When Field House Brewing embraced Abbotsford, the growing city embraced the company back
Field House Brewing Company crew breathing new life into growing Abbotsford community
For Josh Vanderheide, craft beer is about a lot more than cold brews. It’s about the warmth of a community.
Vanderheide, whose background includes running a design studio in Vancouver for several years, was introduced to the world of craft beer through his various client accounts.
“We were doing some projects for wineries, craft breweries and distilleries. And the breweries were unique in that they just operated so differently than other industries,” he recalled. "Everyone else was cutthroat and competitive. Trying to get an edge and cut costs. And then there were the brewery guys, just hanging out and lending each other materials and ingredients, hanging out with each other at festivals.
“It was such a heartwarming feeling to watch these people bonding with one another.”
As the idea of collaboration over competition catches on with more business owners — eschewing that long-held idea that you had to “crush the competition” or steamroll other businesses, the craft beer industry is about joining forces to create better, more interesting beers.
“People are evolving their thinking beyond just the capital component of businesses to realize that businesses can actually do a lot. They can be great for communities, they can help create jobs and shape peoples’ lives. They can help grow peoples’ perspectives,” Vanderheide said. “It works because it’s refreshing. Who ever thinks competition is awesome and super cool? It’s mean, it’s nasty and it’s cutthroat. It’s very Donald Trump. Good human nature tells us that’s not really a good way to operate.”
And, when it came to craft beer, Vanderheide wanted in.
“I was like, if I’m going to go into something, this industry seems pretty good,” he said with a laugh.
But, aside from admiring the camaraderie and sense of community exhibited by craft beer industry insiders, he admits he didn’t dream of opening a brewery before setting up Field House Brewing Company in 2016.
“The craft beer industry was just kind of booming,” he said of the decision to set up shop, tracing the movement up the West Coast from Portland to Vancouver. “I was watching this trend happening and how it was affecting communities and the role that breweries were playing as a meeting space for friends and family to come.”
After starting a family of his own in Vancouver, where he was living and working, he said he’d grown tired of the disconnected, disengaged feeling of his downtown locale.
“I found it was one of those places where your neighbours wouldn’t always say hi to you. You’d get in an elevator and no one talks. There was definitely a lack of that community feeling,” he said of the downtown vibe. “That wasn’t really the way people operated.” So, he decided to pack up and head east to Abbotsford, where he spent much of his childhood. He hasn’t looked back since.
“When I first moved here it was almost creepy because everybody was saying hello to me,” he recalled with a laugh. “It was so different.”
In addition to providing a friendlier atmosphere to raise a family, he felt it also presented the perfect opportunity to foster growth in the food and beverage community, too. Specifically, through craft beer.
“Abbotsford was a community that really had a lot of potential, but didn’t have a lot going on,” he said. “I was just looking to bring a new experience to a community that had a bunch of really good people who wanted to do something but there wasn’t a lot of options. It was really those two worlds converging.”
It wasn’t too long ago, that the word Abbotsford was greeted with some form of “ugh” or “no thanks” by hip millennials. Whether because of its semi-rural locale, or simply because it just wasn’t as cool to the Fraser Valley kids who grew up in the area as Vancouver always seemed to be — whatever the reasoning, Abbotsford had become anything but a must-live destination.
“It’s a hard thing to try to sell someone so hard on it. But, if you’re here, you feel it,” Vanderheide concedes of the preconceived notions of the city. "Abbotsford is on the tipping point of realizing its full potential in that, it has a lot of things going for it, and with all the things I know are in the works, it’s going to be a very different place in five years.
“It’s starting to really believe in itself again.”
For a growing number of Vancouverites like Vanderheide, Abbotsford is proving to be the perfect destination to raise a family and get a little breathing room from the downtown density — without being too far away.
“We’re on our way to 200,000 people,” Vanderheide said. "But everybody wants to remain in that small-town vibe where you do say hi to your neighbour and you help them out. You go to places and you know people. I really like that. It’s kind of a bigger town that still thinks of itself as a small town.
“It’s that idea of being connected to a place you live versus living somewhere and not being connected.”
That sense of connection to the community comes through in a big way via Field House Brewing’s food offerings.
“Our food program is driven by our community,” Vanderheide said. “We have amazing growers and artisans out here. It doesn’t make any sense why people wouldn’t focus on that, from my perspective. We want to showcase the best this community has to offer.”
Under the direction of Bonnie Friesen, the brewery’s food program manager, the team has challenged itself to make more than 50 per cent of the brewery’s menu locally sourced, highlighting as many local ingredients and flavours as possible.
“We wanted to do something that was authentic to who we are,” Vanderheide said. "We approached food the same way as we did our beer, which is to make something that’s familiar to people, that people can relate to and there’s a sense of trust there. But also to put a unique and interesting twist to something.
“The idea of familiarity with a sense of surprise is a nice balance,” he added. The resulting Field House menu is a list of kitchen classics ranging from grilled cheese sandwiches to tacos — and, of course, macaroni and cheese — all with an Abbotsford twist.
“We tried to elevate them by sourcing the best ingredients we could find from local sources,” he said of the dishes.
Today, Field House works with 17 local suppliers to stock their kitchen shelves including Anita’s Organic for flours and grains; The Local Harvest in Chilliwack for produce; Mount Lehman Cheese Co. for cheese; and duck from Fraser Valley Specialty Poultry.
And they’re working on getting more of those local ingredients into their beers, too.
“We started our own Field House Farm project that sees us work with three local landowners to grow our own ingredients including trying to grow our own grain for the beer, which is not commonly done here,” Vanderheide explained. “We have a great partner farmer and five acres of land and we’re going to try to do that this year. We’ll probably fail, but that’s part of pushing yourself. And we’ll learn from it and hopefully get better and better.”
The brewery’s beer offering started with a few “tried and tested” core beers. Field House’s four “favourite” brews, the ones Vanderheide assures visitors are always in stock versus the less predictable season and limited-run offerings, include: a Dutch Pale Ale, an Eastern IPA, a Salted Black Porter, and a Sour Wheat Gose.
Unlike some beer companies that find a good brew and stick with it, head brewmaster Parker Reid and his team work to constantly create fresh new beers to reflect seasonal shifts in flavour — as well as ingredients.
“We didn’t get into this business to create the same beer over and over again. That’s not about innovation and creativity,” Vanderheide said. “So, we shifted our beer program to limit our core beers in order to focus on seasonality, new ways, new recipes and new directions in craft beer.”
“It challenged us to release a lot of different beers” he said with a laugh. “It’s a lot of fun.”
In addition to the core beers, Reid and his crew create one or two batches of a variety of new beer types (referred to as small batch) with offerings ranging from a Pear Kolsch (with 300 pounds of Anjou pears to balance the yeasty kolsch) and Dark Sour (a dark beer boasting local blueberries and purple blackberries), to a Nordic IPA (fermented with Norwegian kviek yeast, with notes of citrus and fruit) and Field Beer (a “rustic” saison with flavours of peppercorn, lemon and overripe fruit).
“It’s just enough to get into the market and enough that, if you’ve had it and liked it, we brew enough so you have a chance to buy it,” Vanderheide said of the get-it-before-it’s-gone beers.
In addition to the work on the Field House brand, Vanderheide and Friesen have taken on a hulking 9,000-square-foot building that’s going to be the epicentre of a community initiative they’re calling The Valley Food and Farm Collective.
“It’s meant to intentionally invest in and shape our food culture here in the Fraser Valley,” he said of the project. “To showcase what we have to offer.”
The plan is to create a locally sourced food market and event space, right down the street from the Field House brewery, that’s similar to what’s on offer at Granville Island (to a smaller degree, of course).
Vanderheide hopes the space will change the food culture in the Abbotsford — and beyond.
“We have the food and the people who want it, but we need to create the connection point and actually bring it from the farm and into our city,” he said.
The space, which is supported in part by outside partners including the City of Abbotsford and the University of the Fraser Valley, is expected to open by the end of the summer. And, there’s sure to be a lineup on opening day.
On any given weekend, if you roll up to Field House you’re likely to be met with a crowd ... in the parking lot, on the front lawn, inside the brewery. It’s a busy place, seemingly no matter when you arrive.
And, aside from the obvious financial benefits that parlays to the brewery’s team, Vanderheide’s happy to see the community coming together at his brewery’s doorstep. In fact, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“What I’m really proud of is that we designed a space that the community needed, in some capacity. It’s a place you can come with your friends, your family, your kids or your dog — you can come if you’re young and come if you’re old,” he said. “It’s really designed to welcome everybody in the community — and I think that was something we were missing.”