Starting a Brewery, Part 4: Announcing Halo Brewery’s Location
Welcome back. If you’re new here, be sure to check out the first three parts of this series to catch up on our journey to open Halo Brewery in Toronto.
This announcement has been a long time coming, so I’ll just cut to the chase: We’re incredibly excited to announce that Halo Brewery will be opening Spring 2016 at 247 Wallace Ave on the border of the Junction Triangle and Wallace-Emerson neighbourhoods in Toronto.
We went through negotiations on 5 different properties over 11 months, and looked at dozens more. All of those fell through for various reasons, some of which I touched on in Part 3. Frankly, we felt pretty defeated and were starting to wonder if Halo would ever get off the ground.
We first saw this property on Wallace Ave back in early August and very quickly fell in love with the neighbourhood. Although we put in an offer pretty quickly thereafter, we only finalized the lease and got the keys a few weeks ago. As it turns out, commercial leases are very time consuming processes with a lot of due diligence and paperwork (who knew?!). Suffice to say Callum and I celebrated by cracking open the many, many special beers we had been saving for the occasion.
In the end, we are thrilled to find this space in such a great community. Last weekend, we were in the building getting it ready for construction by papering with windows with pages from our brew log (have fun, homebrewers!) and icons that represent some of the beers we’ll have available on tap and in bottles.
In the little time we’ve had in our space so far, we’ve been energized to see so many people walking and cycling by who are curious about what’s going to happen with it.
The Junction Triangle, which gets its name from the railroad tracks that form a triangle around it, is a neighbourhood that is still in the midst of a transition. Once a heavy industrial manufacturing hub, there has been a recent renaissance of artist workshops, film studios, a major video game development studio (Ubisoft), and a lot of new residential developments. It includes a stretch of Dupont St just north of us which has quickly become a hot spot of new restaurant openings, and we’re just off the West Toronto Railpath cycling and pedestrian trail. It’s truly thrilling to be a part of a community of makers.
Halo Brewery in a nutshell
So what exactly is Halo going to look like?
Our equipment is currently being custom-built by a great Canadian manufacturer, Specific Mechanical, in Victoria, BC. If all goes according to plan we’ll have that delivered in February. Our brewhouse will be capable of producing 7 bbl (US barrels) or 8.2 hectolitres of wort (sugary malt water) per brew. Specific Mechanical has been patient and generous in accommodating a lot of the small modifications we’ve requested to their off-the-shelf systems. We think these little tweaks will help us make our unique beers to our exact specifications.
We also have four 14 bbl / 16.2 hL fermenters that are being custom designed to accommodate the limited floor space we have. We’re lucky to have high ceilings in the building so we’re making the most of that. We will also have two brite beer / conditioning tanks of the same capacity. These tanks are the beer’s last stop before being put into kegs or bottles. All this to say our annual production isn’t going to be massive, but we’re hoping it’ll be large enough to grow into for a while.
What else have we been up to?
As we’ve learned, there’s a never-ending list of things to do to open a brewery. These past few months, our days have mostly been consumed by interacting with lawyers, accountants and bankers related to the commercial lease agreement (who knew these were infinitely more complex than apartment leases?!), general corporation paperwork and housekeeping, and getting our finances in order.
Of course, the paperwork doesn’t end there. That would be too easy! We’ve been going through all the steps and forms required for our manufacturers license, liquor license, and retail store license from the Province. There’s also a bunch of unique tax obligations that breweries have like Excise Tax to the Federal government (so we need a license for that), and we need tax accounts to pay Ontario beer tax. Are you still with me here…? This is riveting stuff.
Meanwhile we’ve been working with our architect and general contractor to put the finishing touches on our floor plans for our building permits with the city. Soon enough, we’ll be starting construction in the space with all the structural work that is required to support a brewery — installation of sloped concrete floors and floor drains, utility hookups, glycol (chilling) lines for the tanks, etc.
We’re also working on a new website that will launch closer to opening. Remember that promise about being the first open-source brewery in Canada? The new site will take our first big steps forward on that. Stay tuned.
There’s a lot of work ahead of us but we’ll try to share more frequent updates with you now that we’re underway. You can always stay in touch on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. We can’t wait for you to try our beer.
