(Ed.Note: I mentioned previously that it is sometimes hard to know when it is fair to review a brewery. It’s more difficult when there’s a paucity of rumour and innuendo floating around. Some breweries exist as hype beasts and every release is dissected on twitter. Some breweries you don’t hear anything about unless you ask around. This falls into the latter category. My hope is to be accurate without being meanspirited.)

The replacement bus rolls past The Six Brewhouse towards Manning Ave, and on foot back towards my destination I call in at Tilt to see if they have an Arkanoid cabinet. How many quarters did I drop on that game? Trapped in space, warped by someone. Sadly, just pinball. The three or four blocks of Dundas are revealing, though.

College West and Queen West are comparatively linear, but Dundas wends around Toronto Western. West of Bathurst, it hasn’t gentrified in quite the same way as its parallel lines and there’s a diverse group of cuisines represented in the two story storefronts, each restaurant with its own identity. Chop-Chop has small plates of dumplings and ersatz Cantonese fare in a relaxed setting. Patois’ menu looks to be a fascinating blend of Jamaica and Hong Kong. There’s Banh Mi and Churrasquerias on offer further down the street.

Even the two pizza places I walk by, Fourth Man In The Fire and Queen Margherita Pizza are discernibly their own shape and size and you can tell just by looking in the window at the diners how the styles of pizza being served differ. Fourth Man has the elevated steel platter in the middle of the table that connotes a vaguely 80’s shaped experience of nostalgia while QMP is wood-fired Neapolitan. I catch a whiff of that smoke on the wind taking a picture of the exterior of The Six.

It’s not like I haven’t been before. I popped in in the first six months and tried everything on tap, but it didn’t seem quite ready for prime time due to personnel changes. We’re now two years in and on brewer number three, Chris Tower, a Niagara College graduate with a lengthy culinary background.

For a Wednesday night in January, the place is actually fairly busy. The space, with its black and white tile and subdued lighting is inviting. Despite its size, the 10 BBL Criveller system that dominates the room tends to diminish in focus due to the television showing the Raptors. It’s something of a showpiece in a crowded room, and it must make for a difficult mash out on brew days. A mural on the back wall has a stylized Trinity-Bellwoods front and center. 

I’m tasting through a flight, and it’s apparent to me that the most successful beer on the menu is the Line 1 Lager. It’s a straightforward Helles Lager with a Hallertau spiciness and that hint of lime that comes through on the finish. There are apple skin esters and a touch of sulfate with yellow flowers and field grasses. Chris says it gets six weeks of lagering time, and that’s reflected in the glass. It’s their bestseller and rightly so.

Village Kiss Gose is a Margarita inspired kiwi lime sour. The acidity is there for certain, but the lime is coming through ever so slightly confected, a little like Rose’s Lime Cordial, making it a little like a gimlet although the kiwi and salt have faded out. This was a half batch, brewed in the early summer. It is similarly on its last keg.

More successful are the 777 Pale Ale (they’re at 777 Dundas West), which is a Simcoe single hop that develops a large amount of bitterness and a powdery mango pine character, and the Streetcar Delay IPA (Cascade, Simcoe and Columbus) which has a brighter orange peel hop character through the mid palate. It has some similarity as the Simcoe continues to make up the bulk of the bittering. The fellow next to me likes it. He orders a Double Jameson and an IPA to chase it. 

At the bar, I’m doing back of the envelope math. 5 barrels is 600 litres. 1200 pints. The Gose has been on for seven months. It’s presumably available in the bottle shop as well. It’s not exactly rushing out the door. The Porter is an older batch still, coming up on a year. The White Squirrel Wit, which has been their most successful beer outside of Line 1, seems to have a following but is not on tap currently for reasons of seasonality. 

The Six has problems. 

For one thing, the bottle shop is in the basement and out of view. In order to get to it, you’d have to go down a flight of stairs, and you’d also have to know it was there. There’s a neon sign saying “Beer To Go” in the window, but looking in the window you might think the sign was mistaken. If it were me, I’d attempt to rectify that ASAP. You’d vastly increase foot traffic just with visibility. 

If I’ve learned one thing interviewing old school brewers, it’s that the benefit of the brewpub model is that you have total control over the perception and service of your product. Consider Bellwoods, for a moment. Their reputation was built on the Ossington location, and being in the same neighbourhood, The Six is in direct competition. You can’t compete for custom against Bellwoods with a seven month old Gose. They should knock that beer on the head and brew something a little exciting or at least fresh. Sacrifice a couple of kegs for the ability to talk up new product online and get people through the door. 

Partially, though, thinking back to the restaurants I passed on the way in, there’s an identity problem at play. The question I’m asking myself sitting at the bar is, “what do they have that no one else has?” Neither food nor drink menu gives me a sense of a driving personality or a vision of what they want the place to be. It feels like a template for a brewpub, but I think there’s potential. There’s Arancini and Spaghetti Bolognese and Seafood Risotto on the menu, and I’m thinking that might be a direction to lean in. 

In the cellar, there are six fermenters and four service tanks. The service tanks would be ideal for Tankovna style Pilsner, and given the current trend for lagers, an onsite only Pilsner with a little service gimmick could be a draw. The geometry of the service tanks would be perfect for light farmhouse ales as well. Chris Tower has a small homebrew system he’s piloting batches on, and a batch of Milk Stout stands ready in carboys. The Stout being poured on Nitro is the best thing on tap, partially because it’s fresh, but partially because it’s characterful. It’s high in bitterness, and it comes across roasty and dry and moreish. 

From a corny keg in the walk-in appears a Blackberry Hibiscus Brett Farmhouse Ale. It’s the best thing I’ll drink all day. It’s nuanced and the progression of flavour flows through sweet and floral down to tart blackberry juice and the blackberry seeds muddle with the barnyard funk of a Berliner Weisse isolate Chris has sourced somewhere online, potentially Milk The Funk. In a city with a trend for funky kettle souring and fruit, I’d put it way above average.

I’m sure there are things I’m not quite managing to understand here, but I’m put in mind of something my dad used to say. “You don’t live in Toronto, you live in a neighbourhood in Toronto.” You can’t be all things to everyone. I think, just to reflect the neighbourhood they’re in, more personality would be better. They’re surrounded by quirky, interesting restaurants whose menus drip in meaning and cultural subtext. The Six is the odd man out.