JULY/AUG 1998

VOL.3 NO.7

Brick Brewing Company -- Ontario's Original Microbrewery

Jim Brickman is fond of saying that he founded his brewery because of what he calls his "drinking problem". Which is not to say that Brickman got bombed one night and decided to invest all his cash into the venture, but rather, that he had a problem finding a beer he enjoyed drinking in the province.

The time was the early eighties and the powers-that-be (Molson, Carling and Labatt) had decided that the market wanted increasingly light-tasting and homogeneous brews. In contrast to that attitude, Brickman felt that there was a definite segment of the same market, himself included, which longed for a full-flavoured, all-barley malt beer. And so was born the Brick Brewing Company.

A lot of beer has flowed through the Waterloo, Ontario, brewery since then, and the first modern microbrewery in Ontario looks quite a bit different today that it when it opened in December of 1984. To find out how much had changed, SBWoB webmaster Kevin Fair and I made a spring road trip to Brick to chat to and have lunch with Jim Brickman.

First, though, I had to review the highlights of Bricks activity over the past baker's dozen of years:

-- The original Brick brand was their flagship Premium Lager. This was followed in subsequent years by their Anniversary Bock, a full-bodied seasonal beer that is still brewed for the winter; Red Baron, a lighter lager designed for a more commercial appeal; and a Vienna lager-ish Amber Dry.

-- The first of Brick's licensed brands was Henninger Kaiser Pils, which was taken over when Heinneken closed their Amstel brewery in Hamilton. This has been followed by a number of other licences, including Pacific Real Draft, Andech's Spezial Hell Lager, the Greek lager, Fix, and their latest, Celis White.

-- Publicly traded from the start, Brick is now about 19% owned by the major Canadian brewer, Molson.

-- Within a short time period, Brick purchased two competing Ontario breweries, Conners Brewing Company of St. Catharines and Algonquin Brewing Company of Formosa, and the product line of Laker brand beers. The Algonquin brewery remains in operation, but the Conners facility has been closed.

-- Today, Brick produces some 25 different brands, which they loosely group into five categories: Brick, Conners, Algonquin, International (licensed brands) and Laker.

With more than two dozen brands to the brewery's credit, I was more than a little curious about why Brickman felt it necessary to maintain such a diverse portfolio of beers. His response was that the company does not want to leave itself vulnerable on any single front and so tries to covers all the bases with a wide variety of brands. This way, the theory goes, if sales dip for one beer, total volumes can be picked up with sales from another. This, says Brickman, allows the brewery some degree of fiscal comfort.

I also had to ask Brickman about his plans for the Conners ales, beers which were once so distinctive but had suffered badly in the latter stages of the original brewery's life. His response was encouraging; he said that their intent was to bring the brands back in line with what they used to be, and perhaps even give them a little more character than before. As proof of this, Brickman offered his brewery's plans to resurrect both the Conners Pale Ale and the Conners Stout, and possibly add a fifth ale to the British-oriented line.

In terms of logistics, Brickman was adamant about the benefits of having two breweries. It gives the company more brewing flexibility, he said, along with the obvious expanded capacity. He also noted that the Formosa aquifer provided that brewery with wonderful brewing water and that they were soon to begin trucking that water down to Waterloo.

(At about this time, Brickman also surprised me with the announcement that Brick Brewing would soon begin to "dabble" in bottle-conditioning. This would be a major departure for a brewery founded on the production of Germanic lagers!)

Finally, as we continued to talk over lunch, I was struck by Brickman's attitude towards beer and brewing. Here, I thought, is first and foremost a businessman. But in contrast to the image of Jim Brickman I had seen at times in years past, an image of a man greatly concerned with the survival of the brewery he had founded, this Jim Brickman was quite evidently having fun making and selling beer. In the end, that might well be the most encouraging sign for the future of Ontario's original micro.

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