Glass half-full outlook

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This article was published 12/08/2019 (2554 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For years, Paul Tower and Brad Blahnik would get together every Monday and do what they loved to do best — brew beer.

The pair met while playing music together; Tower was working in sales and was already homebrewing, while Blahnik, who worked in construction, had expressed interest in learning more about the process.

“We’d brew 10 gallons of beer every single Monday of every week,” Tower recalls.

“Our band shared a studio with a bunch of other bands, so we’d set up our beers on tap, and take people’s criticism to make the next batch as good as we could.”

That weekly ritual would eventually lead to the pair opening Grain to Glass Brewing Supplies at 579 St. Mary’s Rd. in June 2015.

“I realized we were ordering a lot of homebrew supplies for beer making off the internet from the States, and that maybe we could open a homebrew shop,” Tower explains. “Brad was on board with that, so I started doing the research and we opened about six months later.”

The idea to open the shop came after plans to open a nanobrewery — where they could make beer commercially on a very small scale — were shelved due to the restrictive regulations existing at the time surrounding brewing beer in the province. (The regulations were eased shortly after, leading to Winnipeg’s craft-beer boom.)

Grain to Glass has allowed Tower and Blahnik to continue pursuing their passion of brewing beer while helping foster growth in the homebrewing field. The store is one of just a few local shops offering raw ingredients — barley, hops, malt and the like — for homebrewing in addition to pre-made commercial beer kits.

The store also carries wine and cider kits for hobbyists, and offers a modest on-site brewing/wine making program for those unable to make their hooch at home.

Their newest venture is the Monday Mourn American pale ale, the first Grain to Glass beer to be available commercially in 473ml cans. It’s currently for sale at the Quality Inns beer vendor (685 Weatherdon Ave., near the corner of Pembina Highway and Grant Avenue) and The Nob, the beer vendor at the St. Norbert Hotel (3540 Pembina Hwy.). The pair expect the Monday Mourn to be available at Liquor Marts later this month.

The beer emerged from their recipes developed at Grain to Glass.

“A couple of recipes really stood out– we liked them a lot, they were winning awards, and our friends were drinking our kegs dry faster than we could make them.” — Paul Tower

“We started sending our beer off to competitions, and won a fair number of medals over the past couple of years,” Tower says. “A couple of recipes really stood out — we liked them a lot, they were winning awards, and our friends were drinking our kegs dry faster than we could make them.”

The original recipe for the Monday Mourn was Blahnik’s.

“We probably brewed this recipe 30 times; there were minor tweaks from the original recipe before we settled on this,” he says.

“With American pale ales you can push the hop levels like an IPA, but it doesn’t have to be as bitter or as strong in alcohol,” Tower adds. “I prefer a hoppy beer that’s five per cent alcohol rather than seven or eight, so I can have a couple.”

Cans of the Monday Mourn are brewed at Torque Brewing Co., which have helped get a number of local breweries up and running with initial batches brewed at larger scales; Winnipeg Brew Werks, for example, still makes its pils and its new rotbier at Torque’s King Edward Street facility.

The first step was getting the beer brewed for the general public to try at the Flatlander’s Beer Festival in June, where Grain to Glass was pouring both the Monday Mourn and their Creamsicle ale, a blond ale that sees lactose as well as orange and vanilla extract added.

Right until the kegs were delivered to Bell MTS Place from Torque, Tower and Blahnik were nervous about what the beer would taste like.

“They kegged it, threw it in the truck and brought to down to the arena. That’s how fresh it was,” Blahnik laughs. “We didn’t get to taste the beer for Flatlander’s until about five minutes before we started pouring it.”

They liked what they tasted — and so did the public.

“People at Flatlander’s were mad when we gave them a sample and then they’d ask where they can buy it, and then found out they couldn’t. I told them they could come in, and I’d sell them the ingredients if they wanted to make it.”– Paul Tower

“People at Flatlander’s were mad when we gave them a sample and then they’d ask where they can buy it, and then found out they couldn’t. I told them they could come in, and I’d sell them the ingredients if they wanted to make it,” Tower says, laughing.

The next nerve-racking step came when the recipe for the Monday Mourn was scaled up even more, from 20 litres to 2,000 litres. It turns out they needn’t have worried.

“I had a guy come in who had bought some cans, and also had some on tap at his house, and he said it was bang-on,” Blahnik says.

The Monday Mourn available in cans is technically a Torque beer contract brewed for Grain to Glass because the beer is made at Torque’s brewery. That means if Grain to Glass were to open a taproom, they wouldn’t be able to sell the cans there.

And opening a tap room down the road is certainly in the cards. With the homebrewing store already bursting at the seams, the plan is to find a new, larger space where Blahnik and Tower will brew the Monday Mourn, Creamsicle Ale and other core beers — including a peanut butter porter and New England IPA — on a relatively small scale to pour in an on-site tap room and for growler fills, while Torque continues to brew the larger batches for cans.

The partnership reflects the overall camaraderie between local brewers that even predates the craft beer boom that started in late 2015.

“‘Competition’ is not a word we use around here when it comes to local brewers,” Blahnik says. “When people ask ‘Who’s the competition?’, we say Budweiser. It’s all of us against them.”

uncorked@mts.net

Twitter: @bensigurdson