Open That Bottle

...with Greg Zeschuk

BY LINDA GARSON PHOTO BY DONG KIM

hen Greg Zeschuk was a

little boy growing up in Edmonton, he wanted to be a doctor. He went to university and spent eight years training, before graduating in 1992.

After medical school Zeschuk spent a year in Ohio, and while a doctor, he became an entrepreneur. Returning to Edmonton, he started video game company, BioWare, making story-based and role-playing games, with a vision that if it wasn't successful, he would return to being a doctor. “No one likes a creative doctor,” he laughs. “You're supposed to follow the rules, but I started a company with a couple of colleagues, and it ended up being successful.”

They worked on Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars games, and with Microsoft on a variety of titles. Eventually they created their own popular games, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and in 2012, were bought out.

With the games, Zeschuk had spent a lot of time in Texas, which was having a craft beer boom, and he started a YouTube channel, The Beer Diaries. It was a long-format show, and he’d interview beer entrepreneurs. “It was almost an educational show about the brewing business and beer-making, so I got a miniMBA from these,” he says.

“10 years ago, I retired from video games, then got into the beer and brewing side. That was my new hobby and I wanted to start a brewery.” He’d been fortunate to travel all over the world. “In Denver, they have these really neat little breweries in neighbourhoods, just small gathering places where people get together. I thought that was really cool. I came home saying, ‘okay, I want to do that.’”

At that time, however, Alberta didn’t allow breweries in neighbourhoods. “The city of Edmonton said you can't do that, but what you can do is make a restaurant, and then you can stick your brewery in your restaurant. The zoning is for only one use, so it's a restaurant that happens to have a brewery in it,” he explains. “So that's how Biera came about, which is funny because I wanted to have food, and I met Christine (Sandford, Biera’s Executive Chef) who was working at Acme Meat here in Edmonton, and she had a vision for a small neighbourhood restaurant as well.”

“It was confusing for customers because they would show up at the brewery and discover it's a nice restaurant, and they would get mad at us that it was not your typical brewery tap room saying, you're being pretentious and too fancy.”

Blind Enthusiasm is not a typical brewery. “It's not meant to be,” Zeschuk says. “It's for mixed barrels – it’s more like a winery.” Four years ago the law changed, and they could build the new Monolith, for the barrels and a tap room. “We've brewed for three and a half years, and my brewer worked at Cantillon, so we use a very similar method where we put the beer into barrels to ferment for three years. We

W

couldn't open the taproom in the first few years because there was no beer. We just started releasing beer, and waited to open until the beer literally started flowing.”

What bottle does Zeschuk have squirrelled away?

“It's actually the first Cantillon I ever bought, the Grand Cru Bruocsella,” says Zeschuk. “I knew what these beers were, but I’d never bought one, so I went to Sherbrooke Liquor and bought a bunch of different Cantillons.” In 2008, Cantillons were $27, and Zeschuk knew they’d be worth it (now, they retail for over $50).

Grand Cru Bruocsella is a still, lambic beer aged three years in oak barrels. “I would say it’s the most esoteric beer they make,” he adds. “It’ll last for decades; they just get more oxidized notes and leather notes. We're starting to make these still beers, it’s a very small part of our production, but it would be fun to try alongside some of the stuff we're making.”

Zeschuk describes himself as a ‘taste explorer’, trying new beers whenever he travels. “It's funny that I bought it in Edmonton - we have to think how fortunate we are in Alberta. Because of the flexibility of the importing scheme, we have everything from everywhere.”