Brewing Innovation

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

Wandering through downtown Oshawa earlier this month, one would have noticed the throngs of people filling Ontario Street, many of them sipping a craft beer or two from a selection of Ontario’s craft beer makers.

The success of the Durham Craft Beer Festival, now in its fifth year, is a clear indication that the craft beer trend has come to the region, and the breweries are taking notice.

However, for Durham College, it’s safe to say they spotted the writing on the wall, and as the craft brewers begin to pop up across the region, the post-secondary school’s Centre for Craft Brewing Innovation is ready to welcome them with open arms.

According to Chris Gillis, the manager of applied research business development with Durham College, the idea for the DC Centre for Craft Brewing has been in the works for some time, but there were many hurdles to jump over to get things off the ground.

Originally housed inside the college’s main Whibty campus building, the centre moved in March of this year to a new space inside the college’s Centre for Food.

“It’s been a little nomadic because we don’t have a big program like some of the others,” Gillis says.

Now, thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the centre consists of a 50-litre pilot brew line, a production brew line, fermenters, wort chiller and a low-pressure steam boiler. Essentially, the Centre is a one-stop-shop for brewing craft beer, but more importantly, it’s a space for experimentation.

“The focus is really to give people a place to come and experiment and help them make better beer,” Gillis says. “That could be the testing side of things we’re doing, or a whole bunch of different things.”

For craft brewers, this is an invaluable asset, due to the fact that the small system at Durham College is able to be replicated on a much larger scale, saving them both time, as recipe development can be a lengthy process and more importantly, money.

“Those working in the industry really don’t have two years to take off,” Gillis says.

That means, brewers can come in and test on small batches, whether it’s to improve colour, shelf-life of the beer, or the success of different ingredients, and then take that success back to their larger brewhouses.

“Really, what it does is allows someone to mess around with a recipe, and then when they get the 50-litre version, they have all the information a contract brewer, a bigger brewery, needs to go to 500, 5,000, or 50,000 (litres), Gillis says.

And the desire is there,  according to the Ontario Craft Brewers association, craft beer was one of the fastest growing segments in the LCBO, seeing 20 to 30 per cent growth year-over-year and the total economic impact of small breweries is estimated to be roughly $1.4 billion in Ontario.

In Durham Region, a number of small breweries have started pouring craft beers in recent years, including Old Flame (Port Perry), Manantler (Bowmanville), Brock Street Brewing (Whitby), Second Wedge Brewing (Uxbridge) and most recently the Oshawa Brewing Company.

To help run the centre, Durham College brought on a man who says he’s been brewing beer since “before it was cool”, naming Mike Aylward as the brewmaster.

“I’ve been brewing for a long time and I’ve seen the ebb and flow of brewing,” he says.

In terms of the recent shift toward craft taste, Aylward says it all comes down to quality.

“I think everybody has figured out that people have changed what their tastes are,” he says. “When they drink beer, they want quality, and the big thing too is, I think there’s been a few pioneers who have made it a bit easier to get your breweries up and running.”

“You’ve got the whole artisan food thing going for all the same sort of reason, and then you look at younger people and not only do they want better quality…but they want that unique experience, and so craft beer is doing all of that,” Gillis says.

As it stands, the centre provides corporate training services and programs for the industry, including courses on brewery lab setup and testing, and brewing science. However, Gillis says that as the centre expands, they will look to repurpose the course material into a program for students as well.

“As we get the curriculum together for the industry, we’ll eventually build something out that can be repurposed to maybe post-graduate students,” he says.

They should work fast. Estimates show that there will be over 500 craft brewers in Ontario by 2019, and currently, there are 2,300 full-time employees in the craft brewing sector in the province. The industry is also becoming a major contributor to local economies with numbers from Ontario Craft Brewers showing the sector has poured over $160 million in capital into Ontario’s economy since 2005 and Ontario craft brewers are responsible for approximately $150 million in annual tourism revenue.