A brewery quietly redefining what it means to drink local – blending craft beer and sustainability on a restored heritage farmstead
The small local beermakers that we classify as craft breweries can be discovered in a wide range of settings and locations. Their brewhouses and taprooms might be tucked away in industrial malls and mundane commercial plazas, Chinatown neighbourhoods, a 1930s Art Deco municipal incinerator building or wedged into a refurbished CN rail complex branded a “junction district.” I’ve even visited a nano-brewery built into the 200-square-foot garage of the principal owner’s family residence in a city’s urban residential core.
Recently, I sipped a few pints in a secluded rural setting near a UNESCO-designated area in one of Canada’s southern-most parcels of land. The regional municipality of Norfolk County and Charlotteville Township – Simcoe is the largest nearby community – are located on the north shore of Lake Erie. As I learned, if you drive too quickly on West Quarter Line between the 6th and 9th concessions, you could miss the two ancient barns that mark the spot: Charlotteville Brewing Company (CBC) has used the agriculture richness of the area as the foundation and guiding principle for its business.
Read Also: 5 Ontario craft beers to quench your summer thirst
Once the tobacco belt of Ontario, the area grows a wondrous smorgasbord of crops and livestock: the long-horn cattle of innovative YU Ranch, lavender, hazelnuts and goji berries; both sweet potatoes and peanuts grow in the area. If you see fluffy green plants with bright red berries growing beneath black shade canopies, that’s ginseng, a popular crop in the area that likes Norfolk’s sandy soil but doesn’t like too much sun, so it’s partially shaded.
The barns – originally built in 1913 – were dis-assembled, moved and re-constructed on Charlotteville Brewing Company’s property.
The Carolinian-forest ecosystems and their flora and fauna also include the unusual native North American fruit known as the pawpaw and so-called “flying” squirrels as features of the natural world in which CBC has established its own considerable sustainability project, which is a critical – and ambitious – component of CBC co-owner and general manager Melanie Doerksen’s focus.
That means re-purposing raw material as much as possible, growing organic ingredients and products, paying employees a living wage and striving to be zero waste. They also brew beer and serve food that is sustainable and as delicious as they can make it.
From hops to beer
Doerksen is a chef by training and previously taught culinary at Fanshawe College; she also attended the George Brown College post-graduate Italian cooking program and did a six-month stagiaire on Italy’s Adriatic Coast. With husband and CBC co-owner Tim Wilson, an anatomy professor at Western University, the pair started growing hops in 2010. Visit the brewery and nearby you will see the trellis systems on which hops reach six or seven metres in the air as they grow.
Tim Wilson and Melanie Doerksen, husband and wife and co-owners of Charlotteville Brewing Company.
From there, Doerksen and Wilson’s interest dove into the agronomy of beer’s basic ingredients: they loved craft beer and the concept of local food but noticed that there were not a lot of Ontario hop growers. They started growing their own, and eventually another eight or nine farmers banded together to become the Ontario Hop Growers Association, according to Doerksen.
“This is actually the first year that we’re not growing hops, so it feels a bit weird. This time is usually quite manic for us, but now it’s a bit relaxed,” she says.
In 2018, with their knowledge of beer’s hoppy perspective, they twigged to the idea of brewing, and the CBC project was, quite literally, re-built from the ground up: they deconstructed a couple of old barns, stored the boards and beams and other components while a pad was laid and rebuilt the structures on their current site with a few tweaks and alterations here and there.
One barn is the taproom and kitchen, with capacity for about 35 guests; the other the brewery and retail space. Both are beautiful structures that look like they have been part of the terrain for decades. Originally erected in 1913 just north of Ilderton, Ontario, about 20 kilometres northeast of London, the barns appeared to Doerksen and Wilson almost serendipitously.
“Tim was learning how to dive, and it was his instructor’s family farm. He wanted to leave the farm, and there were these beautiful barns. Tim and I both fell in love with them. The owner said, ‘I’ll give you them for free if you take them down.’ So we gave him a very nice bottle of Scotch and the deal was done,” says Doerksen.
The next steps didn’t happen as quickly: it was roughly five years during which they cleaned out the barns, sold off unneeded farming paraphernalia and dismantled the structures (most barns are built with what are known as “bents and bays” for easy expansion). They moved the tons of material to Norfolk and hired a barn builder they found in Avon to rebuild them – “he was like our barn guru,” says Doerksen.
The barns have been re-constructed with the original wood, dowels and hand-hewn beams, and CBC used extra beams among the stock for their patio structure that includes space for as many as 100 guests, the central focus of which is a wood-fired pizza oven that operates during the busy summer season.
Bees and beers in the Carolinian forest
The reconstruction was a first step in developing a fully integrated system within the unique ecology of the Carolinian forest in which the brewery sits. The business is what CBC calls “agroecology,” a holistic “closed loop” practice that has few external inputs and where some of the 41 acres of property produces food that is served fresh or preserved for the brewery’s charcuterie boards – or packaged for retail sale. It’s a serene setting evoking a sense that human fabrication fits tidily into a natural environment that has been embraced and nurtured.
Bee hives and biodiversity are part of Charlotteville Brewing Company’s sustainability plan.
“We have bees,” Doerksen adds. “We are working now with Birds Canada conservation organization and with ALUS, the alternative land use system (that builds climate resilience and enhances biodiversity). They’ve put in a pollinator row for us, and we have a pond that we’re working on out back to create a turtle habitat.”
The Carolinian forest is primarily deciduous and covers a significant swath of land as far south as Tennessee. Here, the forest ranges from the southern tip of Ontario between lakes Erie, Huron and Ontario and is rich in a biodiversity of species from plant life to birds, snakes and a species of intriguing “flying” squirrels. “Carolinian Canada” includes the UNESCO-designated Long Point Biosphere Reserve, with Long Point in Norfolk County being a 40-kilometre-long sand-spit on the north shore of Lake Erie, roughly three hours southwest of Toronto.
As it develops, visitors as they wander the CBC property will be able to access information about various species and their endangered status, for instance, via posted QR codes. They will, of course, also enjoy Charlotteville beer – including one made with pawpaw fruit found in the area. Currently using a nearby producer, CBC has just planted a grove of seven of their own pawpaw trees which they expect will bear fruit in the next couple of years. The planting is part of the local focus that comes out of the CBC kitchen and the brewery’s mash tuns. Most of the fruit used – raspberries, quince, haskap blackberries and pawpaws – are from producers less than 50 kilometres away.
The CBC bar-snacks menu includes whipped feta, cream cheese, lemon and baguette, salumi and local cheese boards, a half-dozen handhelds including veggie flatbread with crispy chickpeas, a Greek-inspired YU Ranch all-beef frankfurter with tzatziki and a couple of dishes for kids.
Offering locals and tourists an engaging beer experience
A chef’s craft is ingredient and technique-driven, and so is a brewer’s. While Doerksen’s beer recipes are currently in play, more and more are the purview of “brewster” Holly Schell who studied brewing at Niagara College and plied her craft at Bellwoods, the popular brewery located near Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods neighbourhood. Schell was living only a few minutes away in Waterford, and when she heard that CBC was looking, she applied right away.
“I think it took us all of 48 hours,” according to Doerksen. “She applied, yep, okay, good. You’re hired. She has a wonderful reputation, and Bellwoods is probably one of my favourite breweries. We’re starting to see more of her recipes coming out, her different ideas.”
Schell’s approach is to brew a variety of beers, flavour-wise and style-wise, that appeal to a wide audience, drawing on ideas that come from the local ingredients she has access to.
“I like to lean into the local produce,” says Schell. “But the pawpaw was a first for me. It’s not a very common ingredient and was pretty labour intensive because of the seeds (which can be 25mm in diameter). It has creamy banana, honey and, some people say, tropical melon notes.”
The Carolinian fruit forms the backbone of the Pawpaw Pucker Sour (4.2 ABV; 13 IBU) along with its Jarrylo hops that add slight banana and citrus notes. Schell describes the task of developing a new beer as one that seeks a balance of flavours that customers can relate to, even if they may not know the main ingredient. She stresses that if you can’t imagine how something is going to taste, it might make you nervous about trying it.
The Charlotteville Brewing repertoire sits at roughly three dozen beers broken out into North American or European styles, stouts and a porter, gose and tart beers, fruited beers, low-alc beers and IPAs. Within all of that, the selections aim for a balance between the popular beers that people like – I believe there is a strong homing instinct within beer aficionados that draws them to varied brew experiences – and new beers that are slowly being integrated into the rotation.
CBC’s En Garde! – a bière de garde or “beer for keeping” is a northern French-styled pale ale – is Doerksen’s recipe and Schell’s brewing touch: the collaboration won a gold medal at the Ontario Brewing Awards a few years ago. The day of my visit saw the blackboard beer menu offering 10 choices, including a sour, an IPA and an Irish red ale that represent a fairly broad cross-section of styles that boasts the variety Doerksen says her customers look for.
The Charlotteville Brewing repertoire sits at roughly three dozen beers. The selections aim for a balance between the popular beers that people like.
“We like to do that largely because if you look at the other breweries in the area, many of them have a lane that they’re sticking to. They like Belgians or they’re doing big IPAs. So, this gives people an opportunity to try a wider variety of beer. We try to have that experience with people so when they’re coming in, it’s like, ‘Oh! This isn’t the standard pint that I get when I go to a chain restaurant.’”
CBC customers are both local patrons and a Norfolk tourism demographic that draws craft-beer lovers from the GTA, Waterloo Region and Woodstock and London; some travel from Niagara and Sarnia and Windsor. CBC beers are available at some area licensees and in their bottle shop, and the business is licensed to serve beer in the taproom and on the patio as well as selling from their retail counter. During my spring taproom visit, I watched as several small groups – including a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids – marched in and out of CBC for samples of beer and a stamp on their tourism “passport:” it’s part of the growing energy that Norfolk County has been experiencing when it comes to food and beverage.
Yet, despite the pace and moments of hustle-bustle in the taproom, customers’ primary motivation for visiting is the beer and quiet reflection says Doerksen, adding that people are also interested in their gardens and bees and the tranquillity of the Carolinian forest around them. It’s that holistic approach – and one where the strategy is to slow down time over a freshly poured pint.
“We don’t have TVs. We have Wi-Fi but don’t advertise it,” she says. “We want people to engage with one another and normally don’t give out the login details except for the tourist beer-passport season. So, it’s, like, you’re going to have to chat. That’s really all we’re looking for them to do. Experience good food and good beer.”
