SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY 2018
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • FEBRUARY 2018
When George Woods says it’s the perfect spot in North Vancouver to enjoy a delicious craft beer and great food with your friends and family, he’s not overselling it. Start with the Kenebeck Truffle Fries. They’re tossed in truffle oil and parmesan cheese and then topped with chopped parsley and served with their house-made garlic aioli – and it pairs well with their gluten friendly Rizzla Rice Lager. Then order one of their hand-crafted forno pizzas. I recommend the Duck Confitzza. It’s made using Anita’s organic flour, olive oil, shredded duck, sautéed apples, mozzarella, brie, goat cheese, candied walnuts and a hoisin glaze – and it pairs well with their seasonal Wyld Raspberry Berliner Weisse. And if you still have room, you have to try their Vanilla Bean Ice Cream. It’s topped with cookie crumble and chocolate milk stout sauce – and it’s heaven with their solid and robust Chocolate Milk Stout, a beer that has been aged on cacao nibs and shells provided by the East Van Roasting Company. For all you readers in the MVRD (Metro Vancouver Regional District), the address is 1015 Marine Drive. Everyone else please read on.
By David MacDonald
THE BREWERS G eorge Woods and Taylor Dean are brewers. Taylor worked through many different roles at Whistler Brewing and came to Hearthstone in the summer of 2015. George’s story is a little different. George is a student of his native Scotland’s famed BrewDog craft brewery. He ran their experimental small-batch brewery for three years. And he has a very keen palate and an amazing knack for developing recipes – and a love for snowboarding. George spoke with Spotlight on Business in late January as Darren manned the taps. “I moved to Canada in 2013 after a snowboarding holiday. I fell in love with the place and never left. The way I became a brewer wasn’t the long way ‘round like so many brewers out there. I was really just down on my luck in Aberdeen, Scotland and one day I saw an advert for brewing appren- tices. I just thought, ‘Hey, brewing sounds cool.’ And I like beer; I don’t mean just drinking it, I had a genuine interest in European beers and some American crafts so I thought GEORGE’S STORY
I’d just go along and have a kick at the can. It turned out I had a little bit of a natural flair for it. I understood the ingre- dients and the process. But I didn’t start brewing with BrewDog straight away. Me and seven other guys started with just dreadful jobs: making cardboard boxes for 12 hours a day, lots of cleaning, lots of sweeping, working the packaging line. They were such a small company at the time and they were kind of moving people around departments. But I had a real passion for it. I liked to work hard and I had no problem with the long hours, so one day they just gave me a shovel and said, ‘George, you’re mashing in today.’ That was my first brew. Working six days a week at 12 hours a day, I got really into it and became a team leader pretty quickly. Eventually I was allowed to do my own recipes. As BrewDog became more and more successful, they built a mega brewery – a huge facility. They took everybody over there and it was interest- ing. They were brewing by computer at the new facility, but it’s not what I was used to. I am a touch, taste, and feel kind of guy. So they actually sent me back to the old BrewDog facility to reopen it and use it as a small batch facility. At
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FEBRUARY 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
THE TAP & FORNO
“I think we are incredibly fortunate because we have a restaurant, the Tap & Forno, attached to us now.
We have two big Italian pizza ovens in there. So our big thing is handcrafted beer and delicious food – and that’s good for the local area. We are so lucky to be surround- ed at our location by so many different condos and apart- ments and businesses. We’ve become a haunt for a lot of the locals. We are also very family-friendly. Our owner Brock Rodgers is a lover of great food and owns a few restaurants around the greater Vancouver area, all focusing on craft beer, home-style comfort foods and a wholesome family atmosphere. We’re a restaurant kids can be in from open until close, so people feel comfortable bringing their family here, having something to eat with their friends and col- leagues, and being able to drink a few beers and just relax. It’s a really great location and I think we’re going to be around for a long time. Our IPAs pair well with any type of pizza, especially something with spicy meats on it. There’s something about the bitterness that just cuts you that nice spiciness of salami. The Chocolate Milk Stout really goes great with pastas. It balances really well with anything kind of creamy and it’s also a fantastic dessert beer. If you don’t have anything sweet, it’s nice to have a stout to go with it. The pilsner, Pils, is great for just sitting around and talking with and it’s great with pretty much any dish we serve. It is quite light and accessible but the hops are complex enough – they’re nice and floral – that it puts a little bit of spice in there. It just marries so well with anything Italian, salsa, beans, or burgers. Burgers are the other thing
that point I was with BrewDog for about four years and that’s when I took three months off to do some snowboard- ing – and never went back. They were super supportive. I remember calling them and being so worried about their response. Martin Dickie, brewmaster of BrewDog, said he knew I would fall in love with Canada. I remember him saying, ‘We weren’t expecting you to come back.’ After traveling around in Western Canada for a while, I respond- ed to an ad on Craigslist looking for a brewmaster. I sent a long and wordy email about how I was not yet a brewmaster but would love to be involved. We set up a meeting where I met Brock Rodgers, the owner, and I was basically given keys and we just went for it.” “I liked to work hard and I had no problem with the long hours, so one day they just gave me a shovel and said, ‘George, you’re mashing in today.’ That was my first brew.”
my favourite style of beer. I like a traditional dry stout but we’ve added the tiniest bit of lactose sugar to give it some body and a tiny bit of sweetener to give it that chocolate milk taste. It’s not overly milky and it’s not overly chocolat- ey. They’ve all made a big impact at Vancouver Craft Beer Week, which in terms of competitions is the one we’re the most involved in. We are going to start being more involved in the North Shore Craft Beer Week, which just had its first year last year so we’re hoping to start helping to make that a much bigger deal. It’s going to have some cool hiking trails so you can kind of go from brewery to brewery – and it's all along a bus route as well so you can easily do the whole thing in a day. “It balances really well with anything kind of creamy and it’s also a fantastic dessert beer.” We are fortunate to have so many really good craft breweries here in North Vancouver. You can start way out in Deep Cove, which is absolutely gorgeous, and then you can make your way through Fountain Bridge and then down to Lonsdale where there are beers always brewing. Then you can head down to the sea for more beautiful views and great beer and great food at Greenleaf and Black Kettle, as well – and then there’s us. We have a beautiful patio in back. We really want people to start making a bigger deal about the North Shore Craft Beer Festival because it’s so much fun!” “We’ve got a lot on the horizon at Hearthstone. We’ve got a Trail Mix beer coming out in the spring, for instance. You know, when the people start getting back into those mountains they want a nice nutty beer that’s typically a little darker in colour that features a clever selection of malts. There aren’t any actual nuts in it, so it’s accessible to every- body. It will be made with cranberries and chocolate. It is going to be a great little beer; I’m really looking forward to that. The Rizzla Rice Lager is gluten friendly – or grouped as gluten-reduced – because we use an enzyme that breaks down gluten below 10 parts per-million. That’s suitable for a lot of people who are on a glu- ten-free diet, but I’m not a doctor so I always tell people to check with their doctor’s first. We are also starting up a single release program. We have done really well with single release beers in the past so we are going to try and do a new one every few months. We’re really going to concentrate on a lot of small batch brewing in the next year. Those beers are going to be exclusive- ly in the tap room. We will still continue to can a lot of products and we will keep a lot of stuff packaged so it will continue to be out there in the liquor stores. But if you really want the freshest beer of the batch we encourage you to come to the tap room to try them all – and order a burger or a pizza.” WHAT’S NEXT?
we do really, really well.”
THE BEER
“When we started, we bought 10 IPAs and went through them all ingredient by ingredient. We worked out what was similar and what was different. We scrutinized everything: ‘We are not allowed to have it this colour; let’s not do a crystal backbone; rather than having a piney residue profile, let’s go for more of a fruity, peppy upfront citrus bitterness.’ From the beginning, we really were just trying to make our- selves stand out a little bit by approaching things very dif- ferently. A lot of breweries say, ‘We brew the beer we want to drink,’ which has become cliché – but it’s something that we are really strict on. We sometimes come up with ideas that we think will sell really well, but if our heart is not in them, we won’t do it. We are tied to the idea of doing a honey lager just because they sell so fast, but at the end of the day I don’;t really like drinking honey lager – so I didn’t want to brew one. We’re trying not to adhere to the local trends and kind of do our own thing. We were fortunate enough to be one of the first breweries doing sours and fruity beers. We did really well with our Berliner Weisse the first time we went to Vancouver Craft Beer Week.” “Our four core beers are our Pils, our Chocolate Milk Stout, our India Pale Ale, and our new gluten friendly Rizzla Rice Lager. The three originals have all picked up awards at Van- couver Craft Beer Week, the B.C. Beer Awards, and the Canadian Beer Awards. Our pilsner got a silver medal for European-style lager in 2016 at the Canadian Beer Awards; in 2015 our IPA got a bronze for best IPA in B.C., and just last year in 2017, our Chocolate Milk Stout got best stout in B.C., so they’ve all become medal winners which is really nice. The Chocolate Milk Stout was the first recipe I wrote for Hearthstone. I had the idea rattling around in my head for quite a while. The beer is not overly chocolatey – it just has a really nice, almost a memory of a chocolatey taste. It’s more of an aroma than an actual full-on flavour. Stout is THE LAURELS
many thanks to our advertisers
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HEARTHSTONE BREWERY
1015 Marine Drive, North Vancouver, BC V7P 1S6 info@hearthstonebrewery.ca
604-984-1842
www.hearthstonebrewery.ca
as spotlighted in the FEBRUARY 2018 issue of SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
www.spotlightonbusinessmagazine.com
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