Author Archives: Jim Clifford

Craft-U-Brew

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Beer retailing in Ontario is dominated by the Beer Store, a near monopoly, owned by the large breweries.  This set up has some positive aspects, as the employees are well paid and they recycle almost everything they sell.  However, for those of us more interested in craft beer than industrially

produced domestic or imported brands, the Beer Store limits options.  The other booze monopoly, the government owned LCBO, sells a wider selection of Ontario Craft Beers, but they only sell in single cans or six packs and the prices are prohibitively high.  Neither retailer provides a wide selection of craft beers from across Canada or the United States.  This leaves beer drinkers with few options aside from figuring out how to brew your own craft beer.

Thankfully Craft-U-Brewing is a growing trend.  If you have the time and space its possible to brew your own beer from scratch at home.   Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher is a good resource to learn more about home brewing. For those of us living in apartments, too poor/cheap to buy the equipment or to lazy to learn all the complicated steps in brewing high quality craft beer there are great Craft-U-Brew stores like Toronto’s Fermentations that make brewing easy.

I know that many of you hear U-Brew and think about cheap kit-beer that taste terrible and allow hangovers to start while you are still drinking.  This is true of many of the cheaper U-Brew options that substitute corn sugar for barley to keep the price down.  Thankfully, it is now possible to buy micro-brewed wort (unfermented beer) made with barley malt, water and hops (you add the yeast yourself to make the process legal).  By adding more malt, hops, fruit, spices or coffee you can transform the base wort into almost any style of beer.  Fermentation have a wide selection of beers on their regular list (here are just a few):

  • Danforth Lager
  • Dutch Lager
  • Hoffbrauhaus
  • Czech Pilsner
  • Fuggles Pale Ale
  • Bavarian Bock
  • Newcastle Brown
  • Oatmeal Stout
  • Hefeweizen
  • Belgian Wit
  • Trappist Dubbel

However, what makes this U-Brew special is their ability to emulate just about any beer you have ever tried or read about.  My friend Val tried a Hefeweizen  in Colorado Springs with a really pronounced banana flavour.  Scott, one of the two employs that work with Charles the owner, thought it thorough and choose a yeast strain that would bring out the banana in their wheat wort.  The resulting beer was amazing and that batch did not last very long.  Over the past years we’ve experimented with beer style from around the world.  earthy Peat Smoked Scotch Ales, bitterly hoppy West Cost IPAs, danerously strong imperial coffee stouts (8-9%) and traditionally lagered double bocks. Continue reading →

The Wilbur Collective

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The day started poorly. I figured the ham had been out of the freezer for a good 36 hours, but it remained pretty frozen that morning at 10 am. After some emergency internet searching I got a large tub of water and started thawing.

Nine and a half hours later, after a lengthy boil and slow roast in the oven, I carved into the ham. This would have been a special night simply because we had a large crowd of friends over and some great food to eat.

However, this food had a story, which made it even more enjoyable. This was the first Wilbur Collective Ham Roast and most of the friends around are table contributed to the purchase of a local and sustainably raised pig. To get to this point it took a lot of community and a little bit of organization. We bought the pig from the Kawartha Ecological Growers Coop. [KEG], a collection of small farmers who manage a C.S.A. [Community Supported Agriculture] and sell at a number of farmers markets here in Toronto. Their community of farmers and a very supportive local chief made it possible to buy and process a pig and my group of friends made it possible to find the money to pay for it.
I have wanted to figure out a source of ethically raised and organic local meat for a few years now. The problem is that Katie, my lovely wife, is a vegetarian and she shows little interest in pork, ethical or not. So I have been restricted to buying small amounts of meat from farmers markets or organic butchers, which is not cheap. Months ago, we had a group of friends enjoying the spring weather on our back deck, eating some “Naked” sausages [meaning they were flavoured only with a bit of onion, salt and pepper] I’d bought

from KEG at the farmers market. I soon found that a lot of my friends shared my interest in sourcing their meat locally.

My connection with the farming community starts with Shannon. During the last weeks of winter Katie and I managed to wake up early enough on a Saturday morning to visit the year round farmers market at the new community barns (the potential topic of another post). Shannon was managing one of the best tables of local winter vegetables. After picking out a few bags worth of food we noticed they were advertising a CSA (community supported agriculture). More importantly they were delivering their CSA at a new farmers market in our local park, meaning we could walk to get our share. We quickly decided to sign up for a share and have loved it ever since. It is a really amazing thing to be on a first name basis with the people who not only sells us our food, but also grow much of it themselves.

The folks at KEG developed an interesting network of farmers, butchers and chefs to raise, kill and process pigs. An older, mostly retired farmer, who has been organic longer than label, keeps a couple of sows and one boar from a collection of heritage breeds Berkshire, Tamworth, Hampshire, Yorkshire, and Landrace. He does the farrowing, or pig birthing, for KEG. The young pigs are then passed on to one of two farms who finish the pigs, feeding them locally grown grains and legumes and allowing them to forage around outside. Once the pigs are ready for slaughter, they are sent to a multigenerational butcher in Lindsey for custom small scale killing. The final leg the journey and the one that is really interesting in my mind, is the kitchen of a high-end restaurant in Toronto. The chef and KEG came to an arrangement to process pigs. He then converts the lesser meat into excellent sausages and sells them back to KEG. These are the very same sausages that my friends and I were eating when we decided to found the Wilbur Collective back in May. On Thanksgiving Sunday the chef allowed me to join him in his kitchen and we spent the day making sausages, pork chops, smoked hawks, head cheese, bacon, pancetta and a huge ‘city ham’. After a few dozen emails we found a night that we could all come together and despite my poor defrosting plans, the ham tasted amazing.

Developing real relationships with the people involved with producing our food is important in creating sustainable communities. Doing this while deepening your connections with your existing communities of friends and family makes the experience even better.