Mary Beth Keefe’s first born, Tommy, was an infant when he made the connection between the family’s brew pub and his mom.

At the sight of the framed T-shirt with the logo Granite Brewery on the back wall of the pub, he would point and exclaim, “Mama, mama.”

Tommy will be the third generation Keefe to grow up in the business founded by Mary Beth’s father, Ron, in 1991.

“I was nine when the Granite opened,” Mary Beth recalled in an interview at the English-style pub on the corner of Eglinton Ave. E. and Mount Pleasant Ave. “We spent a lot of time here, having family dinners.”

Like The Amsterdam Brasserie and Brew Pub before it, the Granite helped invent an industry that after years of struggle is flourishing.

Ontario is home to about 183 small breweries, including brew pubs like the Granite, and another 83 are planned by the end of the year, according to the website momandhops.ca.

“It’s an explosion,” says Jordan St. John, co-author with Robin LeBlanc of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide.

Success has not come easily.

A former corporate executive, Keefe chucked it all to try his hand at what was then a novel concept – a pub that brewed its own beer.

He was inspired and also shaken by the death of his brother, Wilfred, at age 43. “When he passed away it was a wakeup call for the rest of us,” Keefe recalls.

Wilfred and another brother, Kevin, were the visionaries in the family. The entrepreneurs. The risk takers. “They’re the ones who got us in the brew pub business,” Keefe recalls.

Wilfred and Kevin had a home renovation business together in Halifax in the late 1970s. One day they got talking to the pub owner where they often ate lunch. “By 1 p.m., they owned it,” Keefe recalls with a laugh.

For awhile, they ran a typical pub, specializing in imported beer. But after Kevin read about the resurgence of craft brewing in England, he began pushing for a change in the laws in Nova Scotia that prohibited brew pubs from making their own beer.

Ontario followed suit.

One of the architects of the English renaissance was Peter Austin at Ringwood Breweries. To help others get into the game, Austin trained and equipped other small brewers.

Kevin went over for about six to eight weeks to learn the craft.

The result was the first Granite Brewery, in Halifax, in 1985, one of the first brew pubs in Canada.

For some years, the Halifax brothers talked about expanding into Ontario. After Wilfred died, Ron decided to fulfill that vision.

“I wasn’t that happy with what I was doing,” Ron said of his former corporate career.

Still, opening a pub that made its own beer was a big gamble back in the early 1990s.

Hardly anyone had even heard of craft beer. Governments didn’t know how to regulate them. Federal and provincial tax rates levied on the big brewers were crippling to the smaller players.

City officials didn’t know how to categorize them. “They said you can’t have a brew pub here. It’s an industrial use in a commercial-residential area,” Keefe recalled.

And then there was the marketing challenge. Most consumers had grown up drinking either Molson or Labatt, the two Canadian mega-brewers that owned virtually 90 per cent of the market.

“We used to spend a lot of our time trying to get people to try us,” Keefe recalls.

Keefe won the zoning battle with the city and later helped push for lower federal and provincial tax rates for smaller brewers.

Along the way, consumer tastes expanded.

“For years, we never had anyone under 30 come in,” Keefe recalls. “Now you get 19 and 21 year olds. They want to know what have you got that’s like a Mad Tom (an India pale ale). What are the IBUs on this?” Keefe said. “I don’t think anyone knew what an IBU was the first 15 years I was here.”

A measure of the bitterness provided by the hops, a light American lager might have as little as 5 IBUs, while India pale ale could have 40 IBUs or more.

Since 2009, Keefe has been gradually stepping back to make room for the next generation brewmaster, his daughter Mary Beth.

One of the first high-profile women brewers in Toronto, she’s made her mark, says beer guide author St. John. “She’s designed two or three newer recipes that have worked out very nicely,” he says.

The brewery produces 12 regular beers, with one or two rotating flavours, and also four seasonal offerings, Mary Beth says.

The pub’s most popular brew is the Ringwood, a pale blonde ale with a 5 per cent alcohol content. Granite’s “Peculiar,” a stronger, reddish brown malty ale styled after an English beer called “Old Peculiar,” is also a big seller.

Like most brewmasters, Mary Beth likes to experiment. For the annual men’s health fundraiser, Movember, she created The Chai Wallah with a Moustache Oatmeal Stout.

But the real challenge, she says, “is making a beer that people like with the four ingredients that beer is supposed to be made from – malted barley, water, yeast and hops.”

“I always thought it was pretty cool that my Dad made beer,” she says. “Keeping it in the family is important to me.”

Along with Mary Beth, Keefe’s son Sam has taken an interest in the business side of the brewery, while the youngest Dave helps out with marketing.

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“We’ve had a few family meetings where we decided that we wouldn’t let the business get in the way of the family,” Mary Beth says.

This summer, the Granite will celebrate 25 years in business.

Behind the microbrew boom

Microbrews are a growing share of Ontario’s beer market, but it was a sector that stuggled for years. The industry’s big breakthrough came in 2003, when the province allowed brewers to own a pub on their premises.

That allowed the Granite to apply for a brewers’ license to sell its beer for home consumption.

Prior to that, most small-batch breweries were struggling, John Hay, executive director of the Ontario Craft Brewers recalls. When Hay joined the industry association in 2002, there were just 12 viable craft brewers in the province.

Now the group represents 60 brewers, from 5 Paddles Brewing Co. to William St. Beer.

While Ontario’s overall beer market has been declining, the craft brewers share has been growing to about 5 per cent.

The labour intensive demands of small batch brewing means they’re also major employers, accounting for 1,400 to 1,500 jobs, or roughly 40 per cent of the industry’s workforce.

The Granite Brewery has grown alongside the industry, expanding three-fold from a few tanks on the main floor to 3000 hectoliters — or about 3000 barrels — a year.

That’s still small even by microbrewery standards. Most craft brewers make about 10,000 to 12,000 hectolitres a year, though some make as much as 70,000 or 80,000, according to the industry association.

The Granite now sells through 20 to 30 other pubs and some LCBO stores though distribution through grocery stores – a new channel the province opened up to all brewers earlier this year - isn’t in the cards at the moment, Keefe says.

“The issue for us will be capacity,” he says.

For small brewers, the most profitable route to success is through its own brew pub, St. John noted. The pub introduces consumers to the product and also eliminates the middleman.

“If you have a restaurant that also brews its own beer and sells it off premise, it’s basically a license to print money,” St. John said.

The Granite specializes in ales made in open fermenters using Ringwood yeast, a particularly robust yeast that not only helps convert the sugar to alcohol but gives the beer a particular fruity taste, Keefe says.

“It’s one of the things that differentiates us,” Keefe says, noting the Granite is one of about 4 or 5 microbrewers in Canada that uses the Ringwood style of brewing.

About a quarter of Granite’s production is top fermented cask beer, or so-called “real ale”, which is unfiltered and unpasteurized and served from a cask without additional nitrogen or carbon dioxide pressure.

The process gives the ale a softer, silkier flavour with less carbonation, Keefe explains.

It also presents some challenges.

Open fermenters are at greater risk of being spoiled by an errant fruit fly or piece of dust. “It makes many brewers very nervous.”

Meanwhile, cask beers can quickly spoil after opening. “They only last a few days. Even the first pint and the last pint might taste a little different. But that’s part of the feature,” Keefe says.

Correction - August 3, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Kevin Keefe pushed for changes to the law in New Brunswick that that prohibited brew pubs from making their own beer.

