Ontario Makers: Left Field Brewery

The Toronto brewery that could. How Left Field Brewery went from the little leagues to being one of the biggest hitters within the Ontario craft beer scene.

The story of Mandie and Mark Murphy is the dream of aspiring craft brewers everywhere. Quit your day job, open a brewery and become a smashing success. It sounds easy enough, but it hardly was. It was a combination of hard work, long hours, complementary skill sets and delicious beer that made Left Field the beloved brewery it is today. Add to that a super-fun branding strategy inspired by Mark’s fanatical love of baseball and Mandie’s instinctive marketing abilities and the brewery was bound to hit it out of the park.

Left Field began selling beer to pubs in 2013. Without their own brewing equipment, the Murphys relied on Grand River Brewing in Cambridge, Ont., to produce their first beer, an Oatmeal Brown Ale named Eephus (available through the brewery only), named after a rarely used, offspeed baseball pitch. That flavourful beer put Left Field on the craft beer map and the brewery quickly began offering additional styles that were brewed by Barley Days Brewery in Picton, Ont. For two years the Murphys would spend hours traversing Highway 401, dropping off full kegs, picking up empty ones and overseeing production days at the two breweries. They were in need of a place of their own and after a long and focussed search they landed on their brewery’s new home by happenstance. Five years ago they were out walking their dog, Spice, and came across an empty industrial space in the heart of the residential Leslieville neighbourhood in Toronto, something of a rarity. They knew it was right and snapped it up.