New Westminster has experienced a massive revitalization over the last fifteen years. Columbia Street is now a safe, wonderful stroll. Front Street remains a terrific collection of niche shops and boutiques, and a tremendous amount of new development near the Quay and the surrounding waterfront area has the area experiencing growth and enrichment in a myriad of ways. It’s an exciting time to be in the Royal City – made even more so with the inclusion of New Westminster’s first craft brewery, Steel and Oak. Located on Third Ave – and a short walk from Quayside, the Skytrain and many budding communities being established in the neighborhood – the brewery has both helped develop – as well as benefitted from – building a strong craft beer presence in the area. Last weekend, I had the opportunity to drive over and see for myself what they’ve done, and let me tell you: it’s a fine thing indeed. Entering the tasting room, you will immediately notice the clean, fresh look to the room itself. Comfortable seating with large, bright windows and a terrific ambiance, it is an ideal place to pull up a chair and decompress from the bustle of one’s busy day. The space is cozy, with seating for twenty-five at a time, but not so much that you find yourself battling for space or feeling crammed into a corner. I particularly enjoyed the record player on display up front and center, playing music that was set at just the right level to be enjoyed without hindering your ability to have a quiet conversation.
After sampling some of their taps – and especially their radler; something I’ve personally never seen offered in our area before, I noticed that even just an hour after opening for the day, it didn’t take long at all for the tasting room to steadily fill with thirsty patrons. I was directed into the brewery area, where I was very fortunate to get to speak with Jorden Foss, co-owner of Steel and Oak, who was able to sit down for a solid conversation about the brewery, their beers, the city and what we can expect to see from S&O in 2015.
Q: It’s coming up on a year since Steel and Oak opened its’ doors to the public; tell me a bit about the challenges you faced getting ready to launch?
The biggest challenge for us was to secure a space that was big enough for what we wanted to do and zoned correctly in New Westminster. Surprisingly enough, there aren’t a lot of light industrial places where a brewery is allowed to open up in the city. We’d had the idea for a while, went through the process, got our loan and everything was ready to go, but the one thing that halted us was finding a suitable location. We had our eye on another location nearby that fell through. It was larger than we initially wanted, at about 5500 square feet. Looking back on it now, it would have been perfect. However, when you start up a new business, one of your biggest expenses at the beginning is rent – your biggest monthly expense, anyway. For us, despite this space being a little tight, ended up being great for us based on the amount of foot traffic in this location.
Other things that came up were just regular things that come with any kind of new build; some things were more expensive than we anticipated – we nailed some things and others, we didn’t anticipate the final cost. The thing is, is that you don’t really know ahead of time. If you weren’t an electrician, you wouldn’t know how much a facility costs to power. You can ask other breweries, but at the end of the day every operation is different.
The only other big issue we had with the city – and they ended up being very good about it – was that because New Westminster follows the BC Bylaw Code, so basically when it comes to how many people are allowed in your tasting room, the city allows ten customers per washroom. Because we only have a single washroom accessible to customers (the second being in the brewery area), I went back to the city and explained to them that a maximum of ten just wasn’t going to work for us. They were really good about bumping us to twenty-five, which is perfect for what we need.
Q: You are the only brewery in New Westminster proper; how quick was the community response to your arrival in the neighbourhood?
New Westminster is great for that kind of thing! I was born and raised here, and so I could see that the community would welcome us as their own. This city is great for being one of those communities that supports its’ own. It’s a small town feel in the middle of everything, and they were really looking forward to not only having a craft brewery in New Westminster, but just a central hub where people could gather at, have some beers, and just chat about things. A place where there’s no televisions, where they can just come and hang out. There wasn’t really a place like that in New Westminster; something was lacking. My business partner and I felt it when we moved back here, and we felt that there weren’t any places for guys like us who go with our partners to hang out, have a beer and chat. It seems like the city has latched on really fast, but it’s still growing and that’s something that always amazes me. It’s small enough that I think everybody knows about us. We’ve had the benefit of being the big fish in a small pond right now; we get a lot of really great publicity locally. The tasting room is still getting busier and busier. A lot of people do come in from Vancouver, but it’s been cool to see that our locals really do treat us as *their* brewery.
Q: I remember reading that the original plan was to produce 50,000 litres a year. Coming up on a year, what sort of volume do you expect S&O will have produced in these 12 months?
We will probably end up having done around 1200 hectoliters, quite a bit more than our original forecast. Almost triple the amount we set out to do and a lot of that is due to the tasting room. We really didn’t know how much we’d end up producing. We’d go out and talk to the guys at Four Winds, Bridge, P49, and look at those areas and their population base and form our guesses at what our number would be and how much volume we’d go through. Initially, we thought we’d be doing about 500 liters a week in the tasting room, and now we do 1500-1700 depending on the week! More than triple for sure. We do have two new big tanks on the way, and a bottling line in the works. That will probably push that number up by a bit. It’s one of the tough things about starting a new business, especially when it’s going well; how to grow without overdoing it and losing everything you’re trying to maintain: quality, tank time. We’re looking to grow healthily over the next couple of years; still creating great beer while also getting it out to more people.
Q: Every beer has an origin story. Tell me about your flagships, the Royal City Ale and your Red Pilsner. I’m sure when you opened up, you guys already had a beer or two in mind; what compelled you to go with those styles?
When my partner Jamie and I thought about opening up a brewery, we were Northwest-style guys. We would homebrew IPAs, so we didn’t really know what we were going to be about right away. We knew we wanted to make beer – we know we wanted to make good craft beer, but we also didn’t know what the market was going to allow for. We saw a bunch of breweries opening up, and there’s a big market for Northwest-style pale ales. We had to decide between going that route, or going with something different. For us, that decision was made when we met our brewer, Peter. Pete is from White Rock originally, but just spent the last seven years brewing in Germany. He brews German, European style beers. Working in Berlin and Hamburg for about five years, and then the UK for a couple years. When we met up with Pete and sat down to discuss what direction Steel and Oak would go beer-wise, he brought some of his European-style beers that he’d been brewing in Germany, and after trying them, we realized there was a pretty good market for clean, crisp, balanced European beers. As the market grows, there’s going to be lots of room for niche breweries, for example you have Dageraad in Burnaby who does Belgian-style beers. For us, we were convinced that we should go with what our brewer was best at. There’s no point in making your brewer do something that they’re not one hundred percent behind.
The Royal City Ale, the Red Pilsner and the ESB were recipes that Pete brought back from Germany and the UK. The Red Pilsner, for us, was Pete’s vision of a crisp, clean Pilsner that had a bit more body, more caramel to it than most. He’d been tinkering with that recipe for a really long time, and it’s one of those beers that fills a neat hole in the market: it’s a clean pilsner that anyone can drink, but has enough interesting characteristics: added caramel, a little bit more bitterness, some spicy hop notes on the nose. Interesting to the beer geeks out there, but great for your regular beer drinker that’s just getting into craft beer as well.
The Royal City Ale has been a funny one for us. Pete had always made this German-style Pale Ale, which is really nicely layered; a little bit of floral notes, not too bitter, looks like a lager. Anybody can drink it, but your beer aficionado will appreciate how it’s layered and how it finishes, and your new craft consumer will like it as well because it’s not too bitter or over the top. We wanted to have one beer that we named to reflect New West – the Royal City – so we call it the Royal City Ale. It’s one of our flagship beers, it’s the beer we thought would be the best seller in New West, and it has been. We should have known better, but we originally called it the Royal City Pale Ale, which confused people who assumed it would be a Northwest-style Pale Ale, which it definitely isn’t. It really hit home when we tried to enter it into the BC Beer Awards, and found that it didn’t really fit properly into any of the categories. The only category that it even sort of fit in was the American Blonde-style Ale, so we nixed the “Pale” out of the name and called it the Royal City Pale. Technically, if you look at the guidelines for beer judging, that’s the category it most accurately fits into. Back here in the brewery, we call it “Pete’s Pale”. It’s been insanely popular; the go-to beer especially in our tasting room and the local pubs that carry it on tap. The Red Pilsner is the beer that the majority of our Vancouver accounts like to bring in.
Our new flagship will be a dark lager, which was really popular, but we just didn’t have the tank space to do the lager and the pilsner at the same time. Once we get our two new tanks, we’ll be producing that one as well. It’s a nice, easy drinking lager with dark malts. Something you can drink in the summer when you’re looking for a dark beer, but don’t feel like a stout or porter. Probably the most popular brew when we were doing our initial test batches.
Q: This is the first brewery I’ve ever known that does a radler; what beer have you found to be the most often requested for radlers in the tasting room?
Right now, it’s definitely the Royal City Ale. We recommend it for radlers because it doesn’t take over the lemonade that much; as Pete explains it, in Germany a Radler is *always* 50/50 lemonade to beer. However, in my personal opinion , the best beer that it goes with is actually the dark lager! It’s just a really interesting mix. We actually have a couple customers that will come in, and they’ll try it with *everything* we have on tap just to see how each one works. I have a customer that comes in and orders one with our Weizenbock all the time. Pete prefers it with the Red Pilsner because he likes the bitterness at the back end of it, to finish off the lemonade. It’s interesting to see the combinations people come up with, but definitely the Royal City Ale is the most often requested. We make our own lemonade here; I never thought we’d have lemonade on tap all year round, but even in the wintertime, people buy radlers like crazy! It amazes me that we sell as much as we do and it’s not even summertime yet. It’s been a cool thing, and people like that it’s made to order. That you can pick and choose what you’d like, and that’s how it’s done in Germany. You pick the beer and the lemonade to go with it. The only issue we’ve had is that you can’t fill it in growlers, because we’re worried that it will re-ferment, with the sugars in the lemonade. We don’t want somebody’s growler exploding on them!
Occasionally I’ll get emails from people saying they will be bringing in a big group, but that there are people in the group that isn’t really into beer; do you have anything else? I always recommend they try the Radler when they’re here, and nine times out of ten, they end up really enjoying it. We also have a number of cyclists that come through since we’re right along a bike path, and they’ll grab radlers to help rehydrate. All said and done, it works out to about 2% ABV, so it’s a refreshing drink before they continue along their way.
Q: Your collaboration with Four Winds has been really well received. Intensely smoky, and that classic lacto finish. It is exciting to see these types of interesting collaborations in our local beer scene; if you could team up with another local brewery, which would it be and what type of beer would you want to make?
That’s a really good question! I know for us, we’d love to team up with Dageraad. Ben from Dageraad and our brewer Peter get along quite well, but it’s always funny to get them in a room together; the Germans and Belgians are entirely opposite in how they go about things. Every once in awhile, I’ll get a text message from Ben saying “Tell Pete how high our temperature is during fermentation – we’re fermenting at 28 degrees right now”. I’ll tell Pete and he’ll respond “That’s crazy, you can’t do that! Anything above 17 degrees just doesn’t make sense!” It’s funny to watch them go back and forth, so I think it’d be really cool to do something with them because even though they are so different, they get along and respect what the other is doing. It’d be neat to work with those guys. It’s the reason we teamed up with Four Winds; we have nothing but respect for those guys, and they were really helpful with us during our startup phase. We get along really well, and that’s a great excuse to get together and make beer, and hang out. With collaborations, it’s always great to work with a brewery that’s the opposite of yours, so you can learn about the different ways they do things. It’s a constant learning process, and to have them come in and show one another how one uses Lacto, and for the other to talk about percentages of smoked malt in recipes is really a cool experience to watch. It brings it back to that whole “homebrew” feel, where everyone is learning new things. I’ve also always loved Phillips, and I thought it’d be cool to do something with those guys too. Especially with the respective scale of our breweries; how big they are, and how small we are.
Q: You feature a test tap in your tasting room; can you tell us about some of the interesting stuff you are working on now?
Right now, we just came out with our Coffee Porter that we did with Matchstick Coffee. The roaster for Matchstick is from New Westminster, and is a good friend of mine. The funny thing is, is that Peter doesn’t drink coffee, so we thought it’d be fun to do a coffee porter! For me, it’s definitely a home run, but we don’t know how much – if at all – we will scale it up. Some of the others we’re working on include a brown ale with organic honey, which we will be scaling up production on for sure. We’ve done an Earl Grey IPA a couple times. While we absolutely love IPAs, we just don’t do one , being a German-style brewery. Our assistant brewer, Eric , is a Northwest-style kind of guy, and he’s been making this IPA for ten years. We put it on our test tap twice , and both times it’s gone insanely well. It’s not planned in the calendar or anything, but I’d like to think we might scale this one up as well.
On the docket as well, we have a marzen coming up, an altbier, a smoked honeybock which is planned for the future. We’ve also got a couple different lagers that we’re going to do in the summertime. As much as it sucks from a production standpoint given that it we lose a couple weeks by having to ferment longer, for us, we think there’s a hole to fill by doing great craft lagers. There’s a few good ones out there – don’t get me wrong – but I think it’s a style that doesn’t get appreciated enough out here. We’re also trying a 100% oat beer; we’ve done it twice now – we’ll have one next week and another the week after. The first batch, we did it with Hefe yeast, and it was OK – the yeast kind of overtook it and it ended up tasting like a banana cider in a way. The second one, we used our house ale yeast and it actually turned out really , really good! We’re trying another with saison yeast, and then a lager yeast, so we’re still playing around to see if we can nail a 100 percent oat beer that tastes really great and can be made on a larger scale.
Q: We can find your beers on tap all over the city; how far away is your beer being distributed beyond New Westminster?
As of next week, it will be all the way in Kelowna, and we’re in Victoria as well, and now with the new tanks and additional staff we’ve brought in, we’re now able to distribute our draught quite a bit further! We’ve found that Victoria’s a great spot for craft beer, having a ton of great breweries over there. It seems like for us though, when we came out with the Gratzer, it’s definitely what we’ve been getting the most re-orders from. Victoria has been fantastic to and for Steel and Oak. We’re really pushing to get our draught out there, especially leading up to when we start bottling, just so we increase our market awareness a bit. We’re going to focus on the Vancouver market quite a bit in the next little while, as well as Victoria and out further east in places like Chilliwack and Abbotsford. I think those are good beer communities that are definitely underserviced. I know it because we have people from those places making the trip into town to visit Steel and Oak on the weekends. It’d be nice to be able to take some beer out to those guys as well.
Q: What events can we expect to see Steel and Oak participate in this year? Anything on the horizon?
We’re going to try and really get out there this year. I mean, the first six months were definitely a learning process for us. At first it was just my partner and I, our brewer and our tasting room staff. We just didn’t have the manpower to get out there and go to a ton of events. This year, we’re really going to make sure we’re at most things. I’ll be at Victoria Beer Week for the whole week; I’ve got four events we’ll be doing over there. We’re doing a really cool tap takeover at the Drake that we’re doing with Four Winds and Brassneck. We’ll be doing the VCBW event that is during the same week, so we’ll have beer there too. We’re going over to Howe Sound , doing their tap takeover. The new Squamish Valley beer festival is another we’ll be at. We’re also going to do Eat Vancouver, which just opened up. I’m a foodie at heart, and I used to love going to Eat Vancouver, so as soon as I saw an opening to get our beer in a booth there, we jumped on it. It’s three days, so that will be a big one. We’re going to take part in usual events in the September beer season – the BC Beer Awards, and pretty much anything that we can possibly do, we’re going to try to get out to and be a part of. Our travel budget is only so big at this point, so we have to pick and choose which ones farther out would make the most sense to get to.
Steel and Oak is a proud CAMRA supporter, offering 15% off all merchandise in their tasting room – including some of the softest, most comfortable hoodies I’ve ever worn.
Jeremy Noonan – @jerryvillainous
Community Liason – CAMRA BC, Vancouver Chapter
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For more information on Steel & Oak, visit their website and check out their Facebook and Twitter feeds.
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