Hello again. First, the important news — yes, we are OPEN for business! You can come enjoy beers in our taproom at 247 Wallace Ave just on the edge of Toronto’s Junction Triangle and Wallace-Emerson neighbourhoods. We also have bottles and growlers to go. To start, our hours will be Tuesday-Friday 3–9pm and Saturday-Sunday 11am-9pm. We’ve been thrilled by the reception of the neighbourhood since we opened a few days ago and the warm vibes in our taproom.

It’s been a long several months since we secured our lease in October and started construction in December. We’re pretty tired but couldn’t be happier that we are finally open for business and can see the smiling faces of both friends and strangers enjoying our beer. In the spirit of continuing this series, here’s a belated update on what has happened since our last update mid-February.

March

Toward the end of February we had most of our utilities in place and we were pushing toward doing a water brew in early March. After a few small delays, we were able to do a full water test on the system, which went very smoothly. This let us get acclimated to all the equipment without the added pressure of actually making beer. Essentially, you do everything that you would do on a brew day but only with water to ensure all the pumps are working, nothing is leaking, the water gets to a boil, and we feel confident that we know how things will work on brew day — at least to the fullest extent possible.

Around this time we also started cleaning our new equipment, first with caustic to get rid of any manufacturing grease, dirt and organic material. We then passivated all our stainless steel with a citric acid solution to ensure it stays rust-free and sanitary. Finally, we sanitized everything to ensure it was ready for brewing and there were no contaminants like wild yeast or bacteria in the system.

We also got our glycol chiller system working. This is the big machine that sends coolant (a food-grade glycol and water mixture) through our equipment to keep everything at the temperature we need it to be. This was pretty new to us, but we felt confident we could mix the glycol and start the system on our own. There were a few hiccups along the way, including getting all the air out of the pipes. Apparently there’s no instruction manual for this and nobody tells you how to do this when you decide to start a brewery. ;)

Finally, everything was working and cold. Except for the one time we tried changing one of the temperature controllers from Fahrenheit to Celsius and inadvertently found a bug in the programming that caused the chiller to go into a safety shut off mode in the middle of the night… but that’s a longer story.

Callum checking the mash-in water temperature on our first brew

Then, finally, the big day came. Our first brew! It ended up being a ridiculous 13-hour brew day. We started too late, and finished exhausted, very late. We brewed a fairly simple recipe (by our standards), a 4.9% Session IPA we jokingly call Half-Truth. We learned a lot of lessons in the process and we’ve continued to refine our process with every batch since then. It’s a bit more stressful than a water brew when you have a mash tun full of grains and a kettle full of wort and you’re hoping everything works smoothly.

Unfortunately, in March, we also had to dump a full batch of beer. This is something all brewers dread to do, but it’s especially painful when you’re just starting out and trying to make enough beer to get open. We had some manufacturing issues with our kettle that caused a batch of beer to have an unfortunate burnt taste. Everything is fixed now, except maybe our bruised egos and the constant calls and visits from our HVAC technician to try and fix things. *sigh of relief*

Cleaning out the mash tun. Most of what we do is cleaning. A lot of cleaning.

April-May

We had initially planned to be open at the end of April (ahead of schedule!) but our kettle issues slowed down our brewing for a few weeks. Once resolved, we were able to brew a ton and put the finishing touches on our taproom. There were seemingly a million tiny little details, and small ones kept getting added to the list every day. We had to answer important questions like: How were we going to finish the wood on the taproom walls (we opted for a watered-down black stain that was sprayed on then wiped down)? How would our self-built draft system work? How would we create our beer menus (we had an idea to use magnetic chalkboards on a substrate)? We also hadn’t built our outdoor sign yet, and though we had a design, we didn’t really know how it would physically come together. We also hadn’t even constructed or tested our bottler yet, even though we had a general design in mind and beer ready to go.

The team from CNCCutting.ca and JD McNicoll Interiors assembling our taproom

Eventually, we set ourselves a drop-dead date of the second week of May to be open. We realized that without a date, it would be pretty easy for things to keep sliding. We had to rally ourselves and the rest of our team for one last push to be open.

Sodi Designs installing our amazing custom light fixture, designed by Jedidiah Gordon-Moran

We worked near-sleepless nights going up to the opening. 1am light fixture installs became the new norm. Our outdoor sign was built the week before our friends & family launch and installed the day before we opened. Everything came together really quickly and we are absolutely blown away by the teamwork and dedication of everyone working on this project with us.