If you approach on foot from Dohme Ave, the aroma outside the Muddy York Brewing Company is actually that of baking cookies. Located in the same neighbourhood as O’Connor Bowl and the Peek Freans factory (and perhaps more importantly the factory outlet store for those of you interested in attaining peak levels of Freen), Muddy York is tucked away amongst low rise industrial buildings and transport trailers on Cranfield Road.

The single floor building housing Jeff Manol’s brewery is not purpose built. It’s actually in the back of a Tool and Die shop from that period of East York’s postwar boom, a detail visible in the shape of the cabinetry and the hanging of the doors throughout the building. That sage parental advice that you should have something to fall back on has been taken seriously and the brewery, if we’re to take the square footage it occupies as an indicator, seems to be a subset of the other business. In several places, hard worn sets of calipers line the wall in ascending order of size.

There is a cobbled together sense about the place. The retail area could easily double as the cover of a late 1960’s folk album. The press back chair and battered steel refrigerator might as well be from the Basement Tapes.

To name a brewery after the early portion of Toronto’s history is not a choice to be taken lightly. For one thing, you’ve got people like me roaming around to point out inauthenticity. The flagship beer for Muddy York is their Porter, a style which did not really exist here until Muddy York was Toronto (William Helliwell toured the Barclay Perkins brewery in Southwark in 1832 but didn’t start brewing Porter until much later.) It’s silly to take them to task for that because any historical beer is a pastiche at best. You can’t step in the same river twice.

What you can do is borrow sensibly from the past; you can be aware of it. There’s a tendency to chase trends in new breweries that is ultimately self-defeating. There will always be a newer hop variety and there are always recently pioneered techniques to borrow. It’s important to view those elements as additions to an already existing set of equipment and knowledge than as replacements for old iron. With each additional element the permutative possibilities of creation increase. In the short term, the novel tends to exhaust itself.    

Muddy York seems to have taken a top down view, preferring to select from the entire palette of options for their beer. It reaches the point where it’s difficult to tell what the influence might be for their Unearthed Amber Ale. Do the two varieties of Crystal malt suggest the bones of an English ESB and how do you reconcile that with the American C-hop character? While there is some of the fruitiness of an English style, there’s also the citric and coniferous zest of an American style. Despite that, the balance lets the grain character come through and the dry finish prevents the Crystal from cloying.

Their Diving Horse Pale Ale is similarly an exercise in negotiation between old and new. There are any number of Pale Ales and IPAs brewed in Ontario with the hops that Muddy York is using here. Nelson Sauvin, Simcoe, Chinook and Cascade are all in fairly common use. The late hopping technique employed here is also making its way around. The clever part about Diving Horse is the decision to use only UK Pearl malt. It allows for a more substantial, bready background to illuminate the gentle citrus and tropical notes in the aroma without overbalancing. The contrast adds complexity to what could be a fairly dull experience.

The Muddy York Porter does something that I’ve never seen before. Typically, when you think of a London Style Porter there’s chocolate and roast and a little bit of smoky acridity; it has that. In the historic versions Porter was aged significantly and soured somewhat, a nicety that modern versions don’t really attempt to emulate. Muddy York has cleverly included wheat and chocolate wheat in the grist for the beer which results in that slightly wheaty tang that gives it a touch of verisimilitude. The brown malt adds body but the entire issue is somehow less cthonic than you might expect from the name. It has ruby highlights in the sun.

The brewery itself is relatively small. With three fermenting vessels, it seems unlikely to me that Muddy York is going to take the world by storm in the immediate future. I visited them on Canada Day during the first few hours their bottle shop had been open for business. At the beginning of the third hour they were out of everything but Porter. It may be a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. I admire the gumption it takes to establish a bricks and mortar property when the more usual solution is to hire a brewer and hire a brewery on the way to considering a property eventually. It’s a slower and more gradual process, but there’s something to be said for graft and for complexity.