Growing up in the family pub
Granite Brewery clan on the forefront of ‘explosion’ in Ontario brew pubs
Mary Beth Keefe’s first born, Tommy, was an infant when he made the connection between the family’s brew pub and his mom.
At the sight of the framed T-shirt with the logo Granite Brewery on the back wall of the pub, he would point and exclaim, “Mama, mama.”
Tommy will be the third-generation Keefe to grow up in the business founded by Mary Beth’s father, Ron, in 1991.
“I was 9 when the Granite opened,” Mary Beth recalled in an interview at the English-style pub on the corner of Eglinton Ave. E. and Mount Pleasant Ave. “We spent a lot of time here, having family dinners.”
Like The Amsterdam Brasserie and Brew Pub before it, the Granite helped invent an industry that, after years of struggle, is flourishing.
Ontario is home to about 183 small breweries, including brew pubs like the Granite, and another 83 are planned by the end of the year, according to momandhops.ca.
“It’s an explosion,” says Jordan St. John, co-author with Robin LeBlanc of the Ontario Craft Beer Guide. Success has not come easily. A former corporate executive, Keefe chucked it all to try his hand at what was then a novel concept — a pub that brewed its own beer.
He was inspired and also shaken by the death of his brother, Wilfred, at age 43.
“When he passed away, it was a wakeup call for the rest of us,” Keefe recalls.
Wilfred and another brother, Kevin, were the visionaries in the family. The entrepreneurs. The risk takers. “They’re the ones who got us in the brew pub business,” Keefe recalls.
Wilfred and Kevin had a home renovation business together in Halifax in the late 1970s.
One day they got talking to the pub owner where they often ate lunch. “By 1 p.m., they owned it,” Keefe recalls with a laugh.
For a while, they ran a typical pub, specializing in imported beer. But after Kevin read about the resurgence of craft brewing in England, he began pushing for a change in New Bruns- wick laws that prohibited brew pubs from making their own beer. Ontario followed suit. One of the architects of the English resurgence was Peter Austin at Ringwood Breweries. To help others get into the game, Austin trained and equipped other small brewers.
The result was the first Granite Brewery, in Halifax, in 1985, one of the first brew pubs in Canada.
Still, opening a pub that made its own beer was a big gamble back in the early 1990s.
Hardly anyone had even heard of craft beer.
Governments didn’t know how to regulate them. Federal and provincial tax rates levied on the big brew- ers were crippling to the smaller players.
City officials didn’t know how to categorize them. “They said you can’t have a brew pub here. It’s an industrial use in a commercial-residential area,” Keefe recalled.
And then there was the marketing challenge. Most consumers had grown up drinking either Molson or Labatt, the two Canadian megabrewers that owned virtually 90 per cent of the market.
“We used to spend a lot of our time trying to get people to try us,” Keefe recalls.
Keefe won the zoning battle with the city and later helped push for lower federal and provincial tax rates for smaller brewers. Along the way, consumer tastes expanded.
“For years, we never had anyone under 30 come in,” Keefe recalls. “Now you get 19- and 21-year-olds. They want to know what have you got that’s like a Mad Tom (an India pale ale). What are the IBUs on this?” Keefe said. “I don’t think anyone knew what an IBU was the first 15 years I was here.”
A measure of the bitterness provided by the hops, a light American lager might have as little as 5 IBUs, while India pale ale could have 40 IBUs.
But the industry’s big breakthrough came in 2003 when the province allowed brewers to own a pub on their premises.
That allowed the Granite to apply for a brewers’ licence to sell its beer for home consumption.
Prior to that, most small-batch breweries were struggling, John Hay, executive director of the Ontario Craft Brewers recalls.
When Hay joined the industry association in 2002, there were just 12 viable craft brewers in the province.
Now the group represents 60 brewers, from 5 Paddles Brewing Co. to William St. Beer.
While Ontario’s overall beer market has been declining, the craft brewers share has been growing to about 5 per cent.
The labour-intensive demands of small-batch brewing means they’re also major employers, accounting for 1,400 to 1,500 jobs, or roughly 40 per cent of the industry’s workforce.
The Granite Brewery has grown alongside the industry, expanding three-fold from a few tanks on the main floor to 3,000 hectoliters — or about 3,000 barrels — a year.
That’s still small even by microbrewery standards.
Most craft brewers make about 10,000 to 12,000 hectolitres a year, though some make as much as 70,000 or 80,000, according to the industry association.
The Granite is now available at 20 to 30 other pubs and some LCBO stores. Distribution to grocery stores — a new channel the province opened up to all brewers earlier this year — isn’t in the cards at the moment, Keefe says.
“The issue for us will be capacity,” he says.
For small brewers, the most profitable route to success is through its own brew pub, St. John noted. The pub introduces consumers to the product and also eliminates the middleman.
Since 2009, Keefe has been gradually stepping back to make room for the next-generation brewmaster, his daughter Mary Beth.
One of the first high-profile women brewers in Toronto, she’s made her mark, says beer guide author St. John. “She’s designed two or three newer recipes that have worked out very nicely,” he says.
“I always thought it was pretty cool that my dad made beer,” she says. “Keeping it in the family is important to me.”