The most anticipated brewery opening of the year in east end should be worth the wait: owner Luc Lafontaine (known as Bim, a nickname he’s had since childhood), has years of experience and plans to do it right.

Godspeed Brewery, at Coxwell Ave. and Gerrard St. took Lafontaine two-and-a-half years to put together.

“I want to be a neighbourhood brewpub with an international reputation,” says Lafontaine, 43, of the airy, 6,000-square-foot space that once housed a Bargain Harold’s. With a 23-hectolitre brewing system in the back and 100 seats in the pub and on the patio, the strategy here is to launch right-sized.

“A lot of people I know wish they could go back,” he says of colleagues in the industry. They’ve launched small brewpubs and had to expand or find a second location. “This is the size I want to be, I don’t want to get bigger.”

He’s brewing up beers with his 20-plus years of experience — he began home brewing as a teen — and serving the Japanese comfort food he loves from his travels there.

Lafontaine hails from Gatineau and was interested in fine drink and food from a young age. He’d get his older brother, Brian, to get him beer when he was a teen, but often insisted on imported. “I was never a Labatt Blue guy,” he says.

Meanwhile, living with his dad, Lafontaine soon took over buying his own groceries and whipping up his own meals. By 1991, while still a teenager, he started home brewing.

This was not easy: there was no internet to seek information or make orders. He had a book and would often trek to Ottawa to buy beer-making kits. He’d mess with them. He recalls one of his earliest experiments was an apple amber. “I wish I could go back and taste them,” he says, suspecting they were pretty bad.

While a “beer geek” on the side, he moved to Montreal to study kinesiology at the University of Montreal — seems unrelated to beer, but Lafontaine says they’re utterly connected, as both are sciences where one small change impacts other things.

In 2001, he started working at Montreal brewery Dieu du Ciel! — he’d met the owners previously, before embarking on a long trip, and mailed them beer coasters from around the world. He worked as a server and a manager and finally got shifts in the brewery itself. By 2007, he was head brewer.

By then, Lafontaine had travelled to Japan several times and decided to open a brewery there, as the market was ripe for development, he thought. Meanwhile, he’d met Eri Kuramasu, who was Japanese, and the two began dating.

In 2012, Lafontaine left his job and moved to Japan with Kuramasu. With local friends as investors, he put together Ushitora (it means cow tiger, which are his and his girlfriend’s horoscope animals) in Tochigi, just outside Tokyo.

But visa problems, red tape and issues with his partners made setting up the brewery a drawn-out slog. By the time Lafontaine was ready to open in mid-2014, he’d already decided the project was not for him. “I wanted my 40s to be amazing,” he recalls, and this project was not going to make that possible.

He opened, got everything ready so his partners could run the brewery, and he and Kuramasu returned to Canada at the end of 2014 (they’ve since married). At that time, the microbrewery market in Toronto was underserved, and Lafontaine thought he’d do well here — plus he didn’t want to return to Montreal and compete with his former employer.

Using a name inspired by that brewery — plus Godspeed You! Black Emperor is both a Japanese movie and a Montreal band — he secured partners (including brother Brian, who works in Ottawa in banking) and sought a space.

This cavernous storefront came up in mid-2015. After negotiating the lease, Lafontaine and his partners invested about $2.5 million to get the space ready.

For the food, Lafontaine brought in chef Ryusuke Yamanaka to cook up the comfort foods of Japan, such as Katsu-Sando, a pork cutlet sandwich, and the bestselling Karaage, Japanese fried chicken.

The space opened in July and the brewery has already produced a stout, Dortmunder, smoked saison and transatlantic pale ale ($3.75 for a 355 ml can from the bottle shop) — plus two more available only on tap.

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While the neighbourhood and the city has come out — even Mayor John Tory showed up on opening — it’s a very different microbrew industry these days in Toronto.

Lafontaine says he will truly need godspeed to do well in this tight marketplace, but is hoping his quality offerings and unique location will make a difference. “I’m not taking anything for granted.”

Correction - August 14, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled “Karaage.”

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