Visiting Valley Brewpubs

Last weekend we made a very brief but leisurely trip to Wolfville and Port Williams to conduct some research. Essentially this meant visiting the farmers market to meet wine and cider reps, hitting a yard sale where we found some great old light fixtures, and, of course, visiting some of the valley's great little pubs! This is, of course, the really pleasurable side of our business preparations (in case you're getting too jealous, I'll assure you that the week that followed was far less enviable, consisting of endless phone calls and e-mailing to alcohol and gaming officials, banks, liquor commission reps, lawyers, and architects, bugging suppliers for specs, dragging electricians through buildings and floor plans, and a particularly labyrinthine internet search for wheelchair accessibility dimensions, etc., etc., ad nauseum). 

Paddy's coffin-box beer dispenser unit.

Beer research is serious business.

Barley Sandwiches for everyone!

Sorry we've been so long between posts. I can assure you that it's not because nothing has been happening! We've been taking in some of the local political action, applying for some start-up programs that could be a big help in getting things up and running, welcoming back Seabright Garden's Susie and Will, and working on our research (which happily can include things like trying new beers and perfecting recipes for soda bread and ratios of cheese to pickles, etc, in addition to the number crunching, data collecting, and cold-calling).

!!!Big Announcement!!!
We're very pleased to be able to give you a (very) ballpark estimate of when the Townhouse will be up and running!!! If things go more or less as planned, we hope to be serving you great beer and great local food by the new year! I know it isn't as soon as some might like (including us!), but we think it's better to take our time and get it right!

This post is all about beer...

Craft brewing in the Maritimes
Over the past 6 months or so we've been having discussions about our plans and the local industry with the owners and brewmasters of Propeller and Granite breweries in Halifax, Picaroons in Fredericton, and Mill St. Brewing in Toronto. They have all been very encouraging! Like the UK, US, and Western Canada before us, the Maritimes are experiencing our own craft brewing renaissance. In fact, it's been suggested that the numbers of breweries in the US now exceeds pre-prohibition numbers. This is incredible! Before prohibition, each town or region might have had it's own beer brewers, but after prohibition the big guys took over (as they did here in Canada). The numbers of producers dwindled to just a few centralized mega-breweries. In 1983, the US had a total of only 80 breweries across the entire country, and 92% of these were owned by the top 6 brewing companies (including Budweiser, Miller, Coors, and Pabst). In 2010, the US brewing industry had 1'753 breweries, the highest number since the late 1800s!

A capital idea?

Hello and happy spring!

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to respond to our questions. We have had lots of messages and comments about the menu and service issue. We really, really appreciate it! Your feedback is really helping us make decisions, and tailor the pub to our community. Overall, people seem to be up for ordering at the counter, as long as it is clearly communicated. One great suggestion we've had for a better counter service model was to have menu/ordering forms on each table that can just be checked off with the order and brought to the counter, all filled out.

A Tentative Menu and the Service Question

We'll get to the service issue shortly, and yes, this is my little sister, and no, I can't take credit for this, her friend John in Ireland made it. But first, the menu!

So, I've spent the past month or so whittling down our menu and painstakingly pricing out each recipe. And now I'd like to hear from you. I'm hoping that we've come up with tasty snacks and dishes that will appeal to Antigonishers and our visitors, reflect our regional bounty and character, and be interesting and delicious without derailing your attempts to eat well–asolutely no nasty preservatives or additives or excessive grease to worry about! I've built it around foods that are readily available in our area, and the vegetables that have the longest growing seasons or that keep well for most of the year. We'll be changing it up and adding new things fairly regularly to reflect what's in season, and keep things interesting, but this will be the core of the menu.

The Farm-to-Pub model in action!

I'm really looking forward to volunteering at the ACORN Conference again, this year it's being held at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in Fredericton, March 10-12. 


As I've mentioned in past posts, it's a pretty amazing weekend for anyone interested in growing food on any scale. I'm especially looking forward to hearing Chef Vergen's keynote talk at the organic Banquet on Friday (March 11th, just over 2 weeks away!). As Executive Chef of the Saint John Ale House and a farmer in one of Quispamsis, New Brunswick’s last standing farms, he's a Maritime pioneer of the farm-to-table food model. Trained in classical French cooking, and seasoned with years of experience in fancy restaurants in BC, Quebec, and Paris, he returned to New Brunswick to get back to basics.


 “I grew up in a little log cabin in the woods. It was the 1970s and my folks were back to the land-ers.” That’s where chef Vergen’s love affair — we might even go so far as to call it obsession — with the freshest of fresh ingredients, began.

For more on Chef Vergen's farm to pub perspective, check out this article. Or this one.

 ACORN will also be holding an organic community day on Saturday, and I'd encourage anyone who can be in Fredericton and is interested in organic food, to attend. There's a special pass for all 6 community day workshops for only $25, which include home canning and sprouting, GMOs, seed saving, and growing apples, plus our Seedy Saturday seed-swapping/sale event (a great success last year in PEI!), and entrance to the Trade Show. This is a great place to get organic, open-pollinated seeds for the spring, find out about new varieties of veggies, neat tools, and lots of advice, information, and new ideas.


The banquet, happening Friday night, is in it's 11th year and it always sells out. This year's mouth watering menu, featuring food sourced entirely from Maritime organic farmers: 

Potato-Garlic Soup (potatoes from Five Tier Farm and  garlic from Hope Seeds)
Beef Roast (1784 Slipp Farms Ltd) with gravy
Vegetable-Barley Pilaf
Herb Roasted Potatoes  (Five Tier Farm)
Tuscan Risotto with Squash (TapRoot Farms)
Carrots and Turnip (Red Soil Organics)
Coleslaw (Red Soil Organics)
Blueberry (Gerry Gallant) & Cranberry (Springbrook Cranberries) Crisp with whipped cream

Tickets are $30/each. Everyone is welcome to attend! 1-866-322-2676 or click here to download a full Conference registration form (Banquet registration included).

Cheers!

Time, gentlemen

Some of you may have heard Ann Wroe, obituaries editor for The Economist, interviewed on the CBC about her eloquent "elegy for the English pub." The old fashioned English pubs,  icons of Englishness itself, are shutting their doors at an alarming rate of 50 a day, or 6000 in the last 5 years! Some friends had dropped off a copy of the magazine a while back, and I'd meant to post something on it, but had forgotten until I heard her on the radio last night. When a pub dies, Wroe writes, much more dies with it. Here are a few excerpts that get at how a good pub serves its community, and a link to the full article at the bottom.

The church can go, long since the preserve of a flower-arranging few; the local shop can go, since the distant hypermarket’s cheapness is worth the petrol; but the vanishing of a pub means, by common consent, the loss of the beating heart of a community, in town or countryside. A pub can become a sort of encapsulation of place, containing some small turning’s grainy photographs, its dog-eared posters for last year’s fete, its snoozing cats, its prettiest girls behind the bar and its strangest characters in front of it. The Square & Compass at Worth Matravers in Dorset, on the Jurassic Coast, has accumulated so many fossils brought in by punters that it has its own little museum. Most longstanding pubs have a fossil equivalent, and not merely on the human side: cases of moths, dusty farm implements or, at the Widow’s Son in Bromley-by-Bow, a hanging bundle of blackened hot-cross buns to which, every Good Friday for 150 years, another has been added.

Inspiring Interiors

Well, we've been doing a lot of thinking about how to get the atmosphere of the pub right. Terry spent a fair bit of time in the Mt.A sculpture studio last year trying out designs, crafting settles and benches (a lovely deep green one sits in our mud room now), small tables, and wall paneling samples. Obviously much will depend on the character of the space we end up with, but the we're leaning toward an interior dominated by dark wood, cozy benches, odd nooks and crannies and maybe a dart-board or two all constructed with our very own hands to give it that real home made feel.