Making the world a better place by making beer
Published Saturday October 11th, 2008
Sean Dunbar is the owner of Northampton Brewing Company, Fredericton's only microbrewery.
He is fresh off a trip to Toronto where two of his company's products - Picaroons Best Bitter and Picaroons Man's Best Friend - took home Canadian Brewing Awards.
Dunbar sat down with reporter Chris Fox over, what else - a beer - and talked about running a microbrewery, going against the grain set by big beer companies, and coming up with new recipes.
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Q: What was the last movie you saw and the last concert you went to?
A: I don't really go to movies. It probably would have been one of the last Lord of the Rings movies with my wife because she wanted to see it. I haven't been to a theatre in probably five years. The last concert I went to was Sappy Fest in Sackville in August, which was three days of concerts. It was an indie music festival that had some of the most amazing, life-altering musical experiences that I have seen for a long time. It was fantastic.
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Q: Your brewery makes a lot of different types of beer. What is the process like when you decide you want to make a new one?
A: It's not really planned. Usually we have ideas in our head about what types of beer we want to make because we have read about styles before or tried beers elsewhere.
And then every once and a while we pull one of those ideas out of the big, huge pot that sits on the back burner and boil up all of our ideas. Then we do as much research as we possibly can and start to formulate the recipe and brew it.
Usually the first batch is pretty close to what we want and we just continue to tweak it as we go along.
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Q: How much beer does Picaroons produce in a week?
A: We brew four times a week, 1,500 litres per batch. That's all we can do with the size of our facilities.
Sometimes we feel restricted by that, but sometimes it's nice to not have to brew any more.
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Q: You hear a lot of talk about the rising cost of hops and its effect on beer production worldwide. Does this trend affect you guys a little more than the bigger companies?
A: Yeah, it totally does. Because of our size, we don't have much purchasing power or clout, and we don't have the ability to sign huge, long term contracts.
We are five people in a little brewery in New Brunswick, far removed from the sources of all of our supplies, so it is a constant challenge.
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Q: How do you cope?
A: We try to get smarter about our purchasing, we try to purchase in bigger amounts, we try to do some cooperative purchasing and we just look for efficiencies wherever we can find them in our actual purchasing....
We just want to be able to continue putting beer into a bottle at a price people can afford.
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Q: Is the role of the microbrewery an important one in today's world?
A: I think so. Beer is important, and the more locally it can be made and the more specialized it can be and the more different beers that are out there, the better the world is going to be. We motivate ourselves here by knowing that in some small way we are making the world a better place by making beer. Beer is enjoyable, beer is a good thing, beer has an important place in the social fabric of society.
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Q: So with that in mind, do you think beer gets a bad rap?
A: Yeah, I think it does. There is a stigma attached to alcohol in general, really. It's not entirely unfair, because we can't promote the abuse of alcohol, but what I really think is that more people should drink beer and they should just drink less of it.
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Q: What do you think of the big beer companies and their commercial fronts? Are they partly responsible for the stigma you are speaking of?
A: Yeah. The large breweries have screwed up beer's place. They have brought it down into the gutter and attached to it this stigma of drunkenness, of partying, and of misogynist males drinking too much beer and yelling "woo-hoo" all the time.
We are trying to prop beer back up..... We want to take this beverage, which has been around the world since recorded history, and say, "look, beer has more uses than this."
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Q: So how do you distance yourself from the big breweries?
A: We try to concentrate on the product. Obviously the products we do and the products that the multinationals do are hardly even the same product. It's like Wonder Bread and something you buy from one of the bakers at the market. Yeah, it's bread, but it's really not the same. We want to keep our products more and more specialized and make interesting products for people, and that is going to differentiate what we do and what the multinationals do.
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Q: Talking about some of the awards your brewery has won, I know you just came back from Toronto where you won two Canadian Brewing Awards. Are the accolades important?
A: I am basically an anti-awards person, especially when they have anything to do with the arts, and I consider what we do an artistic endeavor, and I think it is really hard to accept someone else putting their opinion on it.
However, it is really nice for everyone who works here to get a little outside recognition every once and a while.
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Q: What does the future hold for Picaroons?
A: This is the time of year we start to think about that. We are so darn busy from spring all through summer that we just think about making beer, but now we are sitting around and thinking about what we are going to do.
We want to continue making good beer, we want to do some real ale maybe, which is the traditional British style, and we have a couple more styles that we might want to explore, but frankly, I am a little bit burnt out as far as designing packaging, so I would kind of like to not do any brand new styles until at least the winter.
We also have to decide where or if we are going to export. We are under constant pressure to export, so we just have to decide how big we want our business to be.
Freelance reporter Chris Fox is a journalism student at St. Thomas University. Q&A appears each Saturday. Send comments to letters@dailygleaner.com.
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