with Ron Keefe of Granite Brewery
Granite has a sister brewery in Halifax run by your brother so this is a family business?
I had two brothers in the restaurant/tavern business in Halifax, and one of my brothers, Kevin, started Granite in Halifax in 1985 at the location of one of their other pubs. That was the 2nd brew pub in Canada at the time. I was living in Toronto … and quite interested in getting into the restaurant/brewery business, the brewery especially. That's something I enjoy.
It was just starting out then, right?
There were just a handful of microbreweries, and very few brew pubs at the time, and obviously that's grown exponentially over the years. You could tell by going to the brewery conferences. In the late 80's there'd be like a handful of guys in the church basement or something, and now they're taking over entire hotels with thousands of participants.
Were you able to pick your brother Kevin's brain?
Definitely. He had trained at the Ringwood Brewery in England, and the guy that had trained him had emigrated to the U.S. and was running a brewery in Maryland, so I worked and trained with him, and also with Kevin in Halifax … so he was instrumental in helping me get my background at the time.
Is your Ringwood Ale an homage to that Ringwood Brewery training?
That's right. We use Ringwood yeast in all our beers, and very few breweries in Canada use that particular yeast. It's got some very interesting characteristics to it.
Does that affect the styles of beer that are in Granite's repertoire?
Most definitely. It imparts a very special fruity flavour to a number of the beers, and people with a very fine palette can certainly pick up the similarities from the yeast in the different ales. I can't say that I can at all times, because in some of the more aggressive beers it's a little harder to pick up, but it's a very unique style of open top fermentation that you very rarely see around anymore.
Tell us about your ingredients and small-batch brewing process.
Well, we use water, malt, yeast, and hops. Pretty much all brewers start with those basic ingredients, and sometimes they'll add a little something unique, such as various spices or fruit. We brew in 10 hectolitre brews, which is about as small as you get, because we started as a brew pub, although we are now full brewery licensed. In the eyes of the law we went from a restaurant with a brewery to a brewery with a restaurant. It doesn't sound like much, but it makes a significant difference to how we conduct our business. Because we brew in such small batches we can turn on a dime, so to speak, we can try different things. The nice thing about a brew pub is that we have sort of a captive audience, and we do come up with something new the response is immediate. The beer never has a chance to get old here.
Have you noticed a difference in the attitudes of Ontario beer consumers over the years?
When we opened in 1991 we started with three beers and we had to sell, sell, sell. Each year we had to let people know that were options out there — new things that they could try — and when the typical mass-market beer consumer came here and saw something that was little darker, or a little hoppier, or certainly more aggressive, it took a little getting used to. But now there's less and less of that. I think people come in now because of the proliferation of craft breweries, especially in Ontario. We were one of the few back then, and now there are a lot, and they all make great beers, and some people are more aware of the options now — aware of the different styles that are available — so it's not as much of a hard sell, shall we say. People come looking for it now, as opposed to us having to try to talk them into it.
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