E-Malt.com News article: Canada, ONT: Owners of Bellwoods Brewery grow hops in a roof garden for ultra-local beer

By seeding downtown rooftops with beer ingredients, the Toronto based Bellwoods Brewery is giving new meaning to the term "local beer," The Vancouer Sun reported on July, 29.

Soon after moving into their Argyle and Ossington location in Toronto, Bellwoods Brewery owners Mike Clark and Luke Pestl approached neighbours with a simple proposal: provide the pair with space for a roof garden, and in return they would deliver the occasional cask of free beer.

Seamlessly blending the Torontonian love of urban gardening and craft brewing, it was an easy sell, and eight homes and businesses soon signed up for what became known as the City Hops program.

"It's just a science project," Clark said. "But we could see it turning into something bigger."

Bellwoods' rooftop hops empire includes Ossington's I Deal coffee shop and Parks&Rec, a rooftop garden atop Parts and Labour, a restaurant and bar. By 2012, the brewers aim to install additional hop gardens on two Toronto-area community centres.

Hops, it turns out, grow remarkably well in downtown Toronto. With only a minimum of watering and tending, the brewers have found their plants grow upward of seven metres long - nearly twice their initial expectations. Next year, once the gardens are equipped with wooden trellising, Clark expects the hops to stretch to lengths of up to 10 metres - about the length of a bus. "They just explode out of the ground," he said.

Both Clark and Pestl are recent veterans of the brew rooms of Toronto's Amsterdam Brewing Company. In their pre-beer days, however, both men trained as scientists. Pestl has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Western Ontario and Clark has a biochemistry degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax.

"They're really into data," says Katie Mathieu, a gardener at Parks&Rec. The two brewers have meticulously plotted the plant's water intake, charted average daily temperature and kept intricate photo diaries of the budding green flowers.

For every square metre of rooftop soil, estimates Clark, Bellwoods' gardens can raise enough hops to produce one keg of beer. It is more than enough for an amateur homebrewer, but nothing near the quantities needed for a fulltime craft brewer. "We never went into this thinking that it would produce enough hops for large batches. We just liked the idea of prettying urban spaces," says Clark.

For now, like most brewers, the brewery buys its hops from a network of growers in Europe and the north-western United States. However, the owners are in talks to secure a local supplier among Ontario's burgeoning hops producers.

Once its rooftop hops are fully matured, the company has arranged to send a few samples to the University of Toronto to make sure the plants have not absorbed too much of the city's infamous smog. Once laboratory technicians give the all clear, the brewers hope to whip up a few test casks of locally hopped beer by autumn.

The combination brewery, retail store and café are expected to open later this year.


03 August, 2011