Katie Scott pours a Summer Honey wheat at Canoe’s recent Summer Honey Hoedown

‘Tis the Season

Local brewers tell us how they decide what to brew when

There are a lot of factors to consider when a brewery decides what kind of beer to create: the size of the brewery, what ingredients are in season, what will sell and what styles go with the time of year—all are things that come into play. But often, it comes down to what the brewmaster wants to drink.

“We’ve developed our tastes enough to know that if we decide to make it, chances are others are really going to like it,” says Driftwood Brewery’s Gary Lindsay. “If we want to make it and we’re excited about it, that carries through to the beer and the way we sell it.”

Matt Phillips of Phillips Brewery, which releases a specialty beer every month (and two in December), agrees that a lot of it is about what they’d like to see in bottles.

“I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little bit of flight of fancy to it, as in ‘We really want to make this, let’s just do it right now,’” he says. “The summer and especially into the fall is a really cool time because beer is an amazing base for so many flavours to be combined with.”

With that in mind, Phillips is gearing up for one of its popular summer releases: their Raspberry Wheat—although they’re only doing one batch due to the high cost of raspberries. Phillips likens seasonal brews to the work of a good chef. “It’s asparagus season right now, so they’re going to be featuring that more than they would ordinarily,” he says. “In the same way, as soon as the seasonality of fruit start to ripen, it dictates the beer, to a certain extent.”

Spinnakers is also gearing up to make a raspberry beer, and owner Paul Hadfield echoes Phillips’ sentiment about seasonality. “You just can’t reproduce that freshness. It’s so on the nose,” he says. “Like a hefeweizen, you need to drink it when it’s really young because the flavours fade. They change even after a couple of weeks.”

In addition to the seasonal availability of ingredients, another factor to take into account is the beer’s history. Sean Hoyne at Canoe Brewpub says it plays a big part in how he decides what to brew when, pointing to one of his spring seasonal offerings—the Copper Bock—as an example.

“Bock, traditionally, was always brewed in the winter time and then aged throughout the winter and then brought out in springtime in celebration of the spring,” he says, adding, “I like to stay true to the history and tradition of a style, but I’m also still open to putting my own flair into it.”

Speaking of history, Spinnakers is taking that into account with their current lineup of beers. The gastro brewpub turns 25 this year and Hadfield decided a good way to celebrate that would be bringing back some of Spinnakers’ original brews, such as the Mount Tolmie Dark.

“That’s where we’re going over the next 12 months in celebration of 25 years of the renaissance of craft brewing,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of stuff that’s in the brewer’s log and recipe sheets that our guys are going to explore.”

With the recent arrival of summer, breweries are looking at lighter beers to match the temperatures, such as Canoe’s recently launched Summer Honey wheat beer.

“It’s our answer to sitting on the patio having a cold beer in the sunshine with a twist of citrus,” says Hoyne. “It’s a very drinkable beer.”

Driftwood has also brewed a White Bark summer wheat beer, but with a slightly different twist—it’s a Belgian wit beer, which no one else locally was doing.

“There may be trends or styles that are going on on the East Coast or in different parts of the United States. Then we look at what’s being made here and then we try and make something that’s a little bit different,” says Lindsay. “It’s offering a different twist and a different profile on existing styles that customers may have heard of.”

For some of the higher-volume craft breweries on the Island, marketability is a big factor. Take Vancouver Island Brewery, which is also celebrating a quarter-century of brewing by unveiling a new brew in the form of Spyhopper Honey Brown.

“You need to look at your brands and think, ‘What is a brand that’s going to sell 365 days in a year?’ We looked at some of the different styles of beer and how large the honey brown category is,” says Rob Ringma, Vancouver Island Brewery’s marketing manager. “Nobody here really has a local honey brown.”

In addition to having good market potential, Ringma says it was important to have a local angle. “There was no hesitation for us to even think about where we were going to get our honey,” he says. “We had to go local and the beautiful thing is we have Babe’s Wildflower Honey Farm right in our back yard.”

Another thing to take into account, says Ringma, is Vancouver Island Brewery’s role in Victoria’s craft-beer community, which he sees as being a sort of ambassador by offering “transition beers”—brews that a mainstream beer-drinker could find appealing.

“Once we have them on the craft-beer side, then we’re all going to benefit,” he says. “He’s going to go to Spinnakers to drink his IPA, he’s going to stop by Matt [Phillips’] place and pick up some Surly Blonde.”

Lighthouse Brewery, another one of the larger local brewers, has also recently added a new beer to its year-round roster, a Riptide Pale Ale, which brewmaster Paul Hoyne (brother of Canoe’s Sean Hoyne) described as a “well-balanced pale ale” made using Pacific Northwest hops and traditional English malt. Lighthouse will also be moving towards making seasonal beers this fall, thanks to the recent purchase of a bottling line to complement their canned beers.

“With bottles, you just change the labels,” Paul says of the flexibility. “With cans, you have to buy like 200,000 at a time.”

Flexibility is indeed an important factor when it comes to taking advantage of limited ingredients and short runs.

“That’s one of the things that drives us down here is to have the ability to do stuff that’s a little bit different,” says Matt Phillips. “We kept a lot of the same equipment and improved it a little bit so we would still have the ability to do small batches and therefore have the ability to do stuff that’s a little more esoteric and might not necessarily commercially be the most successful beer, but important beers to make in terms of showcasing what beer can be.”

And, as Driftwood’s Gary Lindsay says, “At the end of the day, it’s just because we want to. If we can justify it, all the better.” M