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This month, an old garage on Ossington will transform into a shiny new microbrewery and restaurant. Get acquainted with Bellwoods Brewery, where 14 different beers are currently fermenting.
BY: Crystal Luxmore
In a former auto-body shop and carwash, kitty-corner from the Golden Turtle on Ossington, Luke Pestl and Mike Clark are covered in paint and sawdust. They’ve been that way for seven months, ever since they leased the garage to build their dream microbrewery. Right now, the place is still a work in progress: In the right corner, a stainless-steel brewhouse gleams on a raised slab of reinforced concrete, the six tanks filled with about 14,000 pints of beer. Wood planks, paint cans, drill bits and loose tiles are scattered everywhere. But the pair hopes that by the end of the month, they’ll open the doors to Bellwoods Brewery.
The garage is perfect for a brewery. “The high ceilings allow us to stack storage tanks and have our fermenters as tall as possible,” says Clark, 37. The pair has ambitious plans for the space. Along with the brewery, they’ll add a 20-seat bar on the main floor and another 20 seats along a mezzanine. In the warmer months, the garage door will open up to a patio on Ossington. Clark and Pestl, 30, also negotiated a lease for the garage next door, where they’ll be able to barrel-age beer. Then there’s the wholesale side of the business. Oh, and a restaurant, too.
For that, they’re handing off the menu to Pestl’s good friend Guy Rawlings, formerly of Brockton General, who is designing simple, picnic-style fare with Bellwoods’ brews front-of-mind. He won’t just be braising meats in beer—he also envisions making grits with the malts, puffing toasted wheat and turning suds into malt vinegars. Rawlings will stay on for four months or so, then guest chefs will take over the restaurant for a few months or more.
Bellwoods Brewery’s business plan is set, but the beer is a little more flexible. The pair refuses to nail down a regular lineup of brews; instead, they have 14 beers fermenting and plan to see what people like best. That kind of flexibility might have something to do with the circuitous path both men took to get here. Pestl was mid-way through an engineering postgraduate program at U of T before he dropped out five years ago to take a full-time gig with Amsterdam Brewery. And Clark also turned his back on post-grad work in biochemistry, quitting a job at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to bartend and pursue music, before he discovered brewing. “It’s a good synergy between art, science and engineering,” he says.
They’ve spent the winter tweaking recipes for Belgian and North American beers on their pilot system in Pestl’s house. “But we’ve never used any of these yeasts on a large system, so there will be a bit of a learning curve,” Pestl says. “Actually, there’s a big learning curve.” That hasn’t deterred them one bit. Bellwoods Brewery has a pale ale, double IPA and a Baltic porter, among others, in the works now, and the guys have plans for much more. “We could conceivably do 20 or 30 different recipes on the big system and 50 to 100 pilot batches in one year,” says Clark with a smile. “Yeah,” adds Pestl, “you’re going to see a lot of different styles coming out of here.”
Bellwoods Brewery, 124 Ossington Ave. #OSS
info@bellwoodsbrewery.com, bellwoodsbrewery.com.
