The Art of Beer

The Art of Beer

Jonathan Downing (FH 76-80)

Beer is my life. The summer of 1976 saw the end of my first year as a Day Boy at Tonbridge and my first foray into home brewing with my dad, a PhD in micro biology and chemistry. Needless to say, a great teacher.

At the age of sixteen, my first job was as a cellarman and back stairs runner at the George and Dragon in Speldhurst. This was followed soon after by a move to Moscow and becoming a boarder for my last two years of school where, unfortunately brewing was frowned upon.

The city and University of Birmingham allowed me to renew my brewing endeavours, working in pubs and at proper breweries packaging during peak season. For the Live Aid festivities our house had 8 brews on the go, to keep us going all through the night.

After graduating and applying for jobs at various UK breweries, leaning towards the sales and marketing side to make use of my B.Comm, I had the chance to visit my sister in Canada for a couple of weeks. While in Toronto I heard of a brewing conference and thought it may be interesting to see what was happening in the Canadian industry.

'Sitting alone in a Pub' is a great way to start any story, let alone a career, but the first evening of the conference I was doing just that when some French Canadians who owned the Atlas Hotel, a bar and hotel complex in Welland asked if they could join me. They were also attending the conference and had purchased some equipment that day with the goal to be the first brewpub to open in the province of Ontario. They were keen to learn about English beers and brewing and as luck would have it, they also needed a brewer to help them get started. An invitation to visit their property led to an employment offer to help them start the brewery.

Approximately six months later, after applying to move to Canada and attending the United States Brewing Academy in Chicago for further education (and to see if they did anything radically different in North America), I moved to Ontario to design, build and open the Atlas Hotel Brew Pub, license number BPL 001 - one of the first ten brewpubs in North America since prohibition.

One brewery opening led to another. In a nascent industry you are in high demand if you have the skills and are prepared to work anywhere, such that within my first five years in Canada I had helped open or worked for about twenty brewery startups across Canada and the USA.

I set up my own consulting Company in 1994 with the career goal of opening one hundred breweries, a goal reached by 2006 in a rapidly growing, worldwide industry. Along the way I was lucky to get a contract with the US military to build fourteen breweries on bases in the US, Japan and Korea culminating in a brewery at Pearl Harbor for the Pacific Fleet. 'Work' also took me to Cyprus, the Caribbean, and made me the first North American allowed into the city of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro, Ukraine ) after the Soviet era.

I got married in the summer of 2006, had hit my business goal of one hundred breweries, trained about four hundred brewery staff, designed well over three thousand beers, won a long list of awards and still loved my job. But not the travelling so much.

An endeavour for the next phase of my life was to have people come to me, and aided by my accountant who knew the right people, to approach Niagara College to facilitate this. The idea was to start a course or class there teaching people about craft beer and brewing. The college already had a successful culinary program and had started a Teaching Winery to support the local industry in the Niagara region.

At the time, there were about fifty breweries in Ontario but the industry was showing signs of another growth period, therefore already in desperate need of trained, educated brewing staff. After consulting with the Ontario Craft Brewers Association and other beer industry experts they agreed with me and the new adventure began.

Creating a college course that had never existed in the world was educational, challenging, and a lot of fun, especially when working with the dedicated professionals at Niagara College. Having the opportunity to design and build the world’s first teaching brewery, which as a learning enterprise is also a commercial craft brewery, is the most rewarding thing I have done thus far.

In 2010, we welcomed our first intake of students and have grown as rapidly as the craft brewing industry has in the years since. We earned the commendation as the best college programme in Canada along with numerous other awards. Currently, we have seventy eight students on campus, from the starting point of twenty four in 2010. I am told we still have maintained a 100% graduate placement in jobs, unique among all programmes in Canada.

We just graduated our 250 th student, and are now a year-round programme with a semester added in the summer, due to the demand for our graduates who come from across the world to attend. The industry in Ontario has grown to nearly three hundred breweries, but our graduates go far and wide; working in, managing and roughly 10% owning their own companies, to date.

There are over three hundred applicants for each of the three class intakes annually, with eighteen to twenty students in each class, it seems that I will happily be here for a while.

If you happen to be in Ontario, and in particular the Toronto area, I invite you to come and visit the Glendale Campus of Niagara College where a Teaching Distillery was just added. Within minutes of us are over one hundred breweries, wineries, distilleries, and of course the magnificent Niagara Falls.

Jonathan's 'Go To' Brews

My usual 'go to' is whatever my students are brewing for class projects. They are always creative, innovative and above all well made. There are some classic examples of beers I always look forward to and are my ‘go to’ when I can get them; Wadworth’s '6X' is the finest example of an English real ale when served from the cask and even in cans and bottles is not bad. Other beers in this category would be Sierra Nevada Pale ale, Guinness and Weihenstephan's 'Hefe Weissbier'.

'Juicin' Sawdust City 6.0% vol

Local beers are really the best though; fresh, unique, often brewed using local ingredients and seasonally available. Oast Brewers 'Pitchfork Porter' is a standard but their use of local apricots, chestnuts, strawberries and other produce from Niagara make their portfolio of brews really stand out. Brimstone and Bench breweries also have excellent local themed brews. A little further away in Gravenhurst Ontario and enjoying a newer style of beer, I enjoy drinking ‘Juicin’, a hoppy, hazy seasonal IPA from Sawdust City.

Sour Varieties, Mikkeller

But generally, my order will be whatever I find on a particular day with friends at any brewery or brewpub; it could be a Pilsner from Steam Whistle when I'm in downtown Toronto, a sour from Mikkeller in Baghaven, a '10W30' from Neustadt in Ontario, or a 'Snake Head' from Mundo Maya in Playa del Carmen. The style or brand is usually not important, the company I am with and the taste and quality of the beer make that one my current favourite.