The Spotlight is a series of interviews with the craft beer heroes behind local organizations who are helping grow the beer scene in our fine city. In this issue, we look at Dogwood Brewing.
Over the last twenty years, Vancouver has become a champion of organic and sustainable living, with products becoming prominently visible and accessible most anywhere you go. It is in this spirit then, that Vancouver now has it’s first 100% all-organic brewery. Let me introduce you to Dogwood Brewing, the newest brewery to join the Vancouver craft scene – and they have certainly hit the ground running.
The tasting room is warm and elegant without being excessive: dark wood and copper details really stand out, brightly lit with large windows. That a great deal of passion has gone into both the room – and their products as a whole – is very quickly evident.
Owner and brewmaster Claire Wilson has brought her talents and experience from the United Kingdom to our local craft ecosystem, and after sampling all of Dogwood’s beers, I am glad she did. Her acumen is a wonderful addition to the world-class talent found at so many local craft breweries we enjoy every day. I was very fortunate to get to sit down with her to talk beer, working with organic ingredients, and a very special collaboration project completed recently.
What got you interested in going organic?
When I first started talking with my friends Brian and Rebecca at Crannog about wanting to open my own brewery , they told me that it should be organic. I told them, ‘I know, but it’s expensive, and I don’t know if I can source the raw materials”, but they were very passionate about it. I did the research; checking into the cost and logistics of going completely organic, and realized ‘yes, I could and should do this. I can make it work.’ The goal was to stay “under double” the price of non-organic ingredients; some sources could be triple or even quadruple the price of regular materials. It would have made it unfeasible, since many people wouldn’t be willing to pay a premium on their beer. Brian and Rebecca were extremely helpful with everything: offering to help with the paperwork and certification – they’ve been absolutely fantastic. That’s their passion – they want to try to encourage other breweries to do even just one organic beer.
How difficult is / was it to source organic ingredients? What kind of standards have to be in place to be labelled organic?
When I worked at Meantime Brewery in London, England, we did one organic beer. There is a bit of a process involved when you’re doing both organic and non-organic beers. More paperwork, more of a paper trail, and you need separate storage areas for your organic and non-organic materials. It’s essential to having your beer certified, and the use and storage of your equipment and ingredients is really important. Paperwork to show the the traceability and the tracking of the process; you have to keep records of each cleaning, each flushing during the process. Apart from that, there really aren’t many hurdles. The availability of locally grown, organic source materials is growing, with more to come.
With the added expenses associated with purchasing organic materials, how much of that is passed on to the consumer in the price of your retail product?
Our product is, at the end of the day, a premium product, and we’re selling it at the higher end of the pricing spectrum. We set our pricing to be in line with most other craft beers available locally, because we want to be able to offer it at a reasonable price to customers. It just means our margins are a little bit smaller. It’s just my husband and myself, and so we don’t have any shareholders or others looking for returns on profit, which lets us focus on our own direct expenses.
(Author’s note: Dogwood’s growler fills are, despite being an entirely organic product, are sold at extremely similar prices of fills at other local breweries – this was a very pleasant surprise!)
You started out brewing in the UK; what differences do you see professionally in brewing here compared to back home?
Britain is all about tradition and history, so beers are brewed with an emphasis on doing things the ‘traditional’ way. It’s certainly the accepted norm. The really crazy thing about moving over here and brewing in this region is the whole Pacific Northwest influence in style. Brewing with crazy ingredients – someone’s probably looked at pickles and thought ‘Pickle beer! That could work – let’s try that’, and customers are so receptive to that attitude! Willing to try – and drink – anything. The industry here is so wonderful for that: brewers finding their niches, and I think a lot of the breweries here are finding their own specialty. Iain at Strange Fellows doing barrel-aged and Oud Bruins, Dageraad with their entirely Belgian-style offering. It’s a total embrace of everything to do with beer. Britain has done things their own beautiful way for hundreds of years, and will continue to do so – but things feel so much more exciting and vibrant here in that respect.
You’ve chosen to brew styles of beer that are very comfortable, very familiar in this region and market. Do you plan to stick to those styles, or will you be paying homage to older, traditional brewing styles from back home?
The four core beers that I chose, I chose in the spirit of being accessible, easy to drink. Our Honey Ale, for example, is a light 4.5% ABV. It’s made with a lager-style yeast and sweetened with just a little honey. It’s a style that can be enjoyed by everybody. We have friends that don’t drink craft beer, yet they love this one. Delicious, accessible, drinkable beer. You do have your serious beer fans that enjoy their crazy hop bombs, challenging flavours and chewy mouthfeel beers. Those beers aren’t the type that necessarily translate to a six-pack format, and since we’ve chosen to go with cans instead of bottles, it was important to us.
What inspired you to can your beer instead of bottling?
This was a decision influenced by the environment from a sustainability perspective. Bottles are much harder to recycle, take much more energy and can only be recycled so many times as glass – only a small portion of glass being recycled can actually be used again as glass. In contrast, cans are infinitely recyclable, can be melted down and remade into cans really easily. We chose to use recycled boxes for our packing, too. No plastic rings, either. Everything was chosen so that there was the least amount of waste generated as possible.
There have been a number of local collaborations recently: Steel and Oak partnered with Four Winds a few months back, and now Parallel 49’s Brews Brothers pack. If you could collaborate with any other local brewery, who would it be and what type of beer would you love to make together?
I actually just finished a collaboration brew on March 8 – International Women’s Day. It was a beer picked by the Pink Boots Society, brewed all over the world on the same day. It was started in New Zealand the day before, and I was able to track the progress all over the world. I have a map of the breweries, pictures and videos of each team participating at their location. For this, Rebecca from Crannog, Rachaal from Bomber Brewing, Leah from VCBW, and Lundy from Pink Pints teamed up. We also had one of the teachers and two of their students from Kwantlen’s new brewing program come out as well. We did the brew together, and was so much fun! Everybody contributed and was actively part of the process.
We’d love to do an organic collaboration with Crannog – it’s something that’s really important to us. A good friend of ours makes our tasting paddles; he really loves Dageraad, and he affectionately refers to us as ‘Dagerwood’. It got us to thinking that we should do a Dagerwood collaboration with them; that would be really fun too!
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Dogwood Brewing has officially launched and is now open for business! You can find them at 8284 Sherbrooke Street, just off of Marine Drive in South Vancouver. I was fortunate enough to get to sample all four of their core beers, as well as their seasonal Dark IPA. All organic, and all really quite delicious.
Keep your eyes out for their International Women’s Day collaboration brew – their “Unite Red Ale” – in the next few weeks!
Jeremy Noonan, CAMRA BC Vancouver Branch Community Liaison
@jerryvillainous
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For more information on Dogwood Brewing visit their website or their Facebook and Twitter feeds.
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