Sometimes, the brewery making their beer isn’t really equipped to produce the beer they want. Sometimes they have recipes, sometimes they ask for help with design. “How hard can it be?” they might think if it’s a vanity project. They might have homebrewed a little, but probably they just know what they like. It could be an individual or a consortium of people, usually from a field that has provided them ample funding. Into this situation walks an aspiring beer company owner. In some cases, it meant that the beer wasn’t very good.ĭuring the writing of the second edition of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide, my co-author and I could tell which beer was contract-brewed at which host brewery by the predominant off flavours. It might mean that the sales and marketing for that brewery were suboptimal. That might mean that the brewery was making styles of beer drinkers weren’t interested in. While companies like Cool in Etobicoke were designed to handle brewing other people’s recipes to scale (Denison’s Weissbier, brewed at Cool, was the number one wheat beer in the world on for years), the majority of small brewers who brew batches for others do so because they aren’t using their own capacity themselves. What is it about contract brewing in Ontario that has created such lasting animosity? There are a number of issues. It’s a practice nearly as old as brewing itself. You want more recent examples? Well, in the United States, Samuel Adams and Brooklyn both brew under contract at facilities owned by other companies as part of their business model despite having their own (smaller) facilities. The Romans were doing it at Vindolanda in Britain nearly 2,000 years ago. The idea of contract brewing is not a concept that cropped up in Ontario. The idea that a beer was brewed under contract is an almost immediate disqualifier for serious beer drinkers. It’s become the butt of jokes and a magnet for scorn. In the middle of Ontario’s craft brewing boom, one segment of the market has been maligned more than any other.
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