BREWING UP A STORM
Mad scientist brewer — forever ‘on the cutting edge’ — prefers to keep things close
You catch a whiff of madness in James Walton when you meet him. It doesn’t take long for that whiff to grow into the air of a mad scientist. Turns out others feel the same.
The crumpled, dishevelled steampunk look of his Storm Brewing brewery on Commercial Drive belies the delicious elegance of the beers that come out of there. His brewing tales, as he spins it, are studded with “everyone thought I was crazy …”
Street cred at Storm Brewing isn’t a brand. He didn’t go looking for a stinky chicken processing plant for a neighbour. The raggedy brewing equipment was, of necessity, cobbled together from scrapyard discoveries back in the early ’90s. The mash tun (tank for mashing grain) was cobbled out of an industrial yogurt maker. The yogurt stirrer was repurposed into a milling device. The beer kettle was a factory soup kettle, “modified a bit,” he says, and the chute carrying the malted grain into the mash tun was hammered out of scrap metal. The 10 or so tanks in the facility were scrapyard finds he recycled. The beer kegs “might have once been pop kegs,” he says.
Equipment sat in his front yard before he opened the brewery and his East Side neighbours thought he was building a boat.
“I started cutting off parts, welding things together,” he says. “I grew up on a farm. I learned how to weld and build.”
He opened Storm in 1994 and sold beer by the keg to restaurants and parties. The Liquor Control and Licensing Branch gave him a hard time over the name, Storm Brewing. “It was after the 1993 hockey riot. They didn’t like the double entendre,” he says. In 2013, he opened to the public for tastings and growler fill-ups.
Outside, an outsized graffiti-style wall mural depicts a cartoon brewery with human-sized rats. “In London, during the stout era, people who drank it lived and those who didn’t died of cholera,” Walton says.
“I took poetic licence with the rats. I wanted to name one of my mainstay beers Black Plague.”
Not to worry: Vancouver Coastal Health has only asked him to cover some light fixtures and seal some holes in the floor and walls.
Storm Brewing has four mainstay beers: Precipitation Pilsner, Highland Scottish Ale, Hurricane IPA and Black Plague Stout. The brewery’s so-called Brainstorms are Walton’s madness. He’s crafted up to 120 of them and they change weekly. His Vanilla Whisky Stout is a revelation, as is the Gin and Tonic Pilsner. But wait for the freeze-distilled beer he’ll release at the end of October. I had a sip and I pronounce it gorgeous. In freezing beer, the water freezes, but the syrupy alcohol doesn’t. That syrup is aged in oak.
“It goes from eight per cent to 25 per cent alcohol,” he says. It will sell for $80 a litre.
He also does a sour beer which beer fans are discovering.
“It’s kinda like sourdough bread. I get wild culture from the air and I’ve been doing it since 1996, aging it in oak barrels. People thought I was crazy,” he says.
The Alibi Room sells it with extreme caution.
“They won’t let you have it unless you’d had sour beer before and you’re not allowed to return it because it’s expensive,” Walton says. “It’s like 12-year-old aged beer. I leave it for one year now but made it stronger to compensate.”
The sour beer sells for $32 per litre growler as opposed to $12 for a Mainstay fill-up and $16 for a Brainstorm fill.
The specialty Brainstorms have included Apple Pie Ale, Cherry Whiskey Sour Pilsner, Orange Creamsicle Ale, Sasparilla Ale, Raspberry Mint Pilsner, Pattaya Pleasure IPA, Bloody Mary Pilsner, Bacon Ale (“not great,” he says), Black Forest Cake Stout (very successful), Elderflower Ale, Purple Rain Ale (blueberries, pomegranate), Ice Mocha Stout, Sex on The Beach IPA (flavours of the cocktail of same name), Dill Pickle IPA, Root of All Evil Stout (root beer with sarsaparilla, sassafras, wintergreen and licorice root tinctures), Black Currant Sour Ale and on and on and on.
Thirty Mason jars of tinctures and herbs and spices sit on a shelving unit in the brewery.
“I have these unique kegs where I can open the lid and add ingredients at the keg stage,” he says. “I use a lot of different techniques to get flavours in.”
Joe Wiebe, Victoria author of Craft Beer Revolution: The Insider’s Guide to B.C. Breweries, says Storm Brewing has been a leading-edge brewery since it began.
“James is a mad scientist,” he says. “He’s always been on the cutting edge and experimental and he’s very successful at it. His standard brews are just bang on, really, really well made, but he’s always trying to do new and different things.”
Until he started selling to the public two years ago, you had to be in the know to find his beers, Wiebe says.
Walton’s been making beer since he was 15.
“I didn’t really want to drink,” he says. “I liked the technical aspect of it. I was a science geek. I stole some barley from my mom’s horses. I sprouted and baked it, crushed it with a rolling pin and made acid black beer. It was terrible, but my friends were like, ‘You’re a genius!’ and drank it.”
In 1978, during a beer strike in Port Alberni, where he grew up, adults suddenly noticed him and he realized the importance of beer. “People were freaking out,” Walton says.
He went to university and studied botany and sciences. He worked in the mushroom business — legit! — and then he worked in management in the pharmaceutical industry.
“I realized how the other half lived. I was clean and didn’t have s--- on me,” he says.
He opened Storm Brewing when he realized he could make better beer than what was available at the time.
“If I didn’t have a background in organic chemistry and botany, I would have had a hard time making beer with guarana, for example,” he says. (It gives the caffeine jolt in Red Bull and Monster beverages.) “The South American seed contains twice as much caffeine as coffee beans. It totally worked. I had two of my beers and I was vibrating.”
Wormwood, foraged near Trail, goes into Hemingway IPA. Flavourful extract of immature fennel seeds goes into the Fennel Countdown Pilsner. “I’m turning into a herbalist,” he says.
“When I used echinacea, I figured out the amount you need for medicinal effect. Whenever I have it, I wake up without a hangover and my cold is gone,” he says. “But my doctor says that’s bulls---.”
Gin and Tonic Pilsner has actual ingredients for gin, and he has the cinchona to make quinine for tonic water.
“I haven’t done that yet, but anyone with malaria should come try it when I do,” he says. “Not everyone likes everything I make. I try to make beers that actually taste of the flavours I put in.”
One of the longest-running craft brewers in Vancouver, it’s always been about the beer for him, not profits.
“I have control issues. If I sold bottled beers, I’d have no idea what people would do to it,” he says, explaining why he only sells kegs and growlers. “Is it sitting under lights? In a car?
“Growlers I can handle. It says on the bottle that you have to drink it fresh.”
He’ll remain a small-batch operation to be able to be hands on, brewing about 1,200 hectolitres a year, compared with about 30,000 hL brewed at other craft breweries. “And I don’t want to have a bar in here. I get overwhelmed when there are too many people,” he says. His look is punk, not brewmaster. “No beards! No plaid shirts!” he says in unison with wife Heather Walton. “Brewers all like beards.”
His black platform Kiss boots (from Portugal) add height to his five-foot-five frame and levitate him from the wet concrete floor and his gas mask T-shirt is in line with wife Heather’s skeleton T-shirt, bright green Frankenstein stockings and pigtails.
“When I met her, she was in a corset,” Walton says. “Her career was in fashion design and she makes all my fetish clothes.”
If you feel the need for a Storm beer, you’ll find daily Brainstorm specials at 310 Commercial Dr. But you’ll find them at Craft Beer Market, Vij’s, Alibi Room, St. Augustine’s, Homer Street Cafe and 12 Kings Pub, too.