The craft beer buzz is coming to New West.
Jorden Foss and James Garbutt, both 30, are set to open a local addition - Steel & Oak Brewing Co. - to the microbrewery craze by next spring.
"We'd always been craft beer enthusiasts," Foss says, explaining what's drawn the ambitious pair to the hip world of craft beer.
They insist their brewery will distinguish itself from the masses by focusing on quality over the bottom line. Producing a good product will ensure survival in a saturated market, in their view.
"All three of us are completely aware of that," Foss says, referring to himself and Garbutt, as well as brewmaster Peter Schulz.
Schulz apprenticed in Germany at a world-leader in specialty malts and did his master’s degree in Berlin. His training is the German-style, which is a bottom-fermenting beer. There are two types of yeast: One (German) is bottom fermenting, one's (English) top fermenting, Schulz says. The various styles produce different flavour: bottom fermenting is a lot cleaner and crisper; top fermenting is a lot more aromatic, a lot more fruit, he explains.
"The most commonly sold beer in the world is lager, and that's a German style," says Schulz, who previously worked at Russell Brewing Company in Surrey.
The plan is to produce two staple beers and four seasonals.
Foss and Garbutt quenched their thirst for a brewery business during a 2012 trip to Tofino.
"We went to Tofino Brewing Company, and they mentioned to us that they were running out of beer, and we looked at their operation, and thought, 'Oh, this actually works. It could work," Foss says.
Garbutt, a local Realtor, started crunching the numbers.
"We had no past experiences with this, so it started really with reading books. I don't read many books," Garbutt says, laughing. "I doubled my life's book total to four. You read these books, (they) give you a little info. We went to beer events."
"When we were first looking at doing this the first thing we did was went to the city and asked if it was plausible that we could open a brewery here," Foss says.
Finding a location with the right zoning proved challenging.
"Barry (Waitt) and Keith (Coueffin) at city hall kind of gave us this map and said, 'you can do it here, or you can do it there,'" says Foss, who is slated to leave his job in advertising in the next couple of weeks to focus full-time on the new venture.
The location they ultimately went with is an industrial site on Third Avenue, near Stewardson Way.
The goal is to have the brewery produce beer and to have a separate sitting room, which will serve up tasters to sample the suds before purchase.
"The nice thing about the tasting room is that you can actually come in and have a 12-ounce glass of beer on site and enjoy that," Foss says.
But they expect most of the products will be going out the door to liquor stores and pubs.
When they came up with the brewery idea, how much beer you can serve at the front end was just a debate, Garbutt says.
"It wasn't set that now you can serve multiple beers to people, so we went into this with a distribution idea, and it's just happened that it's loosened up at the time throughout this process," he says, referring to a provincial licence that enables small breweries to serve beer to customers onsite (in the City of New Westminster that number is currently capped at 30 people). "When we secured the lease, it was a distribution model ... but now everybody's going to breweries, filling up their growlers and taste a bit," Garbutt says.
For more information on the brewery, visit steelandoak.ca.
