Raising a glass to Atlantic Canada‘s growing craft beer market

Boxing Rock Brewing Company in Shelburne, NS earned an unlikely fan last year when a customer’s mom bought him a keg of its Hunky Dory Pale Ale for Christmas. “One day this guy shows up in his truck and he says he has a problem with his keg,” explains Emily Tipton, the microbrewery’s co-owner. “He says, ‘This is empty, I need it refilled.’”

Tipton’s soon-to-be repeat customer admitted that at first try, he didn’t like her beer. He found it bitter, she says, and it didn’t taste like any beer he’d had before. By the time he finished the keg, though, he’d converted. “When he tried to go back to his usual beer, that tasted horrible,” says Tipton. “It also gave him hangovers. So he bought another keg.”

Everyone knows Atlantic Canada has a long brewing history—think of the big-brew staples, Alexander Keith’s, Oland, Moosehead and Blue Star. But for a long time, much of the beer brewed in this region was what Chris Reynolds, co-owner of Halifax’s Stillwell Beer Bar, calls “colours of the same yeast.” Most breweries, he says, were just making a lot of pale and brown ales, and occasional stouts.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, though, that started to change. A few microbreweries and brewpubs like Granite, Propeller and Garrison popped up in Halifax. Gradually these craft breweries—a catchall term for the brewing of beer in small, well-crafted batches—earned a following of loyal customers. And their beers, inspired by brewing traditions in England, Scotland and Ireland, influenced the East Coast’s now unique character of brewing. Combine that with the recent slew of new microbreweries across the region and you tap into beer culture that is indeed golden—and breweries that can’t keep up with demand.

The learning curve

Atlantic Canada wasn’t transformed into a haven for craft beer aficionados overnight. According to Brian Titus—one of the founders of Garrison Brewing, as well as its current president and general manager—they had to do a lot of groundwork, teaching consumers about craft beer.

“It was challenging to even get people to give us a chance and understand what we’re producing,” says Titus, who had to explain why Garrison doesn’t pasteurize their beer or use any chemical additives—concepts taken for granted in beer circles today. But, he says, “there were consumers who got it and who were excited.”

Those consumers changed everything.

By the mid-1990s, craft breweries were opening up throughout the region. Quidi Vidi Brewing Company was founded in St. John’s in 1996, the Murphy Brewing Company (now Gahan House Brewery) in Charlottetown in 1997, Picaroons in Fredericton in 1995 and Pump House Brewery in Moncton in 1999.

And the pioneer breweries started expanding. Eight years ago, Garrison moved from its original location on Lady Hammond Road to the Seaport on the Halifax waterfront. “Since then it’s been between 10 or 20 per cent growth every year for us,” says Titus.

In July 2013, Propeller opened a second brewery building on Windmill Road in Dartmouth to keep up with demand. Last fall Gahan House Brewery, in partnership with PEI Brewing Company, opened a second location in Halifax. And Garrison’s in the middle of a new $3-million project that includes a new brewing plant near its waterfront location. “You don’t want to say no to people who legitimately want your beer,” Titus says.

Expansion

That demand for craft beer has trickled out of cities to rural communities. There’s Big Spruce Brewing in Nyanza, Cape Breton; PEI’s Barnone Brewing in Rose Valley; Shiretown Brewing in Charlo, NB; Tatamagouche Brewing in Tatamagouche, NS; and of course, Boxing Rock Brewing in Shelburne, NS, just to name a few.

Emily Tipton and Henry Pedro, both engineers by training, started Boxing Rock in 2012. As Tipton explains why craft beer’s become so popular in rural Atlantic Canada she goes back to the story of the man with the beer keg. “People have to be open to it, and not everybody is,” she says. “This guy was willing to give it a shot.”

So what is it exactly about microbrews that people like the keg guy love? For Tipton, it’s the complexity of flavour. Craft brewers develop recipes to capture the flavours of particular styles of beer. Those flavours can vary ever so slightly, due to the different harvests of malts and grains, but that’s part of the charm and excitement of it. “I can’t guarantee you every time you have a [Boxing Rock] Temptation Red Ale it will be exactly the same every time, but it will still be a recognizable Temptation Red Ale.”

Innovation

At Stillwell Beer Bar on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax, an ever-rotating menu of beers on tap showcases the best beer available in Atlantic Canada and across the country. Tonight, they’re offering Boxing Rock’s Hunky Dory Pale Ale, PEI Brewing Company’s Pumpkin Ale, Big Spruce’s Cereal Killer, and Pump House’s Oktoberfest.

Open since November 2013, Stillwell is part of a new vanguard of beer-focused bars and eateries, luring both serious and novice beer drinkers.

That thirst for discovery is what fuels Chris Reynolds and his business partners, Andrew Connell and Laura MacDonald, to search for the best beer in the region.

After a summer of talking to tourists from around North America, Reynolds is proud of the scene here in Atlantic Canada. Our region’s beers have an overarching character, he says, that’s inspired by those northern European brewing traditions mixed with new brewing styles.

“I spent the past summer tasting tons of beers from here. And I met people from places with big robust brewing traditions who look at what we offer and they are really impressed. It made me appreciate what we have in terms of our brewing terroir,” Reynolds says.

In the end, however, it’s not the people from abroad who will be drinking our beers en masse. It’s us. Or, in the case of Boxing Rock, the fisherman from Cape Sable Island who shows up with his truck, looking for a refill for his keg.