Pub Crawl – Granite Brewery

Granite Brewery
245 Eglinton Avenue East
416-322-0723

In the latest issue of TAPS Magazine, Stephen Beaumont addresses the important question of which city can lay claim to being Canada's best place for drinking good beer. Based on a number of criteria, he comes to the conclusion that while Toronto is near the top of the list, it simply can't compete with Montreal.

While it pains me to do so, I'm afraid that I have to agree with his decision, as well as his reasoning behind it. While Toronto has an impressive and growing list of bars and pubs dedicated to local craft beer and quality imports, there are still a large number of establishments in the city that ignore quality brews in favour of the ubiquitous mainstream brands. Our local brewers also tend to be much more conservative then their Quebecois brethren, sticking with well-established styles and not breaking a lot of rules - although that, too, is slowly changing.

What really tips the scales in Montreal's favour, though, is their fantastic brewpub scene. With seven or eight bars in the city making their own beer, and plenty more scattered throughout the province, Quebec has a brewpub culture that's hard to beat in Canada. Meanwhile, here in Toronto, we have... well, technically, we don't have any brewpubs.

Yes, C'est What calls itself a brewpub, but their excellent house beers are brewed at County Durham Brewing. And there's the Mill Street Brewpub down in the Distillery District, but much of the beer that they serve is made out at the main Mill Street facility in Scarborough.

In fact, the only place in town that comes close to the traditional definition of being a brewpub is The Granite Brewery up at Eglinton and Mount Pleasant. All of their draught beer is brewed on site, just a few feet from the bar where it's served. But as of a few years ago, they've been licensed as a brewery rather than a brewpub, a small but important distinction.

Before we get to that, though, we should go back to where the Granite got its start. And that's not midtown Toronto, but rather downtown Halifax, where brothers Kevin and Wilfred Keefe took over a failing bar and grill in 1975 and turned it into a successful watering hole called Ginger's Tavern. Ten years later, Kevin began reading about the craft brewing renaissance, and inspired by Spinnaker's, Canada's first brewpub in Victoria BC, he successfully lobbied the Nova Scotia government to issue him the province's first brewpub license, and then headed to England to apprentice at the Ringwood Brewery where he learned how to craft the classic British style ales that the Granite has become well known for.

While all of this was happening, third brother Ron Keefe was living in Toronto, where he had been resisting the urging of his Halifax siblings to open an off-shoot of Ginger's in Toronto. "I never wanted to be a restaurateur," he explains over lunch and a pint, "but when the brewing side came along, that really sparked my interest. Things got held up in the late '80s when Wilfred died of lung cancer, but after that, Kevin and I got more serious about it. Alan Pugsley, who had taught Kevin how to brew at the Ringwood Brewery, had emigrated to the US and was running the Wild Goose Brewery in Maryland. So I went down and worked with him there, and worked with Kevin in Halifax, and then Alan came up here and helped me set up the brewery."

Luckily, earlier pioneers such as the Kingston Brewing Company had already laid the groundwork that made it easy for Keefe to get a brewpub license, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of red tape to fight through. Construction was held up for a couple of months as Keefe dealt with zoning issues and other bureaucracy, but in August, 1991, the Toronto outpost of the Granite finally opened for business.

As with the Halifax location, the Toronto Granite has stuck with British-style ales, all brewed using hardy Ringwood yeast. The original beer line-up inherited from Halifax included the dry and roasty Keefe's Irish Stout; the dark-amber Peculiar, with notes of caramel and fruit; and Best Bitter, a classic session ale with a mild hoppy character. More recently, Ron has added several new styles, including Gin Lane Ale, a boozy barley wine brewed for the winter season, and Hopping Mad, a hop-forward ale inspired by American IPAs. And in true UK pub style, there are always two cask-conditioned ales available alongside the keg draught options.

On the food side of things, the menu has also grown from being a clone of the Halifax original into something larger and more varied. As Keefe recalls, "It was definitely very pub oriented: fish & chips, ploughman's lunch, burgers. But we've tried to slowly build it up, both in terms of quality and offerings. Fish & chips is still one of the most popular items, but over the years, we've had different chefs bring new things. I usually say that it's somewhere between pub food and casual family dining. We have the fish & chips, we have the burgers, but we also have great pastas and steaks. We have a group of Sri Lankan guys in the kitchen now and they make some unbelievable curries. The beer is what gets us the publicity and gets things written about us,  but even if you have the best beer in the world, it won't matter if your food sucks."

The combination of good food and unique beer, as well as the restaurant's large seating capacity and picturesque patio, has made the Granite a popular spot for any number of events. Private bookings can accommodate up to 120 people, and public events including beer banquets and their annual Oktoberfest, New Year's Eve and Robbie Burns dinners regularly draw sell out crowds.

During his 18 years of business, Keefe has seen a number of changes in liquor and brewing legislation in Ontario, and he's done his best to take advantage of them. The first was a change in the late 1990s that allowed brewpubs to open a second location and supply it with beer brewed at the first. In response to this, he opened Beer Street on the Danforth, but closed it in 2003 after a four year run. He describes it now as "a nice experiment, but it turned out to be an awful lot of work. I always felt when I was there that I should've been here, and vice versa. I would never do it again unless I had a really good working partner."

The next big change came when the government decided to allow breweries to own a tied house - i.e. a bar or restaurant where they could serve their beer. In 2003, Keefe changed the Granite's license from brewpub to brewery - "on paper, we went from being a restaurant with a brewery, to being a brewery with a restaurant" - a change that allowed him to start selling his beer to other pubs, and more importantly, to customers for off-site consumption.

The Granite retail store offers their beer in growlers - 2 litre jugs that are hand-filled and will stay fresh for a couple of weeks if unopened and refrigerated. Containing roughly the same amount of beer as a six-pack, they're an especially popular item on holidays when the LCBO and Beer Store are closed, although the format is still considered strange to some people. "Many times a week, we get someone in to buy beer to go for the first time, and they ask if we sell six packs. If I was able to sell beer in bottles or cans, we could probably double or triple our sales within a month, but I don't have the room or the brewing capacity."

Given the Granite's successful run of close to two decades, Keefe finds it surprising that there aren't more brewpubs (or small breweries with tied houses) established in Toronto. "Why in this city of over 2 million people are there not more brewpubs? It seems to me that there could be one in every neighbourhood. The taxes used to be an excuse, but the taxes are better now, especially for brewpubs. But there's a big initial outlay. Say a restaurant of this size is going to cost you $700,000 to open today, and to do a brewpub, it's going to cost you an additional $300,000 or $500,000. That might be the biggest fear for people."

We can all be thankful that a similar fear didn't stop Keefe from taking the plunge and opening what has become one of the gems of Toronto's beer scene. Whether you call it a brewpub or a brewery, what really matters is that the Granite offers fresh and fantastic beer, and generous portions of pub grub to go with it. And even if there was a brewpub on every corner, it would still be worth the trip to Eglinton and Mount Pleasant to sip some of the best British style ales available on this side of the Atlantic.

(Beer photo from the Granite website.)