WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THREE BEER LOVERS FROM DIFFERENT MARKETING AGENCY BACKGROUNDS COME TOGETHER TO OPEN A BREWERY DESIGNED TO SATIATE THE CURIOUS PALETTE AND MIND? YOU GET SOMETHING IN THE WATER BREWING CO. AND SINCE OPENING ITS DOORS IN MAY 2022, THE BREWERY AND BAR CONCEPT IS ALREADY A HIT WITH THE GREAT AND THE GOODOF TORONTO’S LIBERTY VILLAGE.
“Be different. If you want to be successful and you want your customers to remember you, you have to be different.”
To practice what you preach is a healthy approach to anyone’s outlook on life. And for Steve Waugh, Rick Tanton and Mike Lee, it’s the very advice they’d give their clients back in the wonderful world of marketing.
And now, as brewery owners themselves, they’re heeding those same pearls of wisdom. In doing so, the patrons of Toronto’s Something In The Water are en-joying that desire to be different, manifested in the beautiful beverages the team are producing and serving in the city’s Liberty Village neighbourhood.
“We consider ourselves more of a cafe, than a ‘traditional’ brewery,” says Waugh. “When we talk about Something In The Water, we think of a place where you come together over great conversation and a great couple of beers before moving on.
“But when it comes to those drinks, we’re consider ourselves in the curious beverage business. We produce curious beverages for curious people.”
While the brewery’s bricks and mortar business opened for business from 151 East Liberty Street in May of this year, the story of Something In The Water can be traced back to late 2019.
Starting out as a contract brewing operation, the trio had identified the growth trajectory of sour beers, especially in the US. “We loved these beers, we could see the sector gaining traction, and went about developing our first beer in that style,” he adds.
That would take the form of Lee River Blackberry Vanilla. A 4.9% kettle sour, it showcases blackberry purée from Oregon before fermentation and then again after primary fermentation. The beer is then finished with Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Pods before transferring for packaging.
“Our intention was to launch the beer in bars and restaurants, and hopefully gain an LCBO listing,” recalls Waugh. “But that was in March of 2020, so the business plan predictably blew up when COVID hit.”
The team would still go on to secure that all-important listing in the LCBO. And they knew they would eventually want a bricks and mortar operation of their own, but that was something six, seven, eight years down the line. However, things change…
Working with an industry veteran, they would dig into readily-available LCBO data. “It was a strategic vision type of approach,” he says. “And once we really drilled into that, it become evident that making a long-term contract brewing business that focused solely on sour beers was not going to be viable.”
Waugh explains: “We needed to expand our product focus from purely sour beers to a broader remit of curious beers. It would open more doors, so that’s what we did!”Waugh’s business partner Rick Tanton adds: “While we’ve been professional brand builders in our previous careers, and unless you have unlimited money, building a contract beer brand is incredibly difficult.
“Not having a sense of place, not having something tangible that you can touch and feel makes it incredibly challenging in a saturated industry like craft beer to build a brand effectively. While it can be done, it’s very hard.
And one formative afternoon last sum-mer would change the course of the brewery’s route map for good. “I vividly remember driving down Queen West, which is a really hip part of Toronto. And it was just a sea of ‘For Lease’ signs everywhere,” Waugh recalls. “I had an epiphany moment. Maybe now is actually the best time to build a brewery because everything is closed anyway. That, and it probably was one of the only times when a tenant might have some negotiating power with the landlord.”
He adds: “The Greater Toronto Area re-mains such a popular part of Canada. We knew this was the moment to be opportunistic and go for it. The stars aligned and we would soon find our location.”
And that location would fall in Liberty Village, somewhere Waugh describes as “a city within a city”.
“There’s more than 30,000 people who live in Liberty Village, and that’s within a one kilometre radius of the brewery. It’s largely young professionals who work in down-town Toronto,” he explains.
“It’s a fresh place with a positive energy and very much in-tune with a younger demographic. So while people like Rick and I adore the English pub aesthetic, we felt that wouldn’t be the right fit for our own bar, especially one in this part of town.”
Destination Toronto describes Liberty Village as “heady with Gen Z and millennial energy, it has a youthful, cam-pus-meets-condo vibe.” And following the site fit-out, Something In The Water would join that party in Liberty Village. To produce their beers, they landed on a 2,600sqft operation that houses a 10HL, two-vessel brewhouse, backed up by three 20HL FVs and a brite tank.
“Building a brewery in the bottom of a tower here in Toronto has proven difficult,” smiles Tanton. “So some interesting deci-sions were made, such as our chiller being located in the parking garage rather than the roof, which is some twenty levels up. But we have everything pretty much dialledin now, and we’re really happy with how everything works.”
Prior to co-founding Something In The Water, Tanton worked in marketing for major beer brands such as Heineken, Molson Coors and Miller. While he didn’t have a professional brewing background prior to the new business, one of his first beers can al-ready be called an award-winner.
Pancake Bay Sweet Brunch Stout combines five kinds of malts with flaked oats to create a full-bodied stout, then add milk sugar is added for sweetness. As the brew cools, it is steeped in locally-roasted freshly ground coffee and finished with Canadian maple syrup. And named after the soft sandy stretch on Lake Superior’s eastern shore, Pancake Bay was awarded the second-best sweet stout on the planet at the World Beer Awards.
Helping Tanton in operations is head brew-er Andrew DiMatteo, who joined from Whitby, Ontario-based Town Brewery and previously also worked at Collective Arts Brewing of Hamilton. “We have a modest team here but everyone that has joined us since starting out plays such an integral, important role,” says Waugh. “Everyone is playing their part.”
In addition to Pancake Bay Sweet Brunch Stout and Lee River Blackberry Vanilla, other beers include Great Lake Ontario Keto IPA, a generously-hopped session IPA that delivers strong notes of citrus and finishes dry. But the best part, it has only 3 grams of carbs and 110 calories per can.
There is also Avon, a 4.2% Golden Ale. A blend of four malts combined showcasing a single hop and an English ale yeast, it presents biscuits on first sip making way for the sweetness of melon.
These, along with Painted Lake Peach Crisp Berliner Weisse and Hazy Maitland IPA, are available as part of flights at the brewery’s cafe bar.
“Flights are important to us,” says Waugh. “Because without the brewery at the back, and the flights we can offer, we become a straightforward bar. Breweries are about exploration and discovery is a great thing, which is what a flight can enable you to do.
“Innovation and invention is in the DNA of breweries, and I think we’ve embraced that. I think every brewery is curious in its own right. And maybe, just maybe, what we’re doing differently is that we’ve put a word to it and wrote it all over our wall.”
While upcoming brews include a Peanut Butter & Jelly Milkshake beer, the team have also already got their distant sights set on the potential for future branches of Something In The Water.
Waugh explains: “Both Rick and I are data nerds. We have established Liberty Village with the idea of being one of many. So maybe it’s a prototype in that respect. We hope, and anticipate, there will be more to come. But, for now, they are uncharted waters – pun intended!”
Until then, though, the team are firmly focused on introducing residents and visitors to their part of Toronto to the world of weird and wonderful beers.
“We have a sign on our wall that says curious people drink curious beer. We love the notion of the curious is it speaks to a way of being,” says Waugh.
“It’s why so many of us want to go to local, independent shops rather than the chain stores.“It’s also why you go to farmers markets and museums because curiosity is an intoxicating thing.”
Tanton adds: “That’s why it has be-come the filter of everything that we do here. We believe the people that come through our doors are naturally curious. They want something new, something interesting. And hopefully we can meet those expectations.”
—
As featured in the Summer 2022 Edition of Brewers Journal Canada.