BUSINESS SNAPSHOT
“WE HAVE BEEN WORKING on Fairweather since March 2015.
“Those involved are myself, Ram McAllister, Dan Ryan, Brent Milcz and Sean Hoyne — he owns a brewery called Hoyne Brewing Company and they’re in their seventh year in Victoria. He sort of introduced me to the brewing industry out in Victoria.
“I eventually started working for him and that’s how I really got it in my head that beer might not be something that I just enjoyed, it might be a career path. So by then I had already decided to move back to Hamilton because that’s where all my family’s from, and so I enrolled in the Niagara College Brewing Program. … The phone rang one day and it was Sean and he basically said, ‘I have outgrown all this (brewing) equipment and I would like to find a way to see it end up in your hands.’ ... So the very equipment that got me into this, and helped him build his own very successful brewery, we got to put it on a truck and I got to build it here, which means the world to me.
“We brewed our first batch in early April and we’ve been open since May 26, and it’s been a really great summer of learning and experimenting. We’ve brewed 16 different beers since then, and we are taking this period of time to experiment and do all of the things that we want to do because we are not super-obligated to either a supply chain or a great deal of demand for brands.
“Having the opportunity to take this time and exercise the kind of creative muscle that you can use back there (in the brewery) is really great.”