Canada, ON: Brunswick Bierworks launches in Toronto to make locally foreign craft beers

Toronto's craft beer scene might be expanding, but one brewing facility is keen on introducing the city to brands from outside of Ontario - and now it's getting ready to brew these beers right here at home. Enter Brunswick Bierworks, a massive new brewing facility that recently set up shop in East York, blogTO reported on August 20.

Brunswick, located at 25 Curity Ave., opened in partnership with Craft Brand Company, an organization that brings beer from places like British Columbia, the United States, Europe and New Zealand into the Ontario market.

But importing beer is tricky. There are only a few channels you can go through and usually, what's coming in isn't as fresh as it could be. So Craft Brand Co.'s Mike Laba and his team have been thinking about how to thwart these challenges for a while.

"It would be really great to one day be able to find a brewery in Ontario that could make some of these products locally so that people could enjoy them fresh," he says. "We could direct deliver and get around a lot of the challenges a lot of craft brewers have when exporting to Ontario."

And that's exactly what they're doing at Brunswick, which features two brewhouses and currently has capacity to brew 70,000 hectolitres of beer - the goal is to get up to 100,000. Instead of bringing in kegs, bottles and cans from various places, Brunswick and Craft Brand Co., let out-of-towners brew their beer right here in Toronto.

"We're going to start rolling out some pretty kickass beers from around the world out of Toronto," says Laba.

In less than two weeks, a representative from Stockholm, Sweden's Omnipollo - a well-known European craft beer company - will head to Brunswick to brew two new beers for the Ontario market. As more and more brewmasters start brewing at Brunswick, Laba is planning on having them collaborate on new and novel beers.

"We're always going to have collaboration brews with all of our different partners coming out of there," Laba notes.

Brunswick is also brewing for a few Ontario-based craft brands and will also act as an incubator for new beer startups that may not be able to build their own breweries just yet.

And along with brewing, Brunswick will be open to visitors with its taproom and tours next summer.

21 August, 2016