about craft beer, living life in BC, and our shared love of outdoor adventures in our beautiful province. I really enjoyed our conversation, especially hearing about Connor’s passion for the evolution of the craft beer industry and his commitment to sustainability, supporting local producers, and using locally-sourced ingredients.

Kim: Tell me about how you got started in craft beer?

Connor: I have been going to breweries since I was a kid. My dad was big into craft breweries, and he always took us camping and to craft breweries. I’m from the US, and when I was 18, I was in university, and I met a guy who was home brewing. He brought in some of his beers, and I enjoyed trying them. So, I borrowed a home brewing kit from my cousin, and I fell super deep into home brewing. It was really fun, and a great creative outlet for me. I loved everything about it, and the industry overall. I love the alternative vibe and experimentation in the craft beer industry.

While I was in school and travelling for a couple of years, I’d seek out as much craft beer as possible. I ended up in New Zealand for a year. And from there I was emailing breweries and offering to work for free, although I wouldn’t recommend this approach. This was back when the industry was smaller. Now it’s easier to get your foot in the door. At that time, you had to know someone to get a job in craft beer.

So, I was continuing my homebrewing thing and applying to breweries. By this time, I was living in Victoria, and I applied for a job at Twin Sails Brewing. I was hired as a seasonal Brewery Assistant, so I packed my bags and headed for Port Moody. Mostly I was filling and cleaning kegs and tanks.

Then I talked to Tessa at Land & Sea Brewing in Comox. Right before they opened, I was hired as a Brewer’s Assistant. I worked there for two years. I enjoyed working with their pub-style system. I gained a lot of professional brewing knowledge from Tessa. She’s a very talented brewer. While working at Land & Sea, I met my partner, Lindsay. She was working at the brewery at the time, working in the tasting room. We’ve been together now for four years. It’s a lovely thing.

Beer brought me to my partner.

We decided that we wanted to move to Vancouver, which we did in February 2021. Right away, I got a job at Four Winds Brewing. I was there for about a year as a full-time brewer. I met lots of wonderful people there. However, for a number of reasons, it wasn’t the right place for me. I missed the smaller more experimental brewery setting.

That’s when I stumbled upon Luppolo. I’ve been here for about a year, and I am now the Lead Brewer. My partner, Lindsay is working close to home as the tasting room manager at Brassneck Brewery.

My experience has given me the opportunity to learn lots of different brewing styles in a number of different-sized brewhouses. I’m happy with the way that my career has evolved. In a way, I’ve come full circle back to what really suits me and keeps me inspired.

Kim: What do you love most about craft beer?

Connor: Generally speaking, I think what brought me in was the creativity and experimentation involved in craft beer. It’s a friendly industry to work in, and it is very collaborative. I enjoy the experimentation aspect of making something tangible that I can share with people. I am intrigued by terroir and the use of local ingredients, as I really like tying in the agricultural aspect of brewing. I really enjoy working with my hands. I’m not a person who likes to sit at a desk.

Kim: Why do you think the craft brewing industry became so collaborative?

Connor: I think that that’s kind of the nature of beer. Beer is something to share and bring people together. So that bleeds through into our whole industry. We share ingredients and we enjoy making collaboration beers. Lots of people have been in the industry for some time and are friends. The community spirit is one of my favourite things about the industry. For me, it’s not just about the people drinking the beer, it’s also about the people making the beer.

I also like the symbiotic relationships of the ale trails. We all work together and bring people to the area. We don’t look at each other as competitors like other industries do.

Kim: What do you love most about working at Luppolo?

Connor: There’s a lot. I love the team. It’s small and it really does feel like a family. I think because a lot of the team has been here for three-to-four years plus, I was received with open arms. I love the family environment, and I enjoy getting to know my coworkers really well.

Additionally, our system and brewpub style are perfectly designed to experiment constantly. We are constantly tweaking our beers, even if it’s a beer that we make often, so I really enjoy this aspect of the job. Plus, Ryan, who is our head brewer and owner is super supportive. I feel included and heard in my role.

Kim: Tell me about something you are proud of that you’ve done at Luppolo?

Connor: I’m proud of a collaboration that I brought together with Luppolo and Tessa, my former boss at Land & Sea.

We made an Oyster Pilsner called Mare, which is sea in Italian. We made this beer entirely with local ingredients, other than our house lager yeast. This beer is really special to me because I brewed it with Ryan, my current boss, and Tessa, my previous boss, who really taught me about brewing standards.

It was a great collaboration because Luppolo and Land & Sea’s philosophies are very similar. Mare is a sessionable, nuanced beer with ingredients reflecting BC’s terroir. It was made with grains from Field Five Farm in Saanichton. We used their Pilsner Malt, which is amazing. We liked it so much that we are starting to put this in other beers.

Mare was also made with 100% local Sterling Hops from Justin’s Barnside Brewing hop breeding program. The Sterling Hops were phenomenal and provided this beautiful bouquet of citrus and herbal character.

Tessa came in for the brew day and brought the oysters. She brought them from Fanny Bay, which is just south of Comox Valley. What a unique BC ingredient to be able to tie into and use in this beer.

We used oyster shells to modify the water used in this beer. They are high in magnesium and calcium which lends to the softness of the water profile. The salinity that you get is amazing. We used the oyster shells at the beginning. Then we put a few oysters in the whirlpool at the end, which we ate afterwards, of course.

The beer was really well received. It sold out very quickly on draft at the brewery. So many things about this beer worked out well. The minerals and salinity from the oyster shells provided a fantastic mouthfeel. We also gave it a long lagering time, about eight weeks. We used all-natural carbonation to give a soft fluffy head of foam which was accentuated by our house slow pour. It really had everything going for it. We are looking at making this beer again next year. It was a super fun recipe to design and beer to make.

Kim: How important is it for you to work with local ingredients?

Connor: When looking at recipes, I like figuring out how to adapt recipes to use local ingredients. Finding and using local barley and hops is super exciting for me. We’ve been adapting our European beer styles to showcase more local products, which has been very interesting.

With climate change and the way the brewing industry is going, I believe that the focus on using local products is going to be incredibly important in the next 10-20 years. Having local producers that are making high-quality ingredients locally is amazing. I appreciate being able to make local beers with local ingredients. Therefore, supporting local producers is very important for me and us as well.

Kim: Luppolo has been around since 2016. What makes Luppolo so special?

Connor: Even before I worked at Luppolo, I observed how much care is put into the way the beer is served here. We do slow pours for all of our lagers because we think this is the best way to serve them. We’re talking about a five-to-seven minute multi-stage pour, every single time. This makes the beer so much smoother and frothier. It has a beautiful head of foam. This is a real priority for Luppolo. Even before I worked here, I’d come into the taproom to have a slow pour.

You can make the best beer possible, but it’s also about the service of the beer that truly makes it shine. We serve our beers in a clean glass with a substantial head of foam. Even if it’s a great beer, the way we serve the beer can completely change the experience.

Kim: Tell me about your beer philosophy at Luppolo?

Connor: Beer philosophy for me is all about intent and not rushing things. It’s about taking it slow and being methodical about how you do things and why you do these things.

It’s not just about throwing some random combination of crowd-pleasing flavours into it. I like when I can see all of the little things come together to make one great thing. The things that stand out the most for me are when I can look at how the beer is being served. Is it naturally carbonated? Are they using specific ingredients in a specific way to produce a specific result?

I believe it’s important to always give things time. It’s easy to feel rushed to get something done. There is a lot of pressure to get a beer out, but the beer takes as much time as it takes. If you can be really patient, the beer will tell you when it’s ready, and this can make such a difference.

For example, the old-school European brewing technique called decoction. This is when you take a portion of the mash and boil it and cook it, caramelizing the sugars in the mash, and then reintroduce it. It’s process things like this that really get me excited. Old-school brewers did this to break down the cell walls of under-modified malts in order to allow the enzymes to more easily be able to convert starches into fermentable sugars. We are experimenting with under-modified pilsner malt, specifically from Hogarth Malt in Olds, Alberta. It’s floor malted in a traditional way, and the beer is triple decocted, which adds a lot of richness, body and mouthfeel to the beer.

Kim: Tell me about something you have coming up at Luppolo?

Connor: We are launching a new series at Luppolo called the Forage series. It’s our barrel-aged, mixed-fermentation wild ales that have been conditioned or refermented on locally foraged ingredients.

We are working on the first beer in the series now. It was made this spring, so it is the Spring 2023 Forage series release. It’s a blend of barrel-aged mixed fermentation beer with our fresh Saison. It was steeped on freshly-picked magnolia blossoms from right by Ryan’s house. We were really surprised by this ingredient. There was so much evolution. It was very floral to start, and now there are tropical fruit notes. It’s awesome seeing the way the beer has evolved.

We are bottle-conditioning it now. We anticipate it being released in the fall, once the bottle conditioning has run its course. The beer is not yet named. Watch for it this fall in 750ml green bottles.

Our intention is to release a foraged beer in this series each spring, summer, fall and winter. We’ll be using unique, local ingredients such as dwarf cherries, kousa dogwood and other fun things we can find in and around the city. These are fun blends to showcase a unique piece of our region.

Kim: What is your favourite beer style?

Connor: I like all well-made beers, but I have been coming back to lagers to make and to drink. In general, my favourite beers are sub 5% that are clean, well-made, sessionable beers. I like lagers, pale ales, English pub-style beers, and Saisons, generally in the 3-5.5% range.

More specifically, I really enjoy Barnside’s Farmers Tap. Justin cares so much about what he does, and you can taste it in this beer, which showcases their local ingredients.

I am also often at Brassneck because my partner Lindsay works there. I really enjoy their No Brainer Corn Lager, which is 4.5% ABV. They recently got a Czech side pull faucet that they serve from, which is awesome.

Kim: What are some of your favourite beer festivals?

Connor: Farmhouse Fest is my ultimate favourite. I love the vibe. I love being out on the UBC farm. It is such an intimate and laid-back event, and I love drinking funky, low-alcohol beers. This event always makes me feel inspired.

This year, we are making the official beer of Farmhouse Fest, 2023. We brewed it with the above-mentioned, locally-sourced under-modified pilsner malt from Olds, Alberta. It’s a super rustic, traditional, open-fermented, triple-decocted Czech-style Pilsner based off the original Pilsner Urquell.  We are going to serve this at the event in a gravity keg. It’s a very old school lager but made in Luppolo-style.

Also, when I was living in Victoria, I loved volunteering at Victoria Beer Week. I really enjoyed those events. I like a lot of the smaller beer festivals.

Another is of course our own Luppolo Lager Fest. This is where our local brewery friends come together to showcase lagers. It has real beer garden vibes. It’s a one-day event at the beginning of October featuring locally-sourced lagers. We generally have about seven to eight varieties ourselves, plus another four to six other lagers from other breweries on draft, as well as another four to six different unique lagers in cans. This should be our biggest one yet, and I can’t wait.

Kim: If you aren’t drinking craft beer, what are you drinking? 

Connor: If I’m not drinking craft beer, I’m probably drinking coffee. I love our local coffee roasters. There are some real quality roasters, coffees and baristas here in Vancouver. I’d encourage people to go check out some of our coffee shops, have a nice pour-over coffee, crack open a good book, and take in the views.

Kim: What do you love about the craft beer scene where you live?

Connor: More than anywhere else in BC, I just love Vancouver and my area in East Van. There is an amazing variety of different, focused breweries. They make different styles of beer, but they have a specific character that feeds into all of their beers.

There are some really great breweries really close to us, within a five-minute walk including Brassneck, 33 Acres, 33 Brewing Experiment, Superflux and Slow Hand.

Kim: If you had out-of-town company visiting you, what hidden gems would you recommend?

Connor: I’ve lived in Vancouver for about two years now, so I’m still learning myself. I like to get on my bike and explore. When I’m not working, I’m generally going to the other breweries with my friends on my bike. I really enjoy biking. I actually bike to work most days.

We also have some great parks here. They are great spots for picnics and lawn games. I would also recommend biking along the seawall. I love hiking, and there is quite literally a vast and uncountable number of incredible hikes from anywhere between 30 minutes to three hours away. I go to the Island a lot as I have deep roots there and I really enjoy being out in nature.

I’d also recommend out-of-town company check out our food scene here. We have great food here. There is so much variety with all of the ethnic food options. I’d suggest trying some foods that you may not be able to get in other more rural areas.

Kim: What are your thoughts on the future of the craft beer industry?

Connor: What’s going to be really important as a beer consumer and a supporter of the industry is the shift to thinking smaller. I think the size and scope of your brewery is going to be very important. Think small and think sustainable. Support local producers 100%.

In terms of shifts for the consumer? I think people are getting really excited for easy-drinking, nuanced beers. It’s not about the biggest, boldest beers. It’s about lower-alcohol beers, unique beer styles. Smoked beers and cask beers. I see lots of excitement and joy here.

Kim: Do you have any advice for those thinking about starting a brewery or getting into the industry?

Connor: If you’re in the industry or want to get into the industry, think small and sustainable. And be super thoughtful about how you train your staff and how you treat your staff. It’s tough to live in BC and make a living. So, it’s key that owners train their staff well and listen to their staff and make them feel heard. You can feel this when you go into a brewery. I’d say focus on your staff. Give them the tools, pay them, and support them. This is an industry that’s going to be around for a while.

Kim: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?

Connor: Well, I really wanted to give a shout-out to my partner Lindsay. It’s so nice to be able to share our love of the industry together.

Kim: Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Connor: I would love for you to talk to Tessa from Land & Sea Brewing in Comox. She is the Head Brewer at Land & Sea, and she was my former boss. She has over 10 years of experience and is very technical and methodical in her approach to brewing. She really cares about sustainability and using local ingredients in an interesting and unique way. She is also very thoughtful about the way she designs beer, and I think she will bring an interesting perspective about brewing and living in rural BC. I am super grateful for all that she has taught me, and I think you’ll have a great conversation with her.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I chat with Tessa from Land & Sea Brewing, on the Vancouver Island Ale Trail Part II.

Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Connor Blanchard of Luppolo Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Miguel Molina from Boardwalk Brewing in Port Coquitlam. At the end of our discussion, Miguel selected who I would interview next. He chose Justin Larter, the Head Brewer at Barnside Brewing. Established in 2020, Barnside Brewing is in Delta on the South of the Fraser Ale Trail.

As one of only a few BC farm-based breweries, it was fascinating to hear from Justin about Barnside’s philosophy and commitment to using ingredients from their property in their beer. This was a very interesting conversation because Justin talked about brewing techniques and processes that were new to me.

Like Miguel, Justin is also a recent KPU grad. It’s amazing to hear how these new brewers are helping to shape the future of BC’s craft beer industry.

KL: How did you get started in craft beer?

JL: I kind of found my way to craft beer in an unconventional way. I went from high school straight into university where I studied biology. I got my Bachelor of Science degree in Microbiology from UBCO in Kelowna. After graduating, I worked in the Okanagan wine industry for a bit. I worked for a season doing viticulture at the winery and in the vineyard at Summerhill Pyramid Winery. This experience really opened my eyes to how much fun you can have in the microbiology field producing alcoholic beverages.

From the wine industry, I looked to the craft beer industry. From the outside, craft beer seemed to be creative and open and fun. So, I enrolled in the KPU Brewing and Brewery Operations program in 2018 and graduated in 2020. Starting in the first year of the program, I worked at a couple of different breweries before joining Barnside in August 2020, just about right when the brewery opened. I joined the brewing team, and I was responsible for quality control, yeast management and yeast propagation. I was promoted to lead brewer, and then I was recently promoted to head brewer earlier in 2023.

KL: What do you love most about the craft beer industry?

JL: I really enjoy variety. I enjoy the different experiences of flavour and aroma, the different situations that beer can lend itself to. For example, you can enjoy lagers with a group of friends. You might open a barrel-fermented sour to enjoy with a candlelight dinner. I just find the variety, creativity, and history behind beer all so fascinating.

It’s a great industry to be a part of. There are always new, different, and interesting beers and techniques to discover.

KL: Tell me about one of your proudest accomplishments in craft beer.

JL: Barnside Brewing ended up being the perfect place for me because of my microbiology background. The owners really encouraged me to embrace terroir around here, as we grow our own hops, oats, and barley.

The owners were also really excited when I first talked about collecting our own yeast and bacterial cultures. Within my first year, I was successful at isolating and propagating a wild Saccharomyces strain suitable for brewing from a Chinook hop cone. We lovingly named it Hoppy Cone Surfer. After the isolation, and once we knew we had a viable brewing strain, we banked it with White Labs. It’s a proprietary strain, so we are the only ones who can use it. It is stored and preserved for us there throughout the year. We use it in our Hop Yard Sour and our Fresh Hop IPA.

KL: Barnside Brewing is one of only a few BC farm-based breweries. What does a farm-based brewery really mean?

JL: What it means to me is really embracing terroir. We are one of the few breweries that have a one-mile series: the grains, hops, and yeast that we use in our beers are all sourced from the farm. The owners really embrace this philosophy.

We have a strict rule that in all of our beers, at least 51% of all ingredients must be ours. This is for every recipe in our entire beer lineup.

But in our one-mile beers, including our Fresh Hop IPA and Hop Yard Sour, our local ingredients are much higher than 51%. Plus, both of these beers include the one-mile yeast strain as well.

Our Farmer’s Tap Lager is made with our 100% pilsner malted barley and our hops. It does of course have a German lager yeast strain.

Our Batch 200 Estate Barleywine is also a one-mile beer. It is made with our 100% pilsner malted barley, boiled for eight hours. It was then aged in blackberry brandy ex-Bourbon barrels for 12 months.

KL: What else makes Barnside Brewing unique?

JL: We welded up a “barn-gineered” open fermenter that allows for spontaneous and open fermentation. This vessel gets most of its use in the cooler seasons when temperatures are better for keeping the yeast happy and unwanted microbes out of the beer. We use this vessel to spontaneously inoculate wort for our sour barrel program. We also use it for our open fermented Shingle Mill, which is our “Pub Standard” ESB.

Open-top fermentation takes us back to historical brewing methods. It’s really interesting because this radically alters the tank geometries and flavours of the beer. It creates an environment where the yeast is extremely happy. Because the yeast is moving around more freely, it results in a lively flavour profile in the beer.

We also employ ancient brewing techniques where we brew a turbid mash during the winter and let it cool overnight. Then it’s transferred into barrels (wine puncheons or smaller sized oak barrels) where it ferments for one to three years. This becomes a base vinous sour for some of our different blended sours.

At Barnside, we want to take terroir to the next level. We want to be able to produce beautiful beers, but with historical techniques used in our own way to create modern farmhouse brewing.

KL: Tell me about something new you are brewing right now.

JL: We just released Distant Storm, which is a Double IPA. I had a lot of fun brewing it. While we had this label previously, this is a totally new beer, reimagined from the ground up. It’s a pilsner malt base with lots of wheat. We used mash hopping, and Omega Yeast’s new Thiolized strain, Helio Gazer.

Distant Storm Double IPA is a limited release. It is available on draught and in four-packs of 473ml cans at liquor stores in the lower mainland and on Vancouver Island.

Following the success of this brew, a lot of the techniques we used in this beer will trickle into our core IPA in the near future.

We also just brewed a beer called Spring Blossom Cherry Gose. This uses our house sourdough culture for souring. This was my COVID project. I made sourdough bread using my own wild bacterial culture. After reading about Scratch Brewing using a sourdough culture in their beer, I decided to see how the culture I had created would taste in a beer. It worked great as a souring culture and we now use this in all of our stainless-steel fermented sours. In this beer, we also used local Montmorency cherries. We used all of the cherries, including the pits. The beer has lovely vanilla and cinnamon spice notes from the pits, and a beautiful colour from the juice. It’s not too tart. It’s a sessionable, drinkable sour.

It will be released in early March on draught and in four-packs of 473ml cans at liquor stores in the lower mainland and on Vancouver Island.

We are also making some other recipe tweaks and changes to our core beers. We aren’t changing the bones of the beers, we are just doing a bit of a rework. For example, our Ladner Clay IPA will be a more accurate representation of an IPA with a juicy hop profile featuring our farm-grown hops and thiolized yeast.

KL: What’s your favourite beer style?

JL: I’m a lager man. All this terroir talk aside, I love a well-crafted lager. I enjoy almost any style whether it’s a Vienna lager, a pilsner, or a Czech dark lager. For me, I just love the drinkability of a lager.

I went full circle from lagers through the dark beers, IPAs, and now I’m back again loving lagers.

KL: What are some of your favourite craft beers going into spring?

JL: My favourite beers right now at Barnside are the Farmer’s Tap Lager and the new Cherry Gose. Outside of our brewery, I’m a huge fan of Bellingham, Washington. I love visiting the breweries there and looking for inspiration. They have a really cool lager scene down in Bellingham.

More locally, I love the beers from Strange Fellows and Four Winds. My favourite spot in BC is Luppolo Brewing.

KL: What’s your perfect spring beer and food pairing?

JL: Spring is all about getting the BBQ going. There’s a gentleman who runs Rebel Rebel Barbecue. Every two weeks he comes and smokes meat here at Barnside. There’s nothing better than his tri-tip sandwich, with a glass of lager in hand, soaking up the warm weather and beautiful scenery.

KL: What are some of your favourite craft beer festivals?

JL: My all-time favourite BC beer festival is Farmhouse Fest, followed by Weathered Beer. I love diving into the complexity of wild-fermented beers from across the globe.

KL: Where in BC do you want to travel next to discover their craft beer scene and why?

JL: I really want to head to Tofino and Ucluelet. I’ve been dying to check out both of the breweries there. I’ve been close, but it’s eating me up inside that I haven’t visited yet.

KL: What do you love about the craft beer scene in your area?

JL: I love the area in general. Our neighbours are Four Winds Brewing. They have such beautiful, classic beers. We’ve also got Fuggles Beer close by on the other side of the tunnel. Beyond the beer, it’s also such a gorgeous, natural area. You can look out and see the beautiful coastal mountains. In the summer when there’s a light breeze, you can smell the ocean.

It’s a really unique experience when you come and visit us here. You go from being in the city to open fields, working tractors, and helicopters working in the fields. I love that you can sit down and watch all of the farm work going on while enjoying a crisp, cold lager.

KL: What is a hidden gem in your area?

JL: We have a number of beautiful walking trails all along the inlet. We also have some great restaurants. My favourite restaurant in the area is called Il Posto. They have the best pizza and cocktails in Ladner.

KL: Besides brewing, what else do you enjoy doing?

JL: I love being out in nature. I used to be a passionate mountain biker, but after an injury, I’ve moved to hiking. I really enjoy getting out and hiking around the greater Vancouver area. I also enjoy road trips around BC and the Island. I enjoy adventuring. One of my favourites is paddle boarding at Strathcona Provincial Park on Vancouver Island. I love the beautiful glacial lake water, the gorgeous vegetation, and the big trees.

KL: Who in the craft beer industry should I interview next?

JL: I want you to interview my good buddy Connor Blanchard, a brewer at Luppolo Brewing. As I mentioned earlier, Luppolo is my favourite local taproom. I love their pizza and their slow-pour lagers. I think you’ll have a good conversation with Connor. Connor is one of the best lager brewers that I know in BC and I’d love for him to spread the word.

Stay tuned for the next instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Connor from Luppolo Brewing. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Justin Larter of Barnside Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

My most recent Hops Among Friends interview was with Martina Solano Bielen from Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) and the KPU Brew Lab. At the end of our discussion, Martina selected who I would interview next. She chose Miguel Molina, the Head Brewer at Boardwalk Brewing. Established in 2021, Boardwalk Brewing is in Port Coquitlam on the North of the Fraser Ale Trail.

When I interviewed Martina, it was awesome learning more about the Brewing Diploma program at KPU. She provided an exciting look at the future of BC’s craft beer industry. Speaking with Miguel gave me a further glimpse into the future. I enjoyed speaking with Miguel. As a recent KPU grad, he is one of the people helping to shape the future of this industry. It was exciting to hear about his background in Ecuador, his move to Canada, and his immersion into BC’s craft beer scene.

Kim: How did you get your start in craft beer?

Miguel: Here’s the short answer (not really). About 10 years ago, I was working as a sound and acoustic engineer. I worked at a TV station doing sound editing. I always liked beer, although I didn’t know much about craft beer.

Eventually, one of my friends took me to this craft brewery in Quito, Ecuador, which is where I’m from. It was in a bit of a sketchy neighbourhood, where you don’t usually go, but I wanted to see this place that a few friends were talking about. When I got there, I was surprised because they had a chapel inside the brewery and the vibe of an old town pub, which was pretty cool. A couple of guys from the US founded this brewery called Bandido Brewing. They noted that there were only a few options for craft beer at the time in Quito and therefore they decided to open this place. I tried an IPA there, and I thought, what is this? It was very interesting to me. It was at this point that craft beer clicked for me, and I decided I wanted to do something around it.

A few months later, a friend and I decided to build a small pub called La Reserva. It was a DIY project. Our idea was to bring in all of the craft beer we could find from all around Ecuador into one place. We built and set up everything there, from tables and chairs to the beer lines and tap handles. We built a brand and logos and conceptualized it all. It was an amazing learning experience.

I was still working my full-time job in sound editing, so keeping up with the pub was crazy tiring but uniquely fulfilling at the same time. By this time, it was 2015, and the craft beer boom was really happening. We had this idea at the perfect time. It turned out very cool and we ended up opening a second location a year later.

Long story short, I got my start in craft beer behind the bar! Selling craft beer to our friends and customers. While I was learning, I was also able to share with customers the beauty of craft beer. I also remember I was making lots of brewer friends during this time, and eventually started doing field trips with the pub and our crew to their breweries to get deeper into the process of making beer. During that time I got certified as a Beer Judge (BJCP). It was fun going to competitions and getting to understand so many different beer styles.

A year after this, I quit my full-time job and dedicated myself to the business and craft beer full-time. A couple of years later, my partner and I started our own microbrewery project. We were brewing around 2,000 litres of beer every couple of weeks, selling all of this beer in the pub and some restaurants.

We eventually started canning this beer and selling it around Ecuador. The branding was all about cats, as we really like cats. This was a pure passion project for us. We weren’t making tons of money, but it was very fun. We really enjoyed it and we learned a few cool things.

Eventually, we came to a crossroads. We had two options: to invest in equipment and build up the brewery, or go somewhere else, carry on our adventure, and keep learning about beer. I decided to move to Vancouver and I went to KPU to study brewing, which is where I met Martina. She is such a great brewer and instructor in the KPU program, and an amazing person.

At KPU, I got my first job here in BC. I started working doing sales on Fridays, which helped me to get to know more about the program and chat and learn from the instructors. The plan was to work at KPU with them during the summer at the brewery and the lab. However, the pandemic happened, so the plans changed.

After that, I worked in another brewery cellaring, which was a great learning experience. I was so committed to learning back then, and eventually, I realized that brewing is a lifelong learning experience and you must be open to learning all the time.

After a year, I moved to 33 Acres Brewing. Interestingly, this was one of the first breweries I visited when I moved to Vancouver. I remember thinking at the time that it was a remarkable brewery. I enjoyed looking through the glass at their experimental taproom and thinking “I would love to work here.” The opportunity came up for me to become a brewer at 33 Acres. This was an exponential learning curve for me. There are great brewers there with tons of experience and eyes for the details. Here I learned how to take care of a beer from the raw ingredients to the final package. I also learned how much hard work is needed to be good at this and to be consistent with your products.

The opportunity came up at Boardwalk Brewing to take the lead as head brewer in March 2022. As a new brewery, the challenge was pretty big. Putting all the procedures in place, rethinking every recipe, and coming up with seasonals takes a lot of time. It has been a crazy experience, but so amazing and satisfying to see people drinking our beers and enjoying them so much.

I’m so glad to be working here now contributing to the BC and PoCo craft beer scenes.

Kim: What do you love most about working at Boardwalk Brewing?

Miguel: I am trying to keep things simple on the brewing side, but I also love experimentation, so having the ability to be curious feels great. With brewing, it’s about education, experience, learning, science, and art. You need to have a mix of all of these and the beer will turn out right. I’m happy to have the opportunity to do this at Boardwalk. As well, I enjoy creating new recipes and making little changes to elevate our beers to make them unique and quenchable.

A good example is our brand-new barrel program. We recently released a Brettanomyces sour called Tart of Funk. We took a base ale and fermented and conditioned it in tequila barrels for nine months. We transferred it to stainless and blended it with a sour ale. We then added a bunch of raspberries and bottle-conditioned it. It is a complex but very approachable beer.

We just released it in 500ml bottles, so it is available for the holidays. It’s a great beer to open and share with family and friends for special occasions.

This is our first barrel program beer. It is so exciting to bring these new products to the market. I’m glad to have a great team here that makes things run smoothly.

Kim: As a recent KPU graduate, how does it feel to see fellow students from KPU now going on to do great things in the craft beer industry?

Miguel: I’m so happy about it. I think it’s amazing to see how each person is making their own role in the industry. There are so many options, and it’s very cool to see this. I’m glad I went to KPU, and I’m excited to see more people coming into the industry with this fresh experience and education. It makes me very proud. These people will make our industry even better and more unique. I’m sure some of the beers and names will be recognized not only in Canada, but also internationally someday.

Kim: As an industry, what can we be doing to encourage more diversity?

Miguel: That’s a really good question.

In general, it’s a very welcoming community. It’s a warm industry the majority of the time, and you can see this when you go to beer festivals or into a taproom. You can see it when you see people interacting with each other and collaborating with other breweries.

I’ve been here for three years, so my panorama is not too wide, although it feels like home here. I consider myself an example of inclusion.

In general, BC and the brewing industry are really open to bringing in people with different backgrounds and cultures. In the last year, I’ve seen how women are more accepted in the industry. It’s finally not just a man’s job, and it’s fulfilling to see this, although, in my opinion, I truly believe we can do more about it. I would like to encourage brewery owners and shareholders to increase the diversity percentage in their businesses, and be aware of the value each person brings to the business and keep compensating them well regardless of their cultural background or identity.

Kim: What else is happening at Boardwalk Brewing this winter?

Miguel: We brewed a German-Style Schwarzbier called Black Forest that was released in November. I am so stoked about this beer because we’ve never brewed a dark lager before with Boardwalk. We wanted to create something that isn’t too heavy but still has those layers of chocolate, mild roasted malt flavour, and Maillard reaction.

I think that dark lagers are the best. They are toasty and warm for cold days. We used German malts and hops, as well as a German-type yeast to ferment along with traditional German methods of fermentation. We used a technique called spunding to naturally carbonate the beer. This is a seasonal, limited release and it is available now in 473ml cans. We have a store list on our website, or you can come to the taproom and grab a pint.

Also, we are canning one of our taproom favourite beers, Levitation Lager. It is what I call a BC Lager because it’s made with BC malt and BC hops. This is the best seller in our taproom. It’s 4.2% ABV and super crushable. We’ll be releasing it in 355ml cans at the end of this year.

Kim: What do you love about the craft beer scene in PoCo?

Miguel: Traboulay PoCo Trail is close to our brewery. It’s just five minutes away, so it’s a great thing to do on a weekend. You can enjoy the Fraser River, enjoy a bike ride, and grab some nachos or tacos and our freshest beer.

The PoCo craft beer scene is growing. Patina, Northpaw, and Tinhouse. All 4 breweries are very close, so it is good if you plan to do a brewery crawl. There’s also Mariner Brewing, which is just outside of PoCo. Also very close is Brewers Row in Port Moody. Twin Sails is another favourite of mine.

I find that breweries have their arms open, waiting to welcome people to the neighbourhood.

There are lots of young families in PoCo, so it’s great that we now have these spaces in the community. The community is more connected. Craft beer connects people. People can meet here with their friends and family, play board games and then ride their bikes or walk home. I find that the breweries are real hubs in the community.

Kim: Now that people are beginning to travel again, where in BC is your next spot to go adventuring?

Miguel: I really want to go to Penticton. I’ve never been. I really like Slackwater Brewing beers. I enjoy the vibe of small cities. It’s so different than larger cities. Even though I’ve never been to Penticton, I know I will enjoy it, not only for its amazing beer scene but also because of its wineries and impressive scenery. I’m looking forward to visiting Penticton.

Closer to home, I enjoy visiting Steel & Oak and Another Beer Company both of which are super rad breweries. These are the breweries that I often visit because they are close to my place in New West. I also suggest these breweries to anyone visiting the Vancouver area.

Kim: What are some of your favourite craft beer festivals?

Miguel: In 2019, three weeks after I moved to Vancouver, it was time for the BC Beer Awards, so I volunteered at it. It was awesome to see everyone enjoying talking about beer, ingredients, and the quality of beers. So that was definitely very cool, and I am so stoked that it returned this year.

I really enjoy going to festivals. I really love music festivals and beer festivals, traveling, and visiting breweries. I think festivals are coming back stronger than before. The recent Brewhalla Festival was one of the first festivals we attended as a brewery with Boardwalk. I enjoyed pouring and talking to people about our beers. We also participated in Whistler Beer Festival. It was lovely to hear the feedback from the festival attendees about how much they enjoyed our beers. One of their favourites was “PoCosteiner” which is a German-Style Munich Dunkel, based on a traditional Märzen.

Festivals create a connection between the people that enjoy craft beer and the breweries that create the beer. It’s so awesome to see it all come together.

Next year I would like to attend the Weathered Beer Fest, Victoria Beer Week, Farmhouse Fest, and the GCBF.

Kim: Besides brewing, what else do you enjoy doing?  

Miguel: I enjoy hanging out with my family. My partner Andrea and our 14-year-old daughter Mariafe enjoy taking our bikes out and riding around Stanley Park. We also enjoy visiting Fort Langley and its closest and coolest brewery, Locality Brewing.

I also love playing music, I played drums for more than a decade, but when I moved to Vancouver it was hard to play drums because of the noise and space. So I started playing guitar in a band called Dead Fast. We play punk rock, and it’s super cool and relaxing for me.

Kim: Tell me about some hidden gems in the PoCo area.

Miguel: One of the things I would suggest is mountain biking. Burke Mountain has really great trails. It’s such a great way to hang out in nature and connect with yourself.

Kim: Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Miguel: I’d love for you to speak with Justin Larter, Lead Brewer, Lab Manager, and Wild Yeast Wrangler at Barnside Brewing. He’s such a great person. He has shown me some tips and tricks for brewing over the years. He knows so much about microbiology and he is truly passionate about wild fermentation, coolships, yeast wrangling, and farming. I like their brewing style and the fact that they are using local ingredients.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Justin from Barnside Brewing, in Delta on the South of the Fraser Ale Trail. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Miguel Molina of Boardwalk Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

I spoke with Ashley Brooks, the Quality Control Manager at Four Winds Brewing in my most recent Hops Among Friends interview. At the end of our discussion, Ashley selected who I would interview next. She chose Martina Solano Bielen from Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) and the KPU Brew Lab. KPU’s Brewing and Brewery Operations program offers BC’s only Brewing Diploma program and was the first brewing program in Canada recognized by the Master Brewers Association of the Americas (MBAA) for a standard of excellence in brewing education. The KPU Brew Lab was established in 2015 in Langley on the Fraser Valley Ale Trail.

It was a fascinating conversation with Martina. I really enjoyed learning more about the Brewing Diploma program at KPU, their hands-on learning, and the brewing projects the students complete. It provides an exciting look at the future of BC’s craft beer industry.

Kim: How did you get your start in craft beer?

Martina: I have my master’s degree in microbiology, which I received from McGill University in Montreal. One of my colleagues at the time was doing his PhD in microbiology and he was also a big home brewer. It was the first time I had seen someone home brewing, and I got really interested in brewing. When I finished my degree, I decided that I wanted to apply my knowledge in the brewing field. I thought it would be a cool industry to be a part of and I was excited to use my knowledge of microbiology to make beer.

While I was doing my degree in Montreal, I also did some mentoring, and I was doing some teaching in labs that I really enjoyed. So, when the opening came up at KPU in the microbiology and chemistry part of the brewing program, it felt like a great way to get into the scene. My then-boyfriend, now husband, was from BC, so we moved to BC in 2015 and I started working at KPU soon after. It was a perfect fit for me to be both teaching and working in the brewing field.

I really enjoy working at KPU because it’s a great place to learn. When I started at KPU, I had so much to learn about brewing, beer styles, and brewing techniques. And I did learn. I soaked up knowledge from our faculty, I put it to use when I brewed, and I always learned something new when I taught as an instructor. Plus, as the students coming to the program were really interested in craft brewing and talking about breweries, I got to learn about the craft beer scene in BC very quickly.

Kim: What do you love most about working at KPU?

Martina: On one side, I love the opportunity that I have to work with a whole new group of students every year that are open-minded and excited to learn. The students always have really good questions and I learn from their experiences too.

Our students come from diverse backgrounds. I think this diversity adds so much to the program. We are all learning about brewing together.

On the other side, I love the learning and culture of education at KPU. There is a lot of opportunity for growth, with space to explore, learn new ideas, to think things through, and make mistakes and learn from them. Not only with the students but for myself as well, so I appreciate the opportunity for continued self-development.

When I started at KPU, I wanted to learn as much as possible about brewing, so while I was teaching, I was also taking the online Brewing Diploma from the Institute of Brewing. Once I finished that, I started a diploma in education (Provincial Instructor Diploma Program). In this field, you have to be an expert in both brewing and teaching. They are both equally important. So now I’m learning about how to improve my teaching. It’s great to have this opportunity to be constantly learning.

Kim: What are you most proud of about your work at KPU?

Martina: I think because I’ve been at KPU for so long, I’ve been able to see the progress of the program, and that has been great. This last year, something that made me really proud was the first time we had a KPU ‘tap takeover’ event at The Barley Merchant here in Langley. The event featured all the signature beers from our graduating students. Most students start this program with no brewing knowledge at all, and so at the end of their two years, it’s amazing to be able to taste their incredible beers. Seeing their beers on the beer list right beside beers from craft breweries made me so proud.

Kim: Congratulations on being named BC Brewery of the Year and Best Teaching Brewery in North America in 2019. How does that feel?

Martina: Going back before those awards, when we received our first award in 2017, it was a huge shock. After ironing out kinks with some of the equipment in our brewery, we started the summer of 2017 with another problem: one of our instructors I was supposed to brew with suffered an injury. We were shorthanded the whole summer. All of the brewing was up to just me and a student assistant. Yet somehow, we created a wheat beer that won us bronze at the BC Beer Awards. It was absolutely incredible. I started that summer with doubts about my abilities to make beer, let alone an award-winning beer. Then going on to receive those awards in 2019, it was almost unbelievable. It made me feel very proud of our staff and our team. It was amazing to see how far we had come from the start of the program.

For the US Open College Beer Championship awards, we submit beers that are made by our students, so it made me very proud in 2019 to see how many of our students were awarded for the beers they made in competition with so many other brewing schools.

Kim: How does it feel to see students from KPU now going on to do great things in the craft beer industry?

Martina: Seeing our students get their first brewing jobs or open their own breweries is so fulfilling. I’m so happy that they get to work wherever they want to. I am also very happy that I can help contribute to their success.

It’s all so rewarding, and it makes me so proud. I’m very hopeful that we are going to have a better culture in craft beer going forward, and better beer going forward.

The students are learning the science behind the brewing. And we know that means better tasting beer and better-quality beer. Strong quality control is an important part of the diploma program, so hopefully this enhances beer quality in the world in general.

Because there are many students in each cohort, there are these bonds that develop within classes, as well as with other students that attended KPU. I feel like this common background helps to create a more friendly and tight-knit industry going forward.

Kim: How do you manage both teaching and brewing?

Martina: That’s one of the good things about KPU. I do have a lot of flexibility. From September through April, my focus is on the teaching component. It’s a very hands-on program, so I’m teaching the students and they are putting it into practice in the lab.

In the summer months, when we don’t have classes, I focus more on the brewery. I do more maintenance, organization, and brewing projects.

This summer, for example, we are collaborating with the Applied Genomics Centre from KPU which is working on developing new varieties of hops. They’ve got some great candidates that they’ve been growing at Barnside Brewing in Delta. They’ve turned the hops from last year’s crop into hop pellets, and now we are going to use them in our pilot brewery to see how they do as an ingredient for beer. They are experimental hops, so it’s exciting to collaborate on this project to see how these local hops will work in actual test batches.

It’s hard to separate teaching and brewing. I do try to bring real-life brewing scenarios or problems into the classroom to create more teachable moments. Sometimes I bring the brewery to the class. Sometimes I take the class to the brewery. I try to make it as real-life as possible. They can learn how to use one of the tools I’m talking about in the classroom to address a real problem in the brewhouse. For me, I think it’s very important for people to understand something in order to learn it.

Kim: How can people try the beers made by students in the KPU Brew Lab?

Martina: You can purchase KPU’s beers at the KPU Brew Lab on Friday afternoons all year long. There is a rotating selection of small-batch craft beers on tap. We have a very small brewing pilot system, a 2-hL system, so we end up with about eight 20L kegs, depending on the style. In the spring semester, from January through April, our second-year students develop their own signature beers. They package their final project beers in cans. You can also get a growler fill of your favourite.

When you visit the KPU Brew Lab on Friday afternoons, you can try experimental beers and sometimes even some collaboration beers. Recently some students came back to brew their signature beers again so that we could submit them to beer competitions. One that stands out for me was the beer that Kyle Jansen (who works at Five Roads Brewing) and Kayla Gibson (Faculty Brewing) made. It was a brown ale that tasted like a liquid biscuit. It was so delicious.

Kim: How is today’s future generation of brewers looking?

Martina: The future generation of brewers is looking really great. We have students that are curious and creative. They are making such creative beers for their final projects. We had a Vanilla Chai Latte Stout made by Lindsey Bartram (who is now working at Field House Brewing) and Kevin Reid. Colton Yakabuski (Parkside Brewery) and Jacob Wideman (Farm Country Brewing) made a New Zealand Belgium Pale Ale. One of the final projects this year won an award recently at the Canadian Brewing Awards. It was called Summertime by Mike Patterson (Parkside Brewery) and Michael Hodgson (Russell Brewing). Students are creative, innovative, and enthusiastic. They are curious and they ask lots of questions to understand what I’m teaching them. These are such great traits in students that are so keen to learn because they’ll continue to help improve the industry going forward. It’s really rewarding to see these students questioning the current methods and current practices.

Kim: What are you seeing from a diversity perspective in your program right now?

Martina: Over the last few years, the diversity has increased a little bit each year. We have a few more women. We are up to about 20% women in the program now. We also have about 25% that are from diverse backgrounds (Latin, Asian, and Indian). I hope the diversity continues to grow every year, so we have a representation of our community in the classroom.

Kim: As an industry, what can we be doing to encourage more diversity?

Martina: KPU has added the Nancy More Award and the Diversity in Brewing Award as well as others that encourage students from diverse backgrounds to apply. These awards are helping to lower the financial barrier. I think that one of the most important things to get more women in the brewing program is to have more female role models from the industry. As there is more diversity in breweries and the brewing program, it welcomes and encourages more diversity. Female students see me and Nancy More on staff and see more opportunities for themselves.

Also, I think it’s important to see women students like Ashley Brooks go on and get jobs in brewing. Another example is Emily Kokonas, who was a student at KPU. She went on to work at Bakery Brewing and is now working in the brewing program at KPU. We are increasing the number of role models that will help attract more women to the program.

Nancy More is such a pioneer in the craft beer industry. We are so lucky and grateful to have her as part of our team. Not only is she an amazing leader, but she also has tons of experience from being in the industry for 40 years. She’s such a great example for the students to see.

Kim: What are some of your favourite craft beer festivals?

Martina: I really enjoy the Great Canadian Beer Festival in Victoria. It has such diversity in the beer offerings, featuring breweries in BC, Alberta, and beyond. It’s a cozy festival with such a big mix of breweries from places that I can’t necessarily go and visit myself. I also really enjoy the Fort Langley Beer and Food Festival. I enjoy seeing and connecting with my students at this local festival.

Kim: Now that people are beginning to travel again, where in BC is your next spot to go adventuring?

Martina: I love Victoria and I am really looking forward to visiting again soon. It’s such a quaint and walkable city. I love riding my bike there along the boardwalk. The brewing scene is so awesome in Victoria and I’m excited to go check out the breweries again. île Sauvage Brewing is a brewery I love to visit, and I also enjoy going to Spinnakers Brewpub for a late breakfast and beer. I’m also excited to see KPU alums Amara Houle who’s now working at Category 12 Brewing and Kyle York at Craft Beer Market, once they’re open in Victoria.

In addition to checking out the craft beer scene in places that I visit, I also enjoy hiking, being outside, and visiting lakes.

Kim: What do you love about the craft beer scene in Langley?

Martina: It has developed so much in the last few years. There were very few options to go for a beer after work. Now there’s Farm Country Brewing, Camp Beer Co., Trading Post Brewing, and Five Roads Brewing just five minutes away from work, as well as Dead Frog Brewery, which was one of the first in Langley. These breweries are offering some really tasty beers and great experiences. The industry is friendly, and as there are a number of students and alumni from KPU working in these breweries, it feels very friendly and collaborative in these locations.

Even after students graduate, KPU Brewing instructors stay connected with alumni, often visiting the breweries they work at. Recent grad Kyle Jansen is now a brewer at Five Roads Brewing in Langley and instructors Martina Solano Bielen, Emily Kokonas and Nancy More stopped by to taste some of his work.

Kim: Tell me about some hidden gems in the Langley area?

Martina: I discovered this ramen place in Langley called Akedo Showten Ramen+Gyoza. It was a delicious surprise. The Barley Merchant also has really tasty food, especially the wings, and a really great selection of craft beers. The Raving Gamer is also a fun spot to go to if you are looking to pair your beer and food with some board games. Additionally, every Thursday in the summer, KPU hosts a veggie sale where they sell the produce grown in the greenhouses by students. Their raspberries are amazing!

Kim: Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Martina: I was thinking about this a lot because there are so many interesting people in the brewing industry. Miguel Molina used to be one of our students. He was working for 33 Acres Brewing, and he’s now the head brewer at Boardwalk Brewing in Port Coquitlam on the North of the Fraser Ale Trail. He’s very passionate and really enjoys brewing science. I think he’s pretty cool, and I think he would be a great person for you to speak with next.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Miguel from Boardwalk Brewing. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Martina Solano Bielen of KPU Brew Lab appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.

Most recently I interviewed Marinna Perry, one of the Lounge Managers at Strathcona Beer Co. for my latest Hops Among Friends article. At the end of our discussion, Marinna picked who I would interview next, and she suggested Ashley Brooks. Ashley is the Quality Control Manager at Four Winds Brewing, which opened in 2013 in Delta on the South of the Fraser Ale Trail.

I really enjoyed my conversation with Ashley. I always enjoy connecting with other women who are passionate about working in the craft beer industry. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Four Winds, and after hearing about their upcoming beers, and updates on their plans for their new brewery and restaurant location opening in Tsawwassen, I’m excited to venture out that way again soon.

Kim: How did you get your start in craft beer?

Ashley: My background is in microbiology. I completed my Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree at UBC in 2011. During university, I worked as a server in a restaurant, and I started to learn more about craft beer from the brewery people who came into the restaurant. When the brewing program started up at KPU, I thought it would be perfect as it brought together my love of science and my love and passion for craft beer. I had looked into other brewing programs before, but having the KPU program so local was very convenient.

I started the KPU brewing program in 2014, so I was part of the first cohort. It was a real ah-ha moment for me. When I started at KPU, I got a job as an assistant brewer at Yaletown Brewing Co. with the Mark James Group. I learned a lot in the brewpub setting while learning at KPU. It was like an apprenticeship during school. By the time I graduated in 2016, I was running the Big Ridge Brewing Co. brewpub with MJG.

About a year after graduation, I started at Four Winds Brewing in April 2017, so I’ve been at Four Winds for almost five years now. Four Winds was looking for someone to take over the Quality Control program and manage the lab, so I thought it would be a great combination of my love for both science and beer.

Kim: What can people expect when they visit Four Winds?

Ashley: We always have a good selection of beers for anyone’s tastes. Fresh beer on tap is what we love to serve. We have a very friendly environment with a great vibe and great food to pair with our beers.

Kim: What do you love most about working at Four Winds?

Ashley: So many things. I love the beer, so that’s a good start. There’s always something new and fun going on. For example, new brewing and cellaring techniques to try. I enjoy being a part of putting these ideas into reality.

Coming from a microbiology background, yeast is my favourite thing in the beer production process, as this represents the living portion of beer.

Without yeast, you don’t have beer. I love getting to experiment with new yeast strains with different fermentation profiles. The more I research, the more I learn about how different yeast strains impact the beer. I really like keeping yeast happy, healthy, and viable so that the beer is fresh, clean, and quality tasting.

The brewing industry is exciting and constantly shifting. I love it when the product comes out because it’s a tangible product that you can see, taste, and smell. You can see what worked and you can think about what you can do next time. I really enjoy being a part of the craft beer industry, it’s friendly and helpful, and we share ingredients and knowledge. So it’s a production job, but with social elements. I love going to conferences and beer festivals, and the continual learning aspect.

Kim: What are some of your favourite craft beer festivals?

Ashley: Farmhouse Fest is one of my favourites. It’s in such a great location and I just love trying all the different beers. I really hope it is back again this year. I also love Okanagan Fest of Ale and the Great Canadian Beer Festival, so hopefully they’ll both be back again. I really miss getting together with everyone and seeing all my friends in the industry.

Kim: What is it like being a woman in a predominantly male industry?

Ashley: Since getting started in the industry, I’ve always had a very positive experience, I have never felt that I was treated differently at my job or at KPU as a student. I have been a part of the Vancouver Chapter of the Pink Boots Society since 2015, and I have always found the industry very inclusive. There are some physical barriers at times because of my height and size that I’ve had to overcome, but I’ve just figured it out. In my quality control role, I have less of the physically demanding roles, but I still get a nice mix of working on the floor, working in my lab, and working on spreadsheets for data collection/record keeping. I like running and checking the statistics and making sure everything is in spec for our beers.

Kim: What are your favourite beers right now?

Ashley: I’ve really been enjoying our Four Winds Porter. It’s an oat Porter, and it’s part of our OG (Original Series). It’s nice and smooth — it has a very approachable taste and flavour. We don’t brew this beer very often, and I’m just loving it on these cold, wintery days. It’s also a really easy drinking beer at 5.5% ABV.

Another of my favourites is our La Maison Tropical Ale. I love La Maison come springtime for its light-easy drinkability with hints of tropical fruit. It’s a delicious beer to enjoy after a long bike ride.

Kim: What’s your perfect winter beer and food pairing?

Ashley: I’m really enjoying our Extralux Hazy IPA right now. It’s a brand new recipe with a new yeast strain, made with new cellar techniques and a new mash profile. The tropical juicy flavour profile of this Hazy IPA with the tacos in our taproom is a great pairing. At 5.8% ABV, it’s very approachable for most people.

Kim: What is your favourite beer style?

Ashley: Lager. To some, it may seem like a boring style, but there is so much involved with making lagers. I really enjoy the lager program we’ve been working on. To make a good lager, it’s really important to use healthy yeast. A healthy fermentation is key to ensuring there are no unwanted off flavours in your final product and in making a really clean and delicious beer. It takes a lot of skill to make a good lager. The selection of good malt and hops is also very important.

Kim: What do you have planned for this spring at Four Winds?

Ashley: One of the reasons I like drinking lagers is because I like the clean, breadiness flavour from the yeast where the malt can really shine through. That leads me into Archetype, which is a limited release Czech Pale Lager. We’ve selected some beautiful Czech malt and performed a decoction mash, which is not our typical method. It is fermented in one of our neutral “open” foeders that has never had contact with wild yeast or brettanomyces. The different shape and surface area of the foeder creates a different fermentation profile and puts less stress on the yeast. After starting in the foeder, we moved it into steel tanks and lager it there. The result is an easy-drinking beer that is soft on the palate with some lightly spicy, floral, and bready notes. It will be out in early spring in 473ml cans. I really enjoyed being a part of the process of this new beer.

Kim: What’s the latest update on the new Southlands property?

Ashley: We’ll be breaking ground on the new brewery in Southlands Market Square within the next three months. We’ll have a full 6,000 sq. ft. restaurant and a 15 hL brewhouse. It’s a smaller-scale brewhouse for production.

This will let us brew more experimental beers to pair with some delicious new food items, so we’re really excited about that.

We also have an orchard and some hops on the property, so we’ll have a whole bunch of new projects to try. We’re at capacity with brewing our core and seasonal beers at our current location, so this will allow us to have some fun with more experimentals at the new location. We’re looking at an opening date in a couple of years for the new building.

Kim: What are you most proud of at Four Winds?

Ashley: I am really proud of the Quality Program I’ve been a part of developing here and the amount of quality beer we brew, cellar, and package daily. It takes a lot of hard work, and every position is integral to putting out product that meets our standards. I enjoy monitoring these specifications and ensuring each batch is dialed in for consistency and tasting excellent. I love building spreadsheets and graphs etc., being involved with developing our sensory program, and developing Standard Operating Procedures throughout production.

Kim: What do you love about the craft beer scene in Delta?

Ashley: We have just one other brewery in Delta, which is Barnside Brewing. They have been around since 2020. They are pretty close to us, just a quick bike ride up the street. We did a collab beer with Barnside last year called We heart Delta. It was pretty cool that both of our Delta breweries came together in support of our town. There are also other breweries in the surrounding cities. With the supply chain issues, it’s been beneficial to have brewery friends close by to support each other.

Kim: Tell me about some hidden gems in the Delta area?

Ashley:  I really enjoy mountain biking and cycling. I am part of Muddbunnies, a women’s mountain bike group on the North Shore. There are some easy mountain bike trails at the Delta Watershed. I hadn’t heard of these trails until a few years ago, so they are a bit of a hidden gem. They are within cycling distance from Four Winds, so you can go for a ride and then end up back here for a beer.

There’s a lot of farmland in the Delta area, so bring your bike for a nice easy ride along the farm roads to Ladner or further out to Tsawwassen.

I also recommend checking out Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Ladner. It’s a nice bike ride to Westham Island. Also, Deas Island is a great little park just up the street from us in the Tilbury area. Britannia Brewing Ladner is a great craft beer restaurant where you can also enjoy some delicious beer and food pairings. It’s also really nice to ride out to Centennial Beach in Tsawwassen in the summertime.

If you’re into boating or fishing, there is also some awesome boating right out of Ladner. The area is quite beautiful around here.

Kim: Who else in the craft beer industry do you find interesting and why?

Ashley: Dave and Kevin and our friends at Camp Beer Co. in Langley are always brewing up tasty beers. Being an outdoor camping enthusiast, I love their brand, and they have a great atmosphere at the brewery. We’re doing a Vienna-style lager collaboration brew with them very soon, so stay tuned.

For your next interview, I recommend you speak with Martina Solano Bielen from KPU Brew Lab. She’s one of my favourite people in the industry, and does both teaching and brewing.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the Hops Among Friends blog series, where I speak with Martina from KPU Brew Lab, which is on the Fraser Valley Ale Trail. Until then, cheers!

The post Hops Among Friends: Ashley Brooks of Four Winds Brewing appeared first on The BC Ale Trail.