Grand River Brewing set to open

[northyorksammy]

we Metro TO people are ready to try it

[kmallett]

I'm looking forward to trying some tomorrow night at the Woolwich Arms & Arrow. My first time going there so it should be a nice treat

[pootz]

Rob said:

I have seen a number of references to 'deep golden' and 'copper-coloured' elixirs in reference to some of these products and of course the 'steam' or 'cream' descriptions are fairly common here. I am sure that the alcohol levels of that time period are higher than the 4.4% I put into the Galt Knife Old Style but I aimed to pack as much flavour and mouthfeel in as possible. We don't do Coors Light here and we don't intend to charge just a buck for it either.

Thanks for the insight on the recipe Rob. I hope this beer really catches on..it certainly is unique...if there was only one thing I'd change in it it would be the ABV% but my first impression was that the body was so big and so well hopped that I didn't notice it was light on alcohol....it was very satisfying.

[Derek]

Is the brewery open for tastings and/or tours? Weekend hours?

Will you have growlers for this weekend (June 23rd)? If not, can I bring my own?

http://www.grandriverbrewing.com/

[old faithful]

I wish this venture well, the plans sound great.

I was interested to know that a beer style existed in the area and an "Old Style" will be brewed to commemorate it.

Rob, how did you discover this background, especially on what those beers were like?

Were these top-fermented or lager beers?

In that hop-growing area, is there anything left of the hop vines, not commervcially of course, but sometimes you see vines growing essentially wild in former hop farm areas.

Gary

[pootz]

In that hop-growing area, is there anything left of the hop vines, not commervcially of course, but sometimes you see vines growing essentially wild in former hop farm areas.

Gary

Good question...I will be hiking the Speed confluence/Kosuth area with the dog and a new eye to the folliage after this....maybe I can pick up a few indigenous hop rhizomes to transplant at home.


There are several good books on the region's pioneer brewers at the UWO...Western Steam and Bixel breweries in Strathroy were quite famous and long lived...as was the original Seagrams owned Walkerville brewery....the Kuntz family from Kuntz spring brewery still reiside in Kitchener and the Adlys family are a wealth of knowledge on the Huether lion brewery and have lots of local brewerainia and info....then there is the writing Ian Bowering has done.

I think the pioneer brewers outside Kitchener-waterloo ( where cold lagering and cooler lager fermenting with German lager yeasts was done from the 18 40s on) made beers that were fermented at whatever the temp was in the brewery at the time..short conditioning cycles....lager or ale or hybrid yeast would produce near similar effects at warmer temps above 65 deg.F...with no refridgeration boiled wort had a long cooling cycle and yeasts that were most commercially viable gave good results when pirched into warm wort were the ones most used most often.

I suspect most of the non German lagers were much like California common.....I also suspect the hops were generally British varieties that take on a different charater from the soil and climate they were grown in...most of the indigionous home/farm grown local hops I have used in home brewing were small cones , very sticky from resinous alpha oils, highly floral and have a deep bittering effect...I never put them in a boil longer than 45 min.

[old faithful]

Thanks for that, I have Ian's book (the soft blue cover one) but I don't recall Western Steam in there, I'll check it again, I think Bixel is covered.

The name Western Steam is intriguing. Many years ago Michael Jackson noted that the term steam could mean different things in a brewery name. It might refer to what is now called California common beer. It might refer to the brewery's source of power to generate energy.

However, if a brewery was called, in Ontario, Western Steam, to me that suggests a link to California common beer (which was also made elsewhere than in California, i.e., the brewer might have intended to emulate that style if known here. I suppose, too, "Western" might have referred simply to the westerly portion of Ontario (as in "University of Western Ontario")). Refrigeration was not a concern in Ontario for most of the year and cellars if dug deep were cold in summer (as we know from Neustadt...), so maybe that brewery did not employ ale-type brewing using lager yeasts.

Anyway, fascinating stuff.

Cold-conditioning would have been easy to do in our climate and would have been used to promote stability. That type of aging/maturation would have suited ideally true bottom yeasts which as you say were available in parts of North America from the 1840's on. If Phillip Wagner had it in Philly, it would not have been long for it to come here. So in other words, the German-Canadian brewers might have used a full lagering process, essentially. Some British-culture brewers might have switched to bottom yeasts but conditioned in a short cycle maybe using those shallow pans (just due to heritage - they were still trying to make ale in 5 days), thus producing a kind of steam beer. And, those British-influenced brewers (I infer again) who stuck with top yeast ultimately used cold conditioning anyway and that is what Canadian sparkling ale is, industrially developed with vigour from the 1890's onward (Molson Export Ale - 1904). So is Cooper's Sparkling Ale, so is Cream Ale, it happened around the English-speaking world.

Sounds like there were some characterful beers here based on that kind of hop culture, too.

Gary

[KwaiLo]

I was told some time ago now that the brewery would be open on the 22nd, but I would like to go to the tasting room Saturday if you are open.

My neighbourhood is having a large garage sale, so I want to be somewhere else. I won't have to see what my wife buys that way.

[Rob Creighton]

Okay, I'm trying to keep all the conversations sorted. As to wild hops still in the area, I hear that there are still varieties growing and of course, a number of old-timers have told me of encountering them and using the bines for crafts in their early years. I have not looked myself though I have wandered the historical plaques along the river.

The descriptions of technological change in the 1800's is described many times here. That is the theme of our brewery and our brands and the hospitality room will be a pseudo museum devoted to this theme. We have two classic belt driven drill presses we hope to restore and display and the main drive shaft and pulleys are still in place.

As to the style issues, it is very difficult to put a finger on anything definitive. The perspective of the day at any given brewery was based on the ingredients they imported and grew, the equipment they had access to (coolships for wort, wooden cask coopers, some stone jugs until the late 1800's, the intro of the glass bottle, etc, etc...) and their heritage.

I have had a number of conversations with Paul and Maurice Heisz when I worked at the Formosa Brewery in the '90's and tech change was a huge driving force in changing beers . The introduction of a new brewhouse or the first refrigeration system or the new bottling machine was a point of pride for the family, the brewery and the community. The same was happening with brewing ingredients. We measure ourselves as a society by progress and consistency

We are receiving our growlers, filler and bottle washer tomorrow. If the gods are with us (and I filtered the Plowman's Ale today) we are hoping to have all available in the retail (the filtering was very tasty) store on the weekend.

[pootz]

Thanks for that, I have Ian's book (the soft blue cover one) but I don't recall Western Steam in there, I'll check it again, I think Bixel is covered.

The Canadian business archives at UWO are a wealth of facts...there were also the Strathroy brewing and malting Co. and the west end brewery also located in Strathroy. Probably the best history compiled on the area's brewing history was "On Tap: The Odyssey of Beer and Brewing in Victorian London-Middlesex" By Glen Plillips

The name Western Steam is intriguing. Many years ago Michael Jackson noted that the term steam could mean different things in a brewery name. It might refer to what is now called California common beer. It might refer to the brewery's source of power to generate energy.

According to what I have read the "steam" in their name referred to the heat souce for the kettle and hot liquor system.

Refrigeration was not a concern in Ontario for most of the year and cellars if dug deep were cold in summer (as we know from Neustadt...), so maybe that brewery did not employ ale-type brewing using lager yeasts.

It was a very expensive concern as even if you harvested ice for free in the winter from lakes or elsewhere, it was expensive to build and maintain brick lined ice cellars/caverns for lagering...most lagering cellars were built to keep a constant 50 Deg F all year...these were mucho expensive to build and the best remaining examples were brick lined and 15-40 feet below the surface. At any rate, fermenting real lager with real german lager yeast strains required cooling technology for summer month production...in all I've read on the matter only the K-W brewers did this...it made their beer widely sought after as far as the lakehead and into Quebec and the atlantic provinces.

The Kuntz park brewery was the first to export lager making technology by building breweries in the locales they wanted to sell into so they had the Lion Brewery in Carlsruhe, the Dominion Brewery in Hamilton, the Capital brewery in Ottawa, and Schwan's in Owen Sound....of course there was the Huether cousin who built the excellent Huether brewery in Neustadt which still exists today complete with in house spring and cold lagering caverns cut into the limestone cliffs.

From the research and reading I have done on early Ontario pre prohibition brewing the german lager style was sought for it's smoothness...this suggests that other pioneer "beer" was a fairly unique style indigenous to the area and brewer'e technique who made it...as Rob has said the distict styles of ale or lager got bluredas techniques, yeast and ingredients were swapped as needed. Later on the big ale brewers has to stard cold conditioning their ales to match the smooth fully finished taste of the popular lager beers.....probably by 1880 Canadian beer was fairly unique as a hybrid of styles...cream ales, stock ales... common ale-like beers much like today's steam beer.

I'm glad there's some immaginative brewers like Rob around who like to research the pioneer brewing industry and experiment with recreating some of these brews...the Galt Knife lager is really unique....if you close your eyes as you quaff one you may imagine what the beer tasted like that was tapped in one of the hundreds of roadside coach stop taverns the latter 1800s.

[old faithful]

Excellent information all 'round, thanks again. I'll have to find that book you mentioned about the London-Middlesex area brewers.

These beers from Rob's new venture sound very interesting and I can't wait to try them.

I think the simple reason the K-W beers would have achieved early renown is stability. Ale is a great style but it suits a short brewing, condition and sales cycle and generally temperate year-round conditions. Without that, the product in the early days must have been variable in quality. I am sure outside K-W many hybrid beers existed (probably there were some California common-type beers, probably some all-U.K.-style ale beers which for much of the year would have been stable if sold and bought quickly, but which in warm weather were not always good), probably there were some beers made from spruce and other local ingredients. The technological innovations referred to by Rob were vital in allowing the industry to be put on a long-term basis and grow consumer demand.

Point taken about the expense of digging and lining lagering caves although as you know, these were a common feature of numerous lager breweries in the 1800's.

What I find interesting today is that top-fermented beers are still made (or being made again, i.e., beers of character) although I would think refrigeration characterises all these beers to a greater or lesser degree, in other words that they all are chilled using a heat exchanger (no more coolships) and all receive some period of cold-conditioning except possible for some cask ale.

Still, I am sure those who evolved the cream ale and sparkling ale hybrid styles of lager and ale at the end of the 1800's would be amazed at how older top-fermented styles, and in pristine condition, have come back in the later 1900's and today. E.g., a beer like Black Oak pale ale is probably similar to the best of the earliest pale ales/bitters available in the mid-1800's.

Gary

[pootz]

What I find interesting today is that top-fermented beers are still made (or being made again, i.e., beers of character) although I would think refrigeration characterises all these beers to a greater or lesser degree, in other words that they all are chilled using a heat exchanger (no more coolships) and all receive some period of cold-conditioning except possible for some cask ale.

Well if we want to get technical, the discrete difference between top ferment an bottom fermenting yeast strains is becoming rather blured....many pure "ale" strains I have used actually sublimate ( work in suspension) and drop out to the bottom of the vessel when flocculation occurs...yes they have a top pellicle but so do the lager yeasts I have used.....most of the work is done in suspension by both strains.

The main determinate with all these cross bred hybridized specialty yeasts around in brewing, it is not so much "where they ferment" but at what temperature they ferment....also the size and shape of the fermenting vessel has a lot to do with how well they attenuate ( dissolved oxygen top or bottom)

[old faithful]

I think that was always true (speaking as a non-brewer), that yeasts largely did their work in the body of the brew, but that top yeasts would tend to rise to the top as the ferment proceeded and bottom yeasts would (assisted by cold) tend to precipitate.

However I think the modern cone-shaped fermenters have a tendency to make top yeasts behave like bottom ones in this regard.

Of course fermentation temperature is a key element for yeast activity and the beer's character, I am aware of this.

Also, my understanding is, all yeasts will flocculate and descend ultimately, given time. I don't know if that is true for every ale yeast, but I've kept many bottles of unfiltered beer (most ale-types) in the fridge for many years and they almost always drop bright after a time, saving only when a protein haze gets in (but that's different I think). This includes many Belgian ales which must have used a real cerevisiae yeast (I say this because I understand some brewers add a bottom yeast to bottles even though the previous ferments were ale ferments, to assist in the yeast dropping quickly after bottling).

I realise though ale and lager character can be obtained using yeasts of different classifications.

Gary

[Steve-E]

Rob, where exactly are you located (street address). I'll be out in that area on the weekend and would like to swing by and pick-up some of your tasty beverage!

[Rob Creighton]

The brewery is at the south end of old downtown Galt.

295 Ainslie St. S. right where Ainslie and Water St. merge to become Hwy #24 S to Brantford. The "Galt Knife" sign is still on the building with a banner anouncing the brewery. We're on the left hand side of Ainslie as you go south. Phone 519-620-3233