Big Spruce Opening Sunday, May 31

[spears104]

I just read that Big Spruce Brewing will be opening from 1-3 pm tomorrow with Kitchen Party Pale and maybe some Cereal Killer Stout available for Growler fills. I am definitely heading up (just got the wife's blessing!) Will anyone else from the area be there?

[chalmers]

March 31, right? I won't be, but maybe some CB-local guys will be?

[LiverDance]

I stopped in around 12:45 and got a growler of the pale ale and tried a sample of the stout. The Stout was fantastic! Gonna try the pale ale later this evening.

[spears104]

I was there around 1:30 and there was a good crowd. I had to park down on the road as the parking lot was full. I sampled the stout and purchased a growler of the Kitchen Party Pale Ale. I thought the stout was good but I thought it could use a bit more oatmeal to give it that characteristic mouth feel of an oatmeal stout. I'm having a glass of the pale now and I like it but would have liked it more if there was more hops. He mentioned that he dry hopped the pale with Cascade but it must be very lightly dry hopped. The beer was also undercarbonated. Don't get me wrong, I like these beers! A few tweaks and he'll be all set.

For people not familiar with the area the place can be a bit tricky to find as there aren't signs on the Trans Canada yet. At least none that I saw. The brewery is on Yankee Line Road up on the hill and commands a fantastic view of the Bras D'Or Lakes.

[LeafMan66_67]

http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/1 ... sh-recipes

Couple buys farm in C.B., uses crops in organic beer
Jeremy White was working for Biwater International on a huge water project when a thirst for change swept over him that was too powerful to ignore.

The Ontario native had spent 14 years in Latin America with the construction and engineering giant building massive sewage- and water-treatment plants. Four years working as project director on a $40-million sewage treatment plant in Managua, Nicaragua, sealed the deal.

“I was worried about 500 workers working day and night,” White said Monday. “I had problems sleeping at night when we were doing things in the middle of the night that I wasn’t on the job site for. So I knew I had to step into something else that was going to allow me the kind of lifestyle I wanted to raise kids in.”

White and his wife, Melanie Bock-White, who is from British Columbia, came to Cape Breton in 2008 for their honeymoon.

“We wanted to have a look around at somewhere we could move back to Canada that was maybe a little more quiet and give us a chance to buy a big chunk of land that wasn’t going to cost an arm and a leg,” he said.

Five months after their honeymoon, they bought a Cape Breton farm sight unseen. The couple’s brewing business on the property is getting off the ground this week.

Big Spruce Brewing, located near Nyanza, outside Baddeck, is situated on a 30-hectare farm overlooking Bras d’Or Lake that boasts a market garden and orchard.

“Our brewery is all about trying to fill that void in what we see as the whole farm-to-table niche market that’s going on in restaurants right now,” White said.

“We’re, from what we can tell, Canada’s second organic, on-farm microbrewery (after Crannog Ales of Sorrento, B.C.) and we’re looking to work with not only some of the farm-fresh ingredients we produce here in the production of our beers, but also pair up with some of the local farms here in Cape Breton.”

To that end, White is considering making a potato ale.

“I like to do berry ales as well, too, around when the berries come in. So there will be a number of farm-fresh seasonals coming out in our beer lineup.”

The 41-year-old said he is talking with organizers at Fortress of Louisbourg to develop a spruce beer such as the type popular at the French bastion 300 years ago.

“We’re working with them to develop a recipe that we can hopefully get in there and have on tap one day.

“We’re going to do some special events up there this summer. Forge 300 is the big blacksmiths convention. … We’ve managed to get a table there where we’ll have our beers for sale for the four-day event there.”

He hopes Big Spruce will produce 80,000 litres of beer in his first year.

“We have about 5,000 litres of beer moving its way through the brewery right now.”

The beer is available in 19.5- and 50-litre kegs, and 1.89-litre refillable growlers. East Side Mario’s, Flavour 19 and Governor’s Pub and Eatery in Sydney have committed to selling the new beer on tap, as has The Wooden Monkey in Dartmouth.

“We’ve got a whole slew of them here in Baddeck,” White said. “We’re also talking with the Glenora distillery here. They have a nice restaurant here in Cape Breton, and the new Cabot Links golf course has got a big pub opening up and it looks like they’re going to carry us, too.”

All the ingredients in the beers are organic, White said.

“For grain, for instance, (it) is all grown completely organically without the use of commercially available pesticides and fertilizers. Same goes with our hops.”

Kitchen Party Pale “is a moderately hoppy, full-bodied pale ale,” he said.

“The Cereal Killer Oatmeal Stout is a moderately dry, very full-bodied stout with heavy chocolate and coffee undertones.”

Growlers people pick up at the brewery cost $13, plus tax, to refill. The brewery held its first sales day Sunday, selling 80 growlers.

“We’re never going to bottle,” White said. “The problem with bottling is it requires an enormous amount of water and you create a huge amount of waste water, which is something you could maybe consider doing in an urban setting where you can hook up to a municipal waste-water system. But on a farm setting, where you’d have to send it all through a septic field, you just can’t believe the size of a septic we’d need to ever do that.”

White also believes bottled beer may wind up getting mishandled and placed on shelves where it would get warm.

“We’re all about unpasteurized, unfiltered natural beers here. I don’t want anybody except my employees handling it. So we’ll be doing all the distribution ourselves. The beer will leave our cold storage and go straight to our tap clients’ walk-ins as well. And the growlers will come straight out of our cold storage and into people’s hands.”

The brewery was built with some room for expansion, he said.

Doubling the output could be achieved with another fermenter and a couple of more conditioning tanks, White said.

“We certainly think that upwards of 80 per cent of our sales are going to be to the restaurants and bars.”

East Side Mario’s in Sydney was a surprise customer, he said.

“They’ve got a corporate policy that says one of the eight taps that they have at every one of their restaurants has to be a local beer. So the manager calls me up and says, ‘Finally I have a beer in Cape Breton that I can put on that eighth tap. So when do we get your kegs?’”

White has spent $300,000 to $400,000 on brewing equipment for the venture. That included building a 2,500-square-foot structure to house the brewing business.

“It’s got a second floor that we’re looking to start a restaurant, on down the road.”

The brewery should be able to pay for itself within about a decade, said White, who also intends to pay himself and a handful of staffers.

“We’ve got a couple of (Cape Breton lenders) that are looking to get their money out in six and 10 years respectively, so it should be able to be paid off in that kind of a time frame.”

(clambie@herald.ca)

[jason.loxton]

Sad I missed the opening. Looking forward to trying their beer!