Release the Monkey

Strange Brew works from 6,000-year-old recipe for latest release

If you’re driving north on Chase Road from the village of Wellington, you’ll come to a swamp. A boggy swamp that seems long even when you’re driving through it. When you come through the swamp, the first thing that catches your eye is a funky, rustic tin barn set close to the road on the left side. The tin barn has a lot of character and immediately makes you think of what kind of mischief went on within its walls. Was it a gin joint? Was is someone’s personal auto garage where friends got a deal? There is a house as well on the property, set back just a bit, and that’s where you’ll find the notorious Strange Brewing Studio (SBS). The word notorious is used because aside from setting up normal social media structures for his company, owner and brew master Dave Frederick has not done a stitch of promotion or marketing. Not even a website. He simply set his hours, opened his doors and people started arriving. But Frederick also has a take on the brewing process that is unique in the area, and his products reflect that. The brewery itself is unique and non-traditional in a very traditional way. Most professional breweries are not in the lower half of someone’s house. This one is. But it’s the experience you get at SBS that’s getting people buzzing.

It’s essentially a screened-in porch, one large room with a fireplace and a cold storage room. At the start Frederick didn’t think that opening for retail would be significant, but it’s actually what started the ball rolling.

Dave Frederick records a gravity-reading for his latest batch of Horn Trip at Strange Brewing Studios in Hillier.

“When I started the business plan, I said that I would just brew here, not do retail and just supply restaurants, and that would be a nice living. But the difference came when I decided to open up the retail shop. I opened in October with no advertising and people have been coming ever since and coming back too, which is nice,” says Frederick.

The experience at SBS is more relatable to visiting a local sugar shack than it would be a modern brewery. There are no commercial fridges, just a cozy little bar you’d see in any small restaurant with enough room for two taps and a cash register. The tanks that Frederick uses are tucked behind his large wood fireplace. It’s not shiny, but it’s authentic. His tools are hung on the walls, and it feels like you’re right smack dab in the middle of his process, but in a very positive way. Frederick loves chatting beer and the history behind it and hopes that people leave with a better understanding of what beer making is supposed to be about. In SBS you’re getting a snapshot of brewing without all the bravado or the ego. It’s the brewing process at its purest form, and for Frederick there is ton of philosophy behind his products and what he stands for.

“I’m sort of looking at beer-making outside of time. I do go back to past, and I check out what’s happening now and look to the future, but I take the elements of the beer-making process that I like. The methods and the ingredients regardless of what age it’s from and use it for what I’m doing,” says Frederick.

When it came to make his first beer, the Horn Trip Juniper Pale Ale, Frederick did some research and found that before they were using hops as an anti-microbial, they were using juniper in the Eastern European countries. Juniper prevalent in the County, with bushes actually on Frederick’s property, so he put the two together and the Horn Trip was born.

Frederick came to the County in 2010. He started with Lighthall Vineyards, then moved to By Chadsey’s Cairns where he spent close to five years as co-winemaker/ operations manager. Previously, Frederick had a career in finance and was living the corporate life in London, Ontario, and when the bank he was working for merged with another, there was big push for him to move to Toronto, and Frederick was looking to do the opposite. He didn’t want to go to a bigger city, he wanted to live in a more rural environment. He made the cut and decided to go live with his brother in British Columbia for a while.

Frederick had always been making wine at home and his love of that led him to take a one-year wine program in the Okanagan in the evenings as he was working in the vineyards during the day. When in BC, a friend sent him an article on the County and he had already been aware of the area as a wine region, though still in its infancy. When the decision was made to move back to Ontario, Frederick headed straight for the County.

When he was winemaking, Frederick kept hearing more and more about the complexities of beer making and how creative you can actually be with the process. He started, like he did with wine, in his basement with a friend making beer and was hooked.

“I remember drinking this beer from Montreal and realizing how much complexity and depth you could have in a beer. Then when I heard that they were barrel-aging beer, my head kind of exploded with possibilities,” says Frederick.

Frederick immediately saw the connection between the two processes and knew that his beermaking process could be unique if he used not only wine barrels for aging, but the yeast from the wine itself, which is stored in the lees that most wineries simply throw away.

“In the winemaking process you transfer the wine off the sediment, and the sediment is all yeast basically. And wineries just dump it down the drain. I’ve been living with that fact for 20 years thinking that’s a massive waste. In the lees you’re getting flavours, aromas, tannins, everything,” says Frederick.

Recently, SBS has picked up lees from pinot noir grapes as well as, chardonnay/pinot gris, malbec and cab franc and is releasing a studio series of these beer/wine hybrids called the “Ninkasi” series, named after the Sumerian Goddess of Beer from 4,000 BC. Frederick says that the goddess’ recipe still stands today. You brew beer, blend it with wine and then honey. The only variance from the 6,000-year old old recipe for SBS is that they are aging it in barrels. The series started with a pinot noir blend, which has since sold out. The second of the series has just been released and it’s a baco blend called Swamp Monkey, which you can find at SBS in bottles when the shop is open on the weekends.

SBS will also be teaming up with Walt’s Sugar Shack from some cross-promotion over the Maple In The County Weekend by creating a Smoked Maple beer, with the malt being smoked over wood-fire and then blended with maple. The beer will only be available at SBS but using Walt’s products and having him send people Frederick’s way will be all that he needs to be busy.

SBS considers itself more of a studio than a corporate brewery, hence the reason for the recent name change, but the beer it produces is well above studio level. For more information on SBS visit Facebook @strangebrewingcompany or Instagram @strangebrewpec.