I’ll be honest with you. 

I don’t like my Birthday.

September 9th has more often than not been the first day of school. Monday, Tuesday. Didn’t matter. Sometimes it would be on the weekend before, but the odds were that my Birthday signalled the first day of school. It always felt like they were telling me to get on with it.

As I’m riding to The Granite, early in the morning, in an uber I shouldn’t be taking (it’s only a 20 minute walk), I know the focus isn’t on me. It can’t be. Two members of the Keefe family have passed in pretty quick succession. 

The most prominent of them, Kevin, was responsible for the boom in Craft Beer on the East Coast of Canada. His passing had been brought to my attention by Jeff Pinhey who had known him since the 1980’s. While Craft Beer had started in Victoria, it had been pretty genteel. Halifax was a little more rough and tumble at the time, and so was Ginger’s. Jeff tells me “He was absolutely the one person who led the breakup of racially divided bars in town. Hosted the first live music with black bands playing in white bars.  Didn’t give a shit what your skin was.  Didn’t give a fuck about that.”

I’d say that’s as much legacy as any man needs, but he also made some pretty damn good beer while he was booking bands. Brought better Beer to the streets of Halifax and spread the good word beyond Dartmouth for those who’d listen. Of course, I didn’t get there until 1999. 

On this particular brew day, we’re meant to commemorate Enoch Turner. 

Enoch is an all time Toronto saint. He built a schoolhouse with his own money to educate a thousand local children in a time of crisis. Maybe more impressively, he believed wholly in his apprentice. Samuel Platt, who had the bad taste to be born in Armagh. He went from being a wood chopper on Sherbourne to being Enoch’s clerk to being a distiller to owning a distillery of his own to being an alderman and member of provincial parliament and eventually head of Consumer’s Gas. You can still see both of their houses if you know where to look near Allan Gardens. Both of them serve public functions, which ought to tell you something about their intentions.

I sneak in the sliding patio door, and creep down the main hall past the Hogarth prints. 

Sometimes when you’re doing a collab beer, it’s a bit fraught. There are emails back and forth. You argue over tiny details and worry about whether things will come right. I’ve made ESB’s. Two years ago, I made Dragon Slayer with Jacob at Spearhead. It was a 1972 Fuller’s ESB Clone. We sent cans to John Keeling and his feedback was that it was perfect except for the yeast. Last year we made Enoch Turner’s Ale with Amsterdam Brewing, and Connor was a Burtonized delight. We sold out on the night and then sold out the batch.

Neither of those breweries really specialize in English Ales. Enter Mary Beth Keefe. I’ve left the fine details to her. Looking at the recipe sheet on the day, we’re going with heavy Burtonization, cascade for bittering and fuggles for flavour and aroma.

Mary Beth is a generational brewer. In Canada, this is not a job that really exists. Mare has been brewing since about 2009, and in her own right is terrific. That underplays her a little. She embraces the lifestyle of the female brewer on instagram and really engages with the industry in a fundamental way that speaks to her passion for what she does. 

The best compliment I can give Mare is that her Ringwood yeast is on pitch 1465 when we throw it in the fermenter. Did you try for sourdough during the pandemic? Did you make five or six loaves? 1465. Suffer. This is a nurturing person whose livelihood depends on being a wellspring of care. She has more feel for her brewhouse than anyone I’ve ever seen. She’s never worked on other equipment. The beers in the FVX series will use non-Ringwood yeast, but they’re never going to out-compete it.  

She has kids and she’s tired. She’s also in the middle of an 80 day fitness kick. Tim Burnett, who brews with her, has kids and is tired. I’m tired too. We sit quietly in The Granite’s dining room and we sip our coffee and look at our emails as the mash progresses. There’s some Carastan in there, which is a nod to the old school. It’s surprisingly uneventful, which everyone appreciates without comment. Without open pints in the room, it doesn’t quite smell like The Granite. The Ringwood yeast is more aromatically potent than you might think in the open.

I like Tim a lot. He’s from America and sometimes we joust about Cold IPA and its position in the firmament. He reminds me a little of a cuddly John Malkovich. Intellectual, but warm and precise and funny. He’s extremely knowledgeable and they work terrifically well in tandem. They have the same tattoo artist.

I’m struck by how small The Granite’s brewing system is. We might get 600 litres out of this brew. At 40 a firkin, here today and gone tomorrow. Everything is tight. The equipment is antediluvian. Wood clad. Back when you ordered it when you needed it. You couldn’t pick it up because another brewery went under. Every angle is cut down and Mare and Tim work alternate days, so their techniques are infinitesimally different. A couple of litres here and there. A different angle on the grain chute lever.

Over the course of the day, people pop in as I’m doing the conventional adding hops to the boil photo opportunity, trying not to look fat while standing on a ladder, which is impossible, especially while fat. Alistair Thain, who works in their cellars, was a student of mine and I love him to death. We’ll go back and forth on Bob Mortimer and The Mighty Boosh for hours. He’s continually accruing knowledge and experience and I’m very proud of him. Samantha Brown, who I’d met in Kingston at Stone City, brought me a selection of Cannoli, which were the closest I’d had to a birthday cake in a decade. She’s a good friend. 

At one point, Denise Keefe, Mary Beth’s mum, who I’ve met many times, came in and introduced herself and asked if I would like a cup of coffee. I said, in the same way you might as an awkward teenaged person, “oh yes, thank you very much,” and then put it next to the one I already had.

Ron Keefe, bad knee and all, came in and sat down and had a chat with us. He was bearing up pretty well, given the circumstance. And then Sheena came in, which you could tell by the perfume. And then Sam Keefe poked his head in. And then Mikey showed up to tend bar.

A brew day takes five or six hours. And by the time we were timing the Ringwood yeast pitch, it occurred to me how much depended on it. This Ringwood trebled in 14 minutes. The warmth of this particular hearth ensures the lives of not just all of the Keefes, but the happiness of all the staff, of all the guests. There’s an entire economy extant in the retirees who come over for the crab cakes and soup special. All of it is down simply to care.

There are days I walk into The Granite as a regular and find a conversation with people at the bar. I think if I sat for an hour any given day I could get a little conversation going.  I’ll sometimes glance around the room and realize I know several people from previous visits. John or Bill, Neal or Maz, Ken, Larry, Gordon, Malcolm.

The Granite wins awards. It will continue to win awards. This is immaterial. People meet at The Granite. People get married at The Granite. Wakes are held at The Granite. All of the business of life happens there eventually. What a good brewery does is fill a space in its community. It emanates warmth and care and welcome. This has never changed. 

In life, you do so much that isn’t noticed. It’s the maintenance of things that slips beneath recognition. The care for the essence of things is imperceptible, even through windows surrounding a brewhouse. The Granite is an ongoing team effort in its 34th year, buoyed up by every single pair of hands every day. And so, we’ve made an ESB for the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse. A place paid for by a brewer that educated children in their thousands. Made by a brewery that has found its way into the hearts of a neighbourhood that didn’t exist at the time. 

I hope it will make both Enoch and Kevin proud.