Chris Conway, From Here to There

[Music] Well, hello there, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to you, youth Thursday bunch of beard drinkers, whenever and wherever you're tuning in from. Thanks for pressing play and supporting a Canadian podcast. I'm Troy Burch with Great Lakes, Ontario's local brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery based in its opical who brings you this here between two fermenters, the podcast where craft beer and conversation glide straight from the tanks to your ears. Today we're taking you all the way to Port Credit, Mrs. Agaport Credit, a stretch of lake front that feels like it's own little world, full of character, wonderful little shops and independent businesses, and a great community. And today that world includes one of Ontario's oldest craft breweries, Old Credit Brewing Co. Well, craft brewery has been around for over 30 years, which in craft beer terms mean that they've seen it all, the good, the bad and the ugly, but they push through and are still standing today. It started as a family business by the late Aldo Lista and his vibrant wife, Noreen, in 1994 and was built in the idea that a community needs great beer and done so with more meaning than that of the big brewers, understanding that community builds craft beer. They were doing craft thing before craft was cool and they've been quietly earning their stripes in Port Credit ever since. My guess today is Chris Conway, the general manager of Old Credit Brewery. Chris is one of those fascinating people who is more nearly every hat in the industry. He's not wearing one today, but in the industry. From co-founding Folly Brew Pub and leading its transformation from Habits Gastropub into one of Toronto's most distinctive farm hostile breweries in Ontario, to building Landwash brewery in Newfoundland into one of Atlantic Canada's most respected independent craft operations, to now guiding one of Ontario's oldest craft breweries through a thoughtful and exciting new chapter. Chris is a builder and an operator. Someone who understands the romanticism of craft beer, but also the hard math of making it work. And he's landed at exactly the kind of place where that blend of skills is needed most. He has breathed new life into old credit, updating packaging, creating new brands and establishing a very underrated tap room through what he calls thoughtful modernization. He also loves the history of Canadian beer and has developed a significant understanding of the past, making sure he honors legacy with each new decision he has to make. So today we're going to get into all of that. We're going to get into how Chris got a start in beer from Newfoundland to Folly, to Newfoundland again, and back here to Toronto. The Landwash story and what it takes to build a brewery from scratch in a market like Newfoundland. It drew a hymn to old credit and what he walked into when he arrived. That's going to be an interesting one. The history of old credit, 30 plus years, one family and a lot of beer. What modernizing a legacy brand actually looks like from the inside, the poor credit community and what it means to be a neighborhood brewery and what's ahead for old credit in 2026 and beyond. So grab something cold, maybe a fresh GLB, settle in and let's get into it. Hang tight, we'll be right back with Chris Conway from Old Credit Brewery. It's Great Lakes Brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery. We believe in supporting communities. Good times and brewing amazing beer. It's Great Lakes Brewery, order online for free local home delivery in the GTA. Good times and amazing beer. That's GLB. Chris Conway, welcome to Between Two From Enters. So grateful to be here. I love the name Chris Conway. It seems like we should be in a bush drinking beer together. We can do that. That's a good old name. For someone so close to the brewery into the studio, record this and it took a while to get you on, but that's my fault. I always ask you last minute, but we plan this one well in advance. So thanks for being here today. You always call it right before packaging around. And it's like the next day we're doing packaging and I'm like, I can't get away from this. And as a general manager, it's kind of odd to hear a general manager saying, I can't get away from packaging. I have to help with packaging, but we're going to get into that reason later on in the show and we talk a bit old credit in your role. But how are you doing today? Really, really good. Yeah. And how was the trip from the brewery? Just a quick Uber down the road. It's really, really quite close. I know. It's a lot of people when they say, like, like, a lucky, Mike Lackier, a brewing operations manager and I, when we came that one time to visit old credit, he's like, oh, how far away is him? Like, really you get on the highway and you're right there. Like, it's so close to Grey Lakes and we're going to talk about that underrated tap room because I think I could sit up in those old chairs that you guys have that old British style look for hours and drink, drink old credit, hell, us, but we're going to talk about that later. I got to do a congratulations. There's a beer in front of you. So pick up that beer, crack that open and we're going to cheers to you because you recently got married. So congratulations. Cheers. Thank you. Oh, nothing like a beer of first thing in the morning to celebrate someone getting married. So you're drinking sunny side session IPA. That's the beer of the month right now for Grey Lakes. It's going to be the beer of the summer. But now that we got that out of the way, you're ready to go. You're ready to dig in? Yeah, let's go. So I want to start before beer, before breweries. Who is Chris Conway? Were you drinking in the bush in Newfoundland? Where are you from and what were you doing before this industry got their hooks in you? So my name is Chris Conway. I come from St. John's, Newfoundland. I have been doing a lot of different things throughout my career. Like I started in engineering. I did an undergrad in electrical engineering at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Then I made the weird switch into history and the humanities. So kind of turning that engineering undergrad into a masters in philosophy and humanities at the University of Memorial University in Newfoundland again. And from there I started doing a PhD. So I moved up to Toronto originally to do my PhD in the history of technology at the University of Toronto. So I was here studying history before I really got too deep into this becoming my profession. Okay. And you moved here to do schooling at U of T. How'd you get over to, I guess, at the time Habits, Gastropub? So I mean, I've been, I've loved beer my entire life. I've always been like when I was a kid even before I was drinking like I'd used to go to the store. There was a store in Newfoundland called Antichrase and they used to have all the sodas in the back and I used to love the wall of sodas and I was the kid that was obsessed with trying every new soda, knowing what all those import weird British sodas were, all of that stuff. And so when I got into drinking age, I quickly kind of felt the same urge to try things, be encyclopedic, explore things in the liquor stores there. So I've always been really, really passionate about beer. My dad was always into beer as well. He always had the, you know, the three German loggers, the dab, the whole steam, the becks, the green bottle loggers. And I always wanted to kind of figure out what the difference between those were. And so there wasn't a whole lot of range in Newfoundland. I really tried everything there was. There's only a couple breweries at the time when I was getting, when I was of it turning of age. And I started home brewing down in Newfoundland because there just wasn't the beers I wanted to, wanted to try. When I moved up to Toronto and that's where kind of my pathway to the industry started, I was home brewing in Newfoundland because the beers I wanted weren't there. I, there was nothing happy. There were no Belgians. There were nothing, there was nothing really interesting either being imported or brewed there at the time that I really like wanted to explore. When I moved to Toronto, I thought Toronto was going to be like Montreal. It was really familiar with Montreal, but I'd never been to Toronto. And I was like, there's going to be a million brew pubs for me to explore. And this is 2010. And I was like, there's going to be a million, there's going to be a Duda CL, there's going to be a reservoir, there's going to be an Ameribwa. And I was like excited to hit them all. And when I got here, there wasn't. I was really kind of shocked that this is before Bellwoods, this is before Indy, this is before Junction did their first little spot up in the Junction. And I was kind of here and I was going to Volo and I was loving all the beers I could try, but I was looking for that kind of beer scene to happen here. And when those, when those brew pubs started to open, I just always was going to them. I must have been to Bellwoods like once a week for the first year they were open. I was just obsessed with trying all the new stuff. And I was still because I was doing a PhD. I had tons of kind of reading time. But during reading time you could be home brewing. And so I was home brewing nonstop. I was one year I did a brew a week at home. And I was just super obsessed with trying to find things that even couldn't be found here. So that led me to kind of more niche Belgian stuff. Fell in love with sazon's particularly. I'm always a big fan of fermentation characters. So exploring things like Brett and stuff like that that we don't think about that much anymore was really, really huge for me. So that's kind of how the pull into the industry was. I was doing my PhD and I had time to brew and I had time to visit places. And there an opportunity kind of came around to jump over to the industry and it kind of pulled me in that from there. Yeah. You said 2010 you came here, you're homeboring in the visiting the spots, I think Bowling's open in 2012, 2011, 2012, so we're doing it. 2011. Yeah. And 2015 to 2017, that's when Folly was around. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that chapter, the period between when Habits Castro pub, which was a bar in Toronto, turned into the Folly brew pub. Yeah. So I kind of got injured. I was going around a lot of different places, exploring a lot. I had some friends in the industry and I was and I was passionately home brewing and I wasn't really looking to get into the industry. I was kind of just looking for opportunities to brew a friend of mine at the time, Doug Allen. He was a Nickelbrook sales rep. He knew he knew Michelle and Louise who own Michelle getner Louise Martin's who owned it Habits, who owned Habits Castro pub and that was a fantastic restaurant. Great whiskey selection. Louise's food was always amazing and they were looking at, you know, they wanted, they were have had a great craft beer list and we're looking at like, what would it take for us to start brewing our own beer? What would it take for us to just have a house brand? And so Habits originally started as we bought a, we were looking at doing it on the smallest budget possible. So we bought a little, a little system. It was like a one barrel system, popped it in the kitchen, running on the natural gas. In the kitchen already, it's all, you know, standard three burners, easy stuff. And we bought one tank, one two heck tank that we put in the storage room in the back of the brewery, no temp control on it. So sazon's became a really, really good solution for that as well. And we decided just make one beer called Habits sazon. And that was, that was kind of the original plan was to just, but how did you get, did you ask them, hey, or they wanted this idea, Doug introduced you guys. Yeah. And then it became, well, he can brew the beer. So yeah, it kind of became like that. So Doug, Doug was talking to those guys and I had like, I was doing so much home brew, I was trying to give away beer, which happens in home brew circles. And so I would bring down, you know, different things that I had been brewing. I had just done a really fun sazon for India. How is used to have a home brew tap take over event. I had just done a really fun sazon that I was really, really proud of for that. And so I had been piloting out a whole bunch of sazon's around that time. And I was really just obsessed with that. So I started bringing in beers and kind of explaining how a sazon might be a really good fit for something that's crisp and drinkable kind of like a logger. But that has a little bit of distinction to it and kind of stands up a little differently. And so yeah, they kind of decided I'd come in and do a little bit of the brewing along with Christina Cody. And so we were, we were doing some original batches there, just very, very shoestring. It was supposed to be just like I was supposed to be committing my PhD. It wasn't going to be a career shift. It was, you know, one day a week, one day every two weeks we'd come in and do some work, make this beer. And that would be it from there. It kind of snowballed. We started seeing people respond really well to the sazon, really, really loving it. And then they kind of became the decision to let's invest in a few more tanks. Take this. There was like a dance floor area at the back of habits that wasn't always working as a dance floor because habits was really about, it was about food and conversation and people and trying to shoot horn live music in there wasn't always working. And so we retrofitted that area into a brewery, really small still like in the nano category. But we started brewing there full time around that time. And that's when you became like PhDs on the back burner now or? Yeah. So I mean, I had done, fortunately had done all my coursework. I just finished my comps and I was teaching a course, I was teaching the engineering history course to the engineering undergrad students at the time that I was doing that during the day. And then I was working on my dissertation and the dissertation was kind of stalling out. I wasn't finding the sources. I was hoping to have found to find the research and I was like, kind of to pivot topics or the beer industry seemed at the time to have a lot more jobs in the history industry. History industry is notoriously hard. So just thought, you know, maybe it's a good time to give this a shot and try it. And if I need to put the PhD on hold for a year and if I need to come back in a year, I'll give it a year. And if it works, I'll come back and stick with it. And if not, I'll jump back into the PhD. So obviously beers worked. So what did running Folly teach you about what you wanted to do? So once you decided I'm going to stick with the beer, what was it about it? It kept you there. What was it other than, you know, there might not be as many jobs out there for history, browsers. But it sounds like the industry got their hooks into you pretty good. And however many years, that's 10 plus years later, you're still in this game. So I mean, for me, the hospitality aspect of Folly was really important. Like this was a time when breweries tap rooms weren't really still becoming kind of new in Ontario. And Folly was a brew pub. And so you could actually meet people that were drinking the beer, talk to them, really interact with the consumer a lot more than you could if you were just a production package kind of shop. And the other side of it was the community. And that's really, I think, what really solidified me in it. At the time, this is like 2015 in Toronto, there was a lot of new breweries opening. Yeah, just like the emergence of the second wave of craft breweries in Ontario around that period. And so when Folly was open, we were talking to the guys before they were open, people would come in and we were talking to the guys from blood brothers from Erdogk. There was a brewery called Landsdown that was kicking around at the time. So there was rain hard, all of these guys in the west end of Toronto were all popping up around the same time. And it was just really exciting because, you know, you'd get to go to their facilities before they were open and see what brew house decisions they were making. See all the why they were setting it up like this. What's their philosophy? In the time when some of these breweries now we consider super essential Ontario craft breweries, we're still really just figuring out who they were, what they wanted to do, how they wanted to present themselves. And so it was really interesting creatively to talk to all these people that were just bubbling over with passion and hang out with them, have beers with them and think about what the possibility of a future craft beer could be. So that's for me, that community aspect was just so intoxicating that just I loved having beer with passion people and it was just too much fun. So I couldn't go back. And during that time too, I found this interesting when I was, you know, doing my, my crack research. But you're working for an online platform as like a volunteer called Drinkvine. There was quite large at the time. People really love that. So tell me about that part of your, your career. So that was slightly before Folly. I got in. Oh, it was before Folly. Before Folly. I got slightly. As I was saying, I was always obsessed with trying all the new things. And so when I first moved to Ontario, Drinkvine was this great website and you could add the beers you were looking for. You'd add the stores that were the LCBOs that were near you. And it would show you when new stock emerged. And this was really great if you wanted like the spring seasonal release when that dropped. That was your new beer for a whole like few months. And so I always wanted to figure out how can I get that immediately? Do I have to walk over to Young and Summer Hill? Let's go. I wasn't going to let it sit on the shelf for a day until I tried it. And so I started being having really using Drinkvine a whole lot. And I talked to Ralph Homes, who was the guy that founded Drinkvine. And he was looking for some people that would like curate the lists of like have a recommended list. Also have the spring seasonal list. And at the time, the LCBO was doing media tastings for those. And those were great fun because you know, they just let a bunch of nerdy beer writers in a room with a bunch of beer and say have have had it. Well, I can remember back in the day like 2008 to 2012. There was a lot of us in those rooms. You wouldn't think, but you know, what we would call an influencer today might be have a beer blog back then. And so we were all crowded in this room. And they just let you have a go at it and you know, why can you spit beer? You don't. And so some of those tastings were pretty epic. But yeah. I got involved in those in probably 2012, 2013, 2014 and just really, really deeply enjoyed writing about beer. That's always been a passion of mine. I've always liked blogging and writing and writing is a big part of what got me into the PhD as well. And so I've always really enjoyed that aspect of it. So I got to write like the little spring seasonal blurb on Drinkvine so that people could not just see the beer listing, but also know a little bit about it from somebody that's tried it. Yeah. Nice. And then you did Folly, but that was 2015 to 2017. And then you made one of the most interesting geographic. So we have to take a drink whenever you say pivot that I've heard about it on tarot craft beer. So you pulled up and you went to Newfoundland again in 2017 to co-found a brewery, Landwash brewery and Mount Pearl. Tell me how that decision happened. So I was loving Folly. It was just, it was a magical spot. We were doing weird farmhouse beers. We were doing all sorts of bread-driven stuff. If we wanted, we limited ourselves really fundamentally to that category. So if we wanted to do an IPA, it had to have bread in it as an underlying part of that. Or if we were doing a stout, it had to be like a sour stout with lactose and stuff like that. And that was all really, really fun. I loved it dearly. We were finding we wanted to scale a little bit and scaling breweries, especially brew pubs, is really, really quite a challenge. And so everybody at Folly was kind of dreaming, but the next. iteration of Folly at the time. And the part of coming out of that dreaming was thinking about what opening a brewery back home would look like. We were fortunate enough to get Sonia and Alicia who started Port Rexton Brewing. Came up I think in 2016 they just opened and brewed with us a little bit at Folly and learned a little bit about the scene with us. And we're just talking about how much the Newfoundland beer scene was changing. Newfoundland's always been a province with basically three breweries. In history terms back before 1962 there were three breweries in Newfoundland. We're a varying brewing company, Bennett Brewing Company and the Newfoundland brewery. They all got bought out in '62 by one of piece LeBapt Carlingo Keef, Moulson. And then there were no independent breweries in Newfoundland. While I was growing up there was KittyVity which opened in '96, Storm Brewing which opened in '96, and Yellowbelly which opened in the early 2000s which is a brew pub. They opened in 2009, 2008-90? A little earlier than 10. I think it was more like six. I got to go out and visit before they actually opened and they were just about finished the build there. Yeah, pretty cool to see. I haven't been back but I remember going down like it was either the night they opened or like the day after I was so excited there was finally like a brew pub going to be in Newfoundland and I remember going down and trying full pints of everything they had. The Liam used to go, he got to start the brew master there, got to start in Toronto. Yeah, he wasn't even near Hartburg. He was somewhere like granted at one point. Yeah, granted. Yeah, yeah. He got some granted stuff. Yeah, really talented guy. So Port Rexden and the emergence of Kraft Beer? Exactly. So when the Port Rexden women came up they visited us and they were kind of the first new one. So there were three and then they became the fourth in 2015-16. So that was the first new brewery in many many many years to happen in Newfoundland. Then a couple other breweries like Split Rock started opening up around the same time and there's a kind of thing with Newfoundland. It's always about five years behind whatever Toronto is doing. We kind of looked at the calendar and said, "Well, five years ago where was Ontario?" It was where I was complaining about there's not enough breweries. There's not enough stuff happening and Ontario had boomed and I was like, "Well, if history tells us anything, Newfoundland's going to do the same thing." So instead of thinking about where the next folly could be, maybe it's the right time to go to Newfoundland because it seems like there's just about to be an explosion of breweries there and get in slightly before that really, really takes root and try to become established, try to become respected and build something a little bigger, a little easier to scale up from. And so you did it and tell me about doing it. So you grew it into the I think second, third largest crappery in the province. But it's no small feat, like you said. It's early days of craft in Newfoundland. But the geographic and distribution challenging. So tell me about starting it up. Why do you get Mount Pearl? Why do you call it Landwash? Give me the whole backstory. Sure. So the reason for Landwash is it's a Newfoundland word for the beach essentially. When I was growing up in Newfoundland, my grandparents are from a place called Branch. Well, my other grandparents are from St. Brides, which is about 20 kilometers away, but they're all part of the Cape St. Mary's kind of area. Really, really beautiful part of the province, not the most tourist did, but really, really beautiful. And my grandmother, Nash, on my mom's side, she would always call the beach the Landwash. And we'd go down in the summertime with the cousins and go down and have a big fire on the beach and you know, just have it have a good time. And so the Landwash to me was always a really important memory of community and family and just being by the water and just enjoying each other's company. And so when we were looking for a name, we decided to go with that to represent that kind of community and energy. Finding a place is always harder than finding a name. Finding one of the big challenges we wanted, one of the big things we wanted is because we knew we wanted to be a slightly larger in scale and we had learned some lessons from Folly that you know, if you build it a certain size, it's kind of a ship in a bottle when you build the brewery. If you need to change it later, it's much harder, it's much more expensive. And so the plan was to find the biggest kind of warehouse we could because we knew with Newfoundland and with all the challenges of importing product, if we were going to get cans in, we weren't going to be able to just, you know, pop over to to dwell for somewhere and pick up a couple of skids of cans and and get them ship down. We need to get full trucks. They're going in sea cans. They're going across on the ocean X. If we're getting grain, we're not getting we in Folly, we used to drive up to Gilbertson and Page was in Fergus, which is now Gilbertson and Page's BSG now. And we used to just rent a U-Haul and drive up, pick up two pallets of grain and drive back, unloaded for the back mandor and stack it up again. We knew we couldn't do that in Newfoundland, we knew we have to get like a half-dried long trip. Yeah, it would be five days. We knew we'd be getting our grain shipped in. And so we knew logistically, we would need a lot of warehouse space to make this economically viable. And so we were looking for a larger building. And so we explored some places in St. John's, we explored a spot in Holy Road, we explored a couple different spots. But when we found this spot in Mount Pearl, we just knew it was the right spot. It was a brand new building. Landlord lived, had a car, auto body, Craig English. He had a spot right next door, really nice guy. And just really just fell in love with this building. It had a beautiful mezzanine. Like on the second floor, it was very much if you're looking for a comparable Ontario brewery. It kind of felt like Anderson ails in London. Really, I love Anderson. But it was kind of like that kind of mezzanine looking over the production area vibe, which we just knew it was going to be really special there. And so Mount Pearl, the community was really excited to have a brewery come into there. They had a storm, which didn't have really a front facing area. So there wasn't really a brewery in Mount Pearl and everybody on City Council was really excited to get some time to have their own brewery that could be like their community brewery. So Mount Pearl just synergized everything kind of worked for Mount Pearl. And Mount Pearl's really not far from St. John's. It's actually fully enveloped by St. John's Paradise CBS. So it's kind of like the Mississauga to Toronto. Okay. Mount Pearl is to St. John's. Yeah. And so a little bit more residential, a little bit more of industrial zones. It's a really, really fun community. And when you're building it, what were you trying to create? Community was always big emphasis on the tap room. Tap room was a huge focus. We really wanted people to feel like that was their space. Not just, you know, the economics obviously make it so you really need a tap room these days. But also just we'd seen it folly just how important getting to like sit down and have a shift beer after your after you've done the brew day and then have a regular come in and talk to you and talk about the new beer that you brewed and how that how they like it, how they don't like it, what you should brew next and taking that advice seriously because you want to represent these people. These people had had a brewery they could talk to in their community. You proud of a new community brewery for them. So did you take your sails on styles and was landwashed that and others or was it you had to change styles or brewing styles maybe because the Mount Pearl community wasn't used to having like, you know, an IPA with bread in it. Well, it wasn't even just about changing styles for that reason. Like I'd love to have made it all a farmhouse ale brewery. But we kind of saw how challenging that was even in the market pre-hazy beer. It was it was niche and it still is niche. There's some people doing great farmhouse stuff like barrel heart still in Ontario. But it's still pretty niche and we knew to be a slightly larger brewery we wanted to scale and we wanted to make some volume. We knew to do that we'd need to do some other styles. We need to focus on other things. But it was also, you know, 2017 when Hazy Beer was taking over the whole universe. Everybody was fighting for how turbid you could make it. So we wanted to be kind of part of that trend and that part of it. So we started to be a little bit more of a generalist American influenced brewery down in Newfoundland. We wanted to do those styles really, really well because there wasn't a lot of a lot of that happening down there at the time. And when you were there too, as anyone who's co-founded a brewery, from brewing to branding to financial planning, you know, to getting your malt shipped across and the cans coming on a C-can, did you always see yourself going in that direction, you know, coming from Folly to creating this? Or did you just want to really focus on the brewing aspect? I think it brings out a thing. So one of the things I learned at Folly and from talking to everybody, so before we went back to open landwash, we visited all sorts of breweries on Ontario. I think we did over a hundred and tried to talk to anybody we could and said, "What would you do differently? What would you change?" And one of the things I came through with is making the material conditions for good beer to exist is a lot harder than just making good beer. And so making sure the brewers aren't stressed, making sure they have some room for creativity, making sure that if you make a batch, it can actually sell. It's not just going to sit in the warehouse and feel sad. Making those material conditions and making sure the business around it was healthy and viable and so that the brewers could focus on making interesting beer and better beer and quality rather than, you know, be worried about their their cost. good sold on their IPA, I don't want to brewer thing about that. I want to think about that. I want to make sure I've got that all solved. So if they have a creative thing they want to do, they can do it. So I always really wanted to play that role as making those material conditions exist so good beer can exist within it. You wanted to be the guy behind the scenes making it happen so that everyone else, you know, removing obstacles, yeah, essentially. So you kind of mentioned the crap, your culture and new family and compared to that on Ontario kind of five years behind. But what would you say for the drinkers? Did you notice anything different when you started up Land Wash compared to what it was like in Ontario? I mean, there's a couple things. I mean, the drinkers there were really passionate. There's a very strong sense of local and probably stronger than in Ontario that, you know, this is our town's local brewery. We're going to drink this beer. So no matter what you made, people were really excited by it and really wanted to try it and support it and be really, really truly proud of it. The other thing is just distribution down there is very different. I mean, we had corner stores, convenience store sales for forever before Ontario started doing any of that. And so because of that, you had a different kind of access to market. Newfoundland convenience stores can only sell beer, brewed in Newfoundland. So if you want to brew beer for wide distribution in Newfoundland, there's some communities that don't have analyses at all. They just have convenience stores. Most in the Batts still have plants in Newfoundland for that very reason because if they pulled one out, you lose the ability to distro to that market. The great thing about it is instead of, you know, we don't have a new item submission system which you have in Ontario, you basically let the NLC know we have a one off coming up in six weeks. Here's the UPC. Here's the name. Can you put it on the list? And once it's on the list, any corner store in the province can sell it. So everybody, some of these small breweries that are really quite far flung and far away, you'd go into a Marie's Mini Mart, which is a great Mini Mart chain in Newfoundland. And you'd go in there and you'd have 10s from or 10 beers from a small brewery out in Twilling Gate or a little brewery in somewhere like Corn Mac out in the West Coast that would have 20 different beers and half of them are fruited soures. And so it made the Newfoundland drinker very adventurous because you wouldn't have to travel to a tap room or wouldn't have to travel to a brewery. Everything was there. And very quickly, Newfoundlanders fell in love with sour beer much more, much more than anywhere else I've been. We had a goza that we did with the Newfoundland Steve Salt from the Newfoundland Salt Company, which is a great company. And it was like 15, 20% of our volume was a goza. And you know, it didn't have the coriander in it, but it had everything else. It was like a more modern take with some citra hops, really, really beautiful beer. Nothing else quite tastes like it. It's kind of like orange yellow gatorade. That kind of bright citrus kind of salinity. And that became one of our best selling beers. And what we weren't expecting, we were like, oh, we'll do a sour beer. That's going to be something like old school like Follywood has done. And they just took off differently there than anywhere else. Crazy. And so, yeah, Newfoundlanders love their sour beers. And they're per capita consumption is a lot higher than our area. So, so you were there for almost six years. So, when did you know it was time to move from land washing? What was the decision like after six years of building something from scratch? I mean, it was, it was an interesting decision. I mean, there were some life changes happening at around the same time. I had some relationship changes happening, which were part of it. Part of it was I also just wasn't feeling super like myself in Newfoundland. I've always been somebody that really likes exploring, trying new things, not doing the same thing a bunch of times, having access to all sorts of different experiences and different beers and different food. And Newfoundland's, you know, is half a million people. It's like you put, you know, a 20-foot wall around Hamilton and didn't let people in around. It gets kind of insulated pretty quickly. And so, I was finding myself kind of missing being up in a larger environment where you could travel a little easier, get around a little easier. Things were open past five o'clock. It's a few things like that. And so, I just, I found myself not really feeling quite like myself as much and not feeling quite as excited after a few years in Newfoundland. And I was thinking back to how much I liked exploring and how much I liked going to New Breweries in Ontario. And I started thinking about maybe seeing if I could come back up this way. Nice, nice. You obviously haven't read Alan Doyle's new book because, you know, if you read that, you're never leaving Newfoundland because he waxes poetic in that. So, okay, so that decision is made and it's time to come to Ontario. But before we talk about you joining Old Credit, I want to talk about Old Credit itself. The Breweries. So, for listeners who may not know the Breweries, I want to add you because you're a big history guy. I want you to give me the history. Thirty plus years, so 32 years this year, yeah. It's a long run. How did the place come to be? How is it evolved? Because Conor's was in that space before. A lot of people don't know that Old Credit was a Brewery before Old Credit. But tell me everything you can about the history of Old Credit. Noreen, although the family, there's so much. It's a vast history. It's so deep. And I've been so fortunate that there's been enough of the original people around still that there's still. There's still Ralph. Yeah, Ralph, 32 years. Ralph, Sonuto, Operations Manager at Old Credit, been there forever. He has all the stories. If you really want more, if you like hearing what I'm about to say, go to the Brewery, ask for Ralph. He'll tell you all the stories. He's amazing. So Old Credit kind of started before Old Credit. As you were saying, it was Conor's in the early 80s, I think around 82. The guys that started Conor's, they were doing an English style brewery, Old School Micro Brewery. So they had a best bidder. They had a stout. Things like that. And their original idea was to make a franchise brewery model. And so this was going to be like the first of a franchise. And it's interesting because we still have the franchise model paperwork up in Aldo's filing cabinet from the early 80s of how this was supposed to expand. And they did a really good job built a really amazing, a really amazing business so much so that they wanted to expand and grow. So around the late 80s, they decided to move out of that building and move up to Don Mills somewhere and open a larger facility. So from there on, I mean, their story is not mine to tell so much, but they left the building. And Aldo, Lista had owned that building. So he bought that building. I think sometime in the 70s. And because he lived in Port Credit, he had worked his whole career had been in photography. He had a studio downtown Toronto called New Paramount Studios. It still exists up on St. Clair now. And it was really, really successful with it. And you know, it bought moved out to Port Credit. That's where he wanted to raise his family. That's where he raised his kids. And he had this building, you know, helped with some of the leaseholds getting conners in there was really happy. He had a good tenant. And then when they left, he didn't really have anybody to take over. And so from the late 80s to the early 90s, he was kind of shopping this. And he shopped it to multiple different groups trying to say like, hey, like there's a turnkey brewery right here. Come in, do something. Some people, you know, put together business plans and there's a whole bunch of stories there to dig into that Ralph is the best guy to talk to about. But the longs and the short of it is around, you know, 93. He was down in Florida and he was like, you know what? He had just the piff and he was like, I'm just going to do it myself. I'm going to open a brewery here. And he was in his 60s at the time. And so this is like, you know, this is goals. Yeah. So he found a really talented brew master named Orren Besco. He'd brew it in Amstel. I think he'd brewed around great lakes. He'll be for a bit. Yeah. So really, really talented guy who was going to be his beer guy. He grabbed his nephew Ralph Sinuto. Ralph is Noreen's nephew. So all those wife is Noreen and Ralph's the nephew. So Ralph came in as kind of the do everything else. Although it was going to take care of the business side of it. Orren was going to take care of the beer and Ralph was going to make sure the beer got where it needed to go. Fix something, change something. Handyman, a little bit of everything guy. You know, those three guys that started brewery. And it's still standing to this day. Exactly. They put in a lot of hard work to get the foundation right. And I remember all though, so all the past away in 2021. But I can remember going in to talk to him about his beer. And he was always talking about the cold filtered and the ice. And now you don't get headaches from my beer. And he was so proud of that. But kind of tell me about the the beers back then. And kind of what he was trying to achieve with with the beers that old credit was known for. Absolutely. So the three core beers and old credit went 20 something years between these first three beers to the next beer. So that's that's a long run for brewery to exist. But to exist was only three beers is really special. In '94 they opened with just the amber ale. Really classic old school, multi forward amber ale. And then in '96 they introduced the pilsner, which they just wanted a lighter beer, crispier, cleaner, a little bit more approachable than the amber. And then Probably the old credit or the poor crack community was like Amba beer that's not amber. Well, yeah, originally like all though they were so considerate they were like, Oh, cream or is doing a logger. We don't want to do what cream or is doing will will stay in our own lane and do an amber. And then they, you know, realized why it would be nice to have a logger as well. So they released the pills and are in 96 and then in 99 they released their holiday honey. And so those are the three beers that Orin made Orin passed away around 2001. Kind of suddenly not really expected. And so that left a bit of gap in the brewery and I'll get to that. But those beers really the idea Orin had around those was around the time people were doing ice, ice aged ice beers like ice max ice those. Laker ice all those ones where you basically freeze the beer you'd scoop off. It's freeze to still the little bit. You get a six and a half percent beer. And kind of the idea that Orin had was if we just age it cold and colder and longer than anybody else. So if we just run the glycol full open, no temperature control, just run it at the glycols at minus three. So it's constantly going at minus three. And then, you know, also leave it for four weeks, eight weeks in these horizontal loggering tanks that the beer quality would be really, really special. And they've really held to that. And that's something, you know, you see a lot of breweries that try to turn out volume as much as possible. But the culture there, because of this ice aging, which is a little bit of an archaic term I find, but it doesn't mean anything to the modern beer consumer. This is the way it would have backed them. But what it built was really, really good loggering techniques. And I respect for the time it takes to make really, really good loggers and to make them without any compromise on that. So it wasn't like a shop where you're just turning, turning, turning. It was very careful and considerate as part of the philosophy. In the name, old credit. So it speaks to the credit river in poor credit. So 94. It was the only real brewery that way. Yeah. What did all though and norin due to make it a community brewery? I mean, they were massively involved in Mississauga as a community. There's all sorts of awards and all sorts of recognition posters still up in the brewery about how they if there was an event happening in Mississauga, they were part of it. They were a huge part of the community. Hazel McAllian, the longtime mayor of Mississauga, would, you know, she'd come and talk to Norin and Aldo and sit in the, there's two chairs in the retail shop. And that's where Aldo and Norin used to sit on Saturday afternoons and holds court with customers. And Norin, you know, up until almost she still does sometimes. But last, even last year, she was in most Saturdays and she'd sit in the chair. And if somebody's coming in the retail shop, she'd talk to them, ask them how they are. It was really personal with all of the customers that come into the shop and it was just a retail shop. There was no tap room. There's no sitting down. So you just get to know everybody. And there's people like I recognize customers now that come in every week for their case of beer. It's tradition. And they were very, very good at making sure everybody felt super welcomed there. Like they were part of the family there that there was tradition and longevity as part of that brewery. So I was going to ask, what do you think kept that brewery going for so long? But I think you just answered it. It was the persistence. It was the sense of getting to know the people buying your beer, supporting the community. But you mentioned the 22 years to introduce a new beer. But, you know, they've been through the pandemic, changing consumer taste. You're working on some new stuff now that we're going to talk a bit. But is it that do you think that kept all credit going? Was it just like they were so associated with Norin and although being there, being present? I think it's part that it's also just the team they built there, you know, beer is people. And the big thing they did was keep the people they had at the brewery there for a long time. So it's always been kind of a very small team. I mean Ralph, who we were talking about, he's been there 32 years since the very beginning. And our current Brewmaster, Merrell Pop, he's been there 25 years. He's a really, really talented brewmaster. One of the people you don't hear about in the Ontario craft beer industry, even though he's been there 25 years. He's trained in Germany, also like me most of a PhD, but his is in brewing, which is much more relevant. Really, really intelligent, talented, hardworking brewer. And they managed to make sure he felt comfortable staying there for that much of his career. Yeah, that's kind of where I was going with that question because all credits have been very under the radar for for so long. When you think about craft breweries and you think about the emergence of craft, like we said, 2010 to 2019 when the explosion happened in Ontario, all credits been through the whole thing. But when, you know, you name 20 breweries, all credit might not even pop up into that. And you're trying to work to change that model. I get that. But what do you think was holding them back from that in the mid to late 2000s? I mean, I think a part of it is just older was getting slightly older. And he wanted to keep his brewery his way. He had his business. It was his passion project. He wanted it the way it was. And when you have a founder that's, you know, getting into his 80s and he's still the creative vision behind behind the brand, it does become harder to kind of pivot. So the pivot to cans happened a little later. And the changing, adding new beers that happened much later. And so it kind of did make it so that, you know, the years up until the craft beer boom, old credit was doing really well. And then when everything started happening, everything started changing so fast, it didn't really have the person behind it at the time to start changing it and start doing new things and start not keeping up with trends so much as just keeping the very relevant and evolving for those for those years. And so it kind of stayed in a holding pattern. And especially as all those health declined in the later years, it became something that kind of just stayed the way it was because that's the way it is. Yeah. And there was some need to start changing that. But again, not too rapidly and not too aggressively. The one thought I always had when it comes to old credit and what I really admired about the list is is that they were so focused on keeping it poor credit. Yeah. And I admire that because a lot of breweries now, they open in a neighborhood or a city and they want to expand quickly. They want to grow from what they started. And I always found that, you know, if I wanted to do my own brewery one day, it'd be nice to have that community, you know, you just focus on, you know, your 10 kilometer radius. And you keep the people coming back, you know your business, you know, your guaranteed sales of this and that. But when we come back after the break, I want to talk about what you're doing to not only honor that, but then to change that vision a little bit as the GM of old credit. So we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and get into that with Chris Conway. Well, how's your doodle rolling baggage here, rolling solo down here at sunny side beach. I like to get here nice and early to grab me some prime sandy real estate. I lays out me towel, slather myself liberally with tenon butter and soak in some tasty vitamin D. Speaking of tasty, lucky lucky in me cooler box, a whole gaggle of sunny side session IPA. Big on the taste, low on the alkahookahol, a springtime summertime, many time treat and a permanent staple in the grips of me fingers. Oh, and check out the can to see a brand new me. Been lifting some iron to boast me biceps, triceps and me deltoids. You know what they say? Suns out, guns out, work your tan and crack a can of sunny side session IPA. So now we get to the part where you're at old credit. You've made the journey back from Newfoundland and it's 2024. So you stepped into the GM role in August of that year with everything that we've just been through. You've said, what was the state of the brewery when you arrived and what did you walk into? I mean, the brewery is really well kept. That's one of the things that sort of let me rephrase the business of the business. Yeah. When you walked into the brewery, the business of the brewery. So I mean, I don't know if it knew where it was going at the time. And so it was under all those grandson, Brandon, he was kind of being the GM for a little while. But, you know, he wanted to go back to school. He was an engineer by training and wanted to go back and do his masters. And it didn't really have a set direction. It even in the job posting, it said, you know, guide the brewery's future. That was that was part of the mandate. And so it was kind of looking for where it was going next, what it could do next. And it was everybody there was hungry for doing something more. Everybody was excited that, you know, we could become relevant even more than we were to get people to know it again. I mean, when I walked in, it didn't have a tap room. It had this beautiful. And you mentioned this room. I love the tap room. So up on the second floor of the brewery, there's a tap room. It was an old school tasting room, like those old school 90s breweries tasting rooms that Conor's had built. And so it feels like an English pub up there. And they used to do just, you know, tastings up there. And when I walked in for the first time, they took me upstairs for a meeting and I saw this room. And it was never, it had never been open to the public. We had some patio business starting up, but I saw this room and I just seemed wrong to not be able to welcome people in there and let people sit down and have a beer and to even enhance that element of community that had been built for so long. So that, that was one of the first things. They had just introduced the Hellis Lager for the very first time and it was just like a one-off batch because they just invested in a new mash ton. And wanted to test the mash ton. So they said, "Okay, let's do something that's not our normal beer. We'll do something slightly different." And so it was Morrell Pops first beer there. He'd been there, you know, 23 years at the time. And he'd never been able to do his own recipe at all. So he got to, you know, have creative control over this Hellis Lager, which we just got a seasonal release for in the LCBO. - Yes, congratulations. - Congratulations. - Look, yeah. - Yeah. - Please, please drop out of the bite if you're in the Toronto, Mrs. Saga, Hamilton kind of range. So it was his first beer and the first new beer in like 25 years. And so it was really, really quite exciting. For everybody who's jazzed about having that and having, you know, some new direction. So we were trying to just put together where the business was. Like the first thing I wanted to see is like, where's our inventory at? What does the, how does this brewery function? I just needed to learn the ropes of that. Learn the distro model because old credit is surprisingly in quite a lot of LCBO's, grocery stores, convenience stores. It's pretty well distributed throughout Mrs. Saga, throughout kind of West End of Toronto, and throughout Burlington Oakville area. So just learning this whole new area, I'd been to Toronto, but I'd never really like been in Mrs. Saga. - I'm excited to park there. - Yeah, like that, you know, Sinclair is going pretty far north. So for me, this was like a whole new, a whole new area to learn. So, you know, it's like the music man, you got to know the territory. So I worked really hard to learn, learn that bit, work with Ralph a whole bunch because there's a lot of great licensee business. Really great community in Port Credit. Like the bars and restaurants along the Lakeshore Strip in Port Credit, which is basically from, you know, we could say as far as Cothra, but it's really from like, like here on Terrio to Mrs. Saga road there on the Lakeshore. There's so many good bars and restaurants that are all not corporate. They're all family owned. - That's what I was saying about Port Credit. - Yeah. - It's really, you know, I don't want to say a throwback to, you know, the fifties, because I don't even think Port Credit probably existed in the fifties. But it's very independently, like it's a very independent strip of Lakeshore. - Yeah, and it's stubbornly so. - Yeah. - And it keeps that. It's right on the water. So there's like a lighthouse there that's where the Credit River joins Lake Ontario. It's, you know, 30 minutes from Union Station if you hop on the Go train. You can get to Port Credit Station and be in this little, like, it feels like a community that's like on Lake Erie somewhere, somewhere really remote. It doesn't feel like you're in Mrs. Saga. - And in the summer it does come alive. It's unbelievable to change. Like I walk to work, so I live in Port Credit. And I basically just walk across the Credit River every day over to Old Credit. And the winter walk is drastically different from the summer walk. And when you go there on Canada Day or something like that, it's unbelievable how many people, that's kind of the waterfront area, the old downtown of all of Mrs. Saga. - And you hope to capture that tourism, but also the community into your new tap room. Like you're trying to build that atmosphere up. How has the reception been from other, well, one from customers, but two other businesses around the area? People have been really warm to it. When people come into that tap room for the first time, they kind of fall in love with it. It's just been over and over. People are like, how did I not know this was here? And the big challenge is it hasn't been there. Like it's been there for 30 years, but we've only had the tap room for one now. And so that's a huge change over for your consumer's perception of what your brewery does and what it's like. But we've had great community support for it. The bars and restaurants have all been no complaints that we're selling beer ourselves now. It's been really, really well received as a community space. And each month it gets better and better. And it's a slow process building a tap room. - For sure. - And anybody that's open to tap room knows how long it takes to get that momentum. But it's slowly growing and that's really exciting to see. - I knew it was a place that Mike Lacky would love just the aesthetics of it. And as soon as he walked in, he's like, yeah. Yeah, this is a place I could have like five or six beers in. So we just talked a bit about the tap room development. So I'm going to skip this question because you've done a great job with that. But I wanted to ask about the thoughtful modernization because I really like that line that you've used. This being a period of that. So you've only been in the position not even two full years. Yeah, the August 2026 will be two full years. So that's a big thing for someone to walk in and say, okay, I got to take 30 years of history. 32 this year, but 30 years and go, how do we take it forward with thoughtful modernization? So what does it look like for a brewery that old? And how do you, because this is where your history comes into effect, I think, how do you take the legacy of what's been created and honor the legacy while still push forward with new things? - I mean, I spent a lot of time in my first year working like a print-as-ing under Noreen. She would come in almost every day for my first, you know, first eight months. - Just to check out, yeah. - Well, and she, I mean, it's been part of her life for so long that it's really a huge part of who she is and what she does. And so she eventually retired last summer, like fully retired officially at 90, which is what we all hope to do. - 9.0. - But, you know, I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time listening to the stories about the brewery, from her, from Ralph, from Arrell, from everybody that's been there, Anna and Danny, everybody that's been there a really long time. And to make that part of the story going forward, to not say, you know, you could come in and be like, you know what, we're not doing any of this stuff anymore. Where it is, do high-paisy beers, and we're going to be a whole different brewery. And it's not. I mean, the way I see it is like right now there's a lot of people in beer that are looking for just reliable classic things, things that are comfortable. And old credits really like a retro classic kind of brewery. And so, - It's a good term. - retro classic. - Exactly. And that's the kind of direction we're going with it, is we're trying to introduce beers, if we're going to introduce beers, we want them to make sense in the context of what old credit was in '94. Because we want to kind of backfill some brands that old credit could have brewed. So the first one after the Hellis Lager was just a pale ale. But like an old school pale ale, like Cascade Hop, Sierra Nevada kind of energy, that older kind of craft beer that was a little simpler. You didn't need a white paper on some new hop product to understand what was going on. Although I deeply love beers that you need a white paper to understand. Just simple straightforward flavors that are liable and easy to understand and really delicious. And I've stood the test of time. We're talking 30 years, but we're trying to brew beers that have been brewed for hundreds of years. And so, trying to revitalize it by trying to think what would old credit in '94 brew if the market was more old than ice beer? I don't know if we're doing any ice beer. I think we're going to stick to more, really much more traditional. So I mean, all of my breweries that I've worked at, we've had a kind of very clear canon of the kind like folly was very farmhouse only. Landwash was very, very, very focused on American beers and modern creative brewing. And now old credits really focused on these classic styles. Like I like to pick up like the old home brew books from like 2010. And there's no hazy IP in those books. There's just all these old old styles, you know, best bitters and classic stouts and stuff like that that really for a lot of breweries, they don't focus on anymore. They're not super like they're not the easiest beers to sell and they're not like a mild. A mild is some of the best style out there. Yeah, they're hard to sell these days. But I think gold credit could do probably a good mild down the road. You should call a beer if I can be so bored as to say, "Lista's logger, Lista logger" and tie in the community and that's like paying homage to the folks that started this up and came before. So you've been working on the brand, the better storytelling refresh presence, connecting with new audiences through the tap room. And is your retail store changed at all? Not a whole lot. I mean, the retail store has always been the heart of this business and it's incredibly important. It's where we move most of our beer. We have a really dedicated group of people that, you know, if you're driving on the QEW, we're like a five minute detour down Mrs. Saga Road and then you can be back on the QEW. Look at all these beautiful homes where you're driving down to sea. Aspirational. And it's a beautiful, beautiful area to drive down and visit and, you know, we're really keeping the retail store at its heart. We're trying to make it tidier. We're trying to make sure that the product is easier to grab and go. Making some changes. I mean, we still did three, three, three, four, three, four, one mill small bottles in six packs and 12 packs. We've recently phased out the small bottle, but we still do the big 650 mill bomber bottle that craft beer used out. You've got to be the last one that's doing 650 mill. I think it's us - This and church keys still have their holy smokes or something that's in. That's in the big bottles. All it's doing the 500s of their jelly king and stuff, but other than that, it's for an everyday brand. It's got to be you guys and maybe church key. But yeah, no, we're one of the last still doing those and we still have a lot of people that really love that format. And we do just the pills near the amber and the honey in that format, but there's been people drinking that from that size bottle and they're used to that for 30 years now. So we don't see taking that off anytime soon. We still sell a lot of bottles in the LCBO, which is completely counterintuitive for some reason. The new LCBOs were opening up or like actually, can you send me four cases of bomber bottles? And it's like, okay, it could have been like, although in Noreen just saying, no, I'm bucking the trend. Everyone's doing cans. I'm sticking to the bottle and the stores were like, all right, he's done well here with it. It is quite something to walk into an LCBO and look and see a pilsner on the shelf in a 650 mil bottle. Yeah, I'm really proud. It's still there. I mean, it's part of Ontario craft beer heritage is those old school bottles. That's what, you know, the throwback stuff. Everyone really got their big start in. Yeah, for sure. So we talked a bit earlier when you're at Landwash and how you took everything from Folly, but then you were doing like ERP systems procurement, financial planning, stuff that we don't really talk about when we talk about breweries. We always talk about the beers and culture and, but behind the scenes stuff. So how much does that back of his discipline matter to old credit at this particular stage in their history? It's really quite important. I mean, margins are thin in this industry. We've been around for a long time, but it's really important to focus on making sure your inventory is good, making sure your tank turns are good, making sure payrolls in order. All of those things are really crucial for survival in general in a brewery. And I'm just, I've always been a spreadsheet nerd. And so I've always enjoyed that aspect of the business. So it's really, it's part that, yeah, we don't talk about that much. And the craft brewery finance side of things is something that I find really fascinating because like, like I was saying with Landwash, it's the material conditions that make it so good beer can continue to exist. And although I'm a reigning at a fantastic job of running a very, very tight ship. And so it's one of those things when you do a little forensic audit of the past bunch of years, you see how a lot of these decisions were made to be very economical, to make things make sense for the whole business, and to keep it running really tight. And so, you know, when you, you know, you kind of hope when you go into an old brewery like that, you know, you're new, you're like, oh, I'm going to look at the books and there's going to be all this waste. And I'm going to do a whole bunch of cutting and I'll turn it around instantly. And when you look at it and you see the financial discipline throughout many, many years of going back, it's really quite impressive. And it's one of the reasons they've stuck around. And so it's one of the reasons I'm really happy I get to apply some of that because it's, it's really great to take something that was running well and try to just do a little tune up on it and to understand where all your costs are goods are going and where all your inventory is is a big part of that. And you have a really cool office. You have the old office. Yeah, it's a, it's very steeped in tradition and it's an old school office. I mean, they gave brewery managers good office. Yeah, it was a thing. And but you had a lot of nostalgia around the brewery and you said the retail store is still like a big, it's kind of the heartbeat of the brewery. But it's a little museum at the same time. I have any plans to do anything with all the knickknacks and stuff that's there decluttered a little bit, but we're trying to keep and I'm trying to slowly add back now. So I we did a little declutter last fall. And now we're kind of finding little pieces of history. We want to add back little stories. We want to be able to tell part of modernizing it is, you know, we've expanded hours. And now we're open a little later in the evening. And so for the first time, old credit has some part time staff helping out in the retail. We've always had just full time people. And so being able to make sure that all the knickknacks and things that are there and the pieces that we have stories about all the staff know the stories. So you're not coming in and go, oh, what's that? And the new hourly guy who just started is like, no idea. So we're trying to now kind of we edited down. And now we're trying to kind of carefully filter some of that back in so that those stories are still there. Because it does is your history. It is, it is well 32 years of Noreen and although putting stuff on the shelves from the travels, that also beer stuff. And it's quite it's quite interesting for those who haven't been told credit to go and see what they have in the retail store. It's quite something. That's the GM incoming here from co-founding a baritone being, you know, the the GM running the show behind the scenes. What's been the hardest thing about this role so far for you? I mean, I there's a correct comic quote that I come back to a lot on this one. And it's that he says something aligned to it's in focus. If you want to look it up, but he says something aligned to a flaw in the human characters. Everybody wants to do the building, but nobody wants to do the maintenance. And this has been a real maintenance aspect of this. We have a lot of equipment that is from the 1980s. Our college, your copper coil kettle. What is your bottling line? It's not from the it's from like the 40s or it's from it's from the six. The name the phase plate says 1960. And it's from West Germany. It's pretty cool looking. Oh, it's and it works really well still for what we're using it. It's true. And it doesn't it's been in function for 32 years at old credit. And so there's a lot of a lot of decisions to be made about, okay, where how do we how do we safely invest in upgrades and equipment? You know, we just got a new heat exchanger. It played heat exchanger, which we use after boiling before fermenting. And we got a new we installed that we've did our first brew through it on Wednesday. And it was really, really nice to see because the old one was a small one that was undersized for corners in the 80s. And a piece of equipment surviving that long industry is is a feat. But part of what we're doing is trying to look at, okay, well, what what a potential failure points. You know, it's not what what's a new piece of equipment that's shiny and new that we want to add to our brewery. It's what a potential failure points in some of this older equipment. How do we make sure nothing goes down? How do we make sure things continue to run smoothly, even though you're using old systems and old equipment and an old building? Mm-hmm. Nice. And you I think you did answer this question. But what surprised you the most good or bad since arriving? And I think if I can put something in your you said the financial books were like pretty good. Yeah. Was there anything else that since you survived there was really like, holy shit, this is shocking or holy shit, this is really awesome. I mean, I think again going back to the people like you don't hear about people in their careers spending their entire career at a one brewery that often or in a job anymore. Yeah, this doesn't happen. You've had three. Exactly. And so you don't you don't see that kind of like that it's truly a family. The way Aldo and Orin treated their staff was truly truly a family. And not in the corporate speak kind of way that we're all a family. We like to have fun here like truly and like Norin came by with Easter gifts for everybody last week. It's it's truly truly family and the people that have stayed there have stayed there because they felt like they were really really a part of it and they are really really a part of it. And so I have a great appreciation for everybody that works there because they've all been there so long and care so much about it and that's that's something I wasn't expecting to walk in and have such long tenured staff and such passion behind it still after all these years. And you're having a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really it's just a fascinating spot to be right now because the the market the industry is changing so much the market's changing so much so much is going on and to be at a spot that's just has that kind of longevity is is a really interesting vantage point. And it's in a in a community Mississauga even you know where we're one of two breweries in Mississauga Mississauga is seven percent of Ontario's population has has two breweries which is surprising to me but we've been Mississauga's brewery forever and we're trying to expand kind of beyond just being poor credits brewery to being really Mississauga's brewery because that's what we've been for so long and we have a lot of great relationships throughout the whole throughout the whole city. Nice. Let's talk about the industry for a little second here. You've built and operated breweries in three different markets Toronto, Newfoundland and Mississauga poor credit each is pretty different. It's a you know you look at Toronto market then you go to Newfoundland which was an emerging one and then to where you are now. What's your overall read on the Ontario craft beer market based on those three breweries you've been with? I mean the market right now obviously there's some bummer stories coming out like there's some long-term breweries that have closed in the last couple years and it's sad it's really really sad to see but at the same time there is some really fantastic beer being brewed throughout this province right now there's some just amazing breweries. I managed to get out to something like over 50 breweries last year just to visit and have a beer check out spots and you know are you going to be able to continue that now that you've you just come married? Well we go to a lot breweries together yeah no it's not just me solo I mean we met in a beer class so yeah well I took Jordan St. John's. Oh I dare to. George Brown's. Yeah George Brown's just catch up with Jordan's CEO and you know you meet somebody in class. You should teach that class. Yeah yeah yeah yeah and I and you met your wife there that's amazing. Exactly so it's a fun way to do it but we you know explored a lot of breweries together and There's a lot of. really, really fantastic beer happening in this industry right now. A lot of people that are really honed in to making really delicious stuff. And so while there's some sad stories about breweries closing, the ones that are staying are really like old credit have just been hardened and become really, really beautiful spaces. And is that what keeps you optimistic about the future of this industry? Like why every morning you get up and go, I'm excited to do something today in this industry. Yeah. Yeah. There's just still, there's so many passionate people like still that community that I fell in love with originally with craft beer. That's still there and there's still people that are super passionate. I mean, there are people that got into craft beer because it was fun to own a brewery. But there's a lot of people that really got into it because they couldn't do anything else. They just have to make good beer. That was, they, it was their calling. And so there's a lot of really great breweries out there right now that I'm a huge fan of. And it's always exciting to get to go back to them and see what's new and what's changing. Well, we're going to go for a tour after we finish this. You can see what's new. I GLB right after this. But last question before we get into some rapid fire questions, which is the hard part of the show. But any advice I always ask people in a management position or owners, any advice for someone thinking about getting into craft beer, either as a brewer or on the business side of things? Yeah. I mean, for me, because you've started. It's a home brewer. Yeah. And then a brewer and then an owner and then a GM. So you've kind of touched all services. So what advice would you give? I mean, for me, just general in life, there's a Bob Dylan quote from a hard reigns going to fall. Know your song well before you start singing. And or all know my song well before I start singing. And talking to people and understanding, you know, people in different stages of their career at different breweries and different spots, taking advantage of the community that exists within craft beer, like go to all the conferences. If you're thinking about opening a brewery, find a way to get to an OCP conference and talk to suppliers, talk to brewers, go to some of those sessions, learn as much as you can and talk to as many people are super open to talk about all of this stuff. And so I really would recommend talking to as many people as possible and really understanding the full nature of the industry, where you want to be in 30 years in this industry. Not just, you know, I want to make some beer, it seems fun. It seems like a really cool career. Think about, you know, what are you doing in your 50s? What are you doing in your 60s? Are you opening a brewery in your 60s? Like all they did? I mean, that's the kind of thing to think about is not just as a career, but as part of your life. Where beer is going to take you. Nice. Very good answer. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to hear from our pal Octopus and we're going to come back with some rapid fire questions. Hang tight. Here we observe the elusive GLB pet octopus named Octo, protective, territorial, passionate about hops. I can hear you talking about me. It's prize possession. The Great Lakes Brewery Octopus wants to fight six pack, which is now available at the LCBO for some reason. Ah yes, six shimmering cans of the Great Lakes Brewery Octopus wants to fight six pack. Bright, citrusy, dangerously drinkable. How about some privacy pal? Unfortunately for the octopus, the six pack is now widely available. Don't remind me. Octopus wants to fight six pack, now available at the LCBO. Why are you order? No, she, Great Lakes Brewery, brewed for you, Ontario. You betcha, Octopus, six packs are on the shelves all across Ontario right now. Grab some. Well, it's nice and fresh. Chris, this has been amazing, but now it's time to hold your feet to the fire here. What beer have you been enjoying recently? There's not an old credit or a great lakes. So last night I had a really great logger beer called Watts Golden, which is a collab between Slake Brewing on PEC, Prince Edward County, and Melon Brewing in Montreal. Two of my very favorite breweries. And it was a, it's just a really beautiful clean crisp logger. I had a few over the summer, but I was fortunate enough for Eric to send me some as a wedding gift. Oh, so, so I had one of those last night and when I was thinking about that, I was like, you know what, that's probably the best way I've had it in a little while. Very good. Name a brewery that consistently impresses you. Brew History is one that I probably spent more money at last year than any other brewery because I just love, you know, I love a niche. And so they do niche regional European loggers and I just have so much respect for what those guys are doing. That's true history is a business defined. They know who they are and what they want to be. Name a person in the industry that has or continues to inspire you. I'm going to say my old friend, Jordan St. John, beer writing. The beer industry has gone through a downturn, but the beer writing industry has struggled even more. There's very few pages you can actually find to find somebody still writing about beer and to find somebody still passionate and teaching and writing about beer like Jordan is. I'm really glad to get to call him a friend. Best time in place for a beer. Sunday afternoon, 2 p.m. Some nice tap room, any nice tap room. It's very specific. What's a beer style you think deserves more love? Let me guess a sazon. Yeah, I'm going to be basic AF and say sazon. It's so hard to find a decent sazon around that anybody's even making right now. There is good as a crispy log or on a hot day. I just want to see. Sazon's are great, great, great style to drink. If you could only drink one beer for the rest of your life, what would it be? I'm going to give a sazon to point. Yeah, yeah. In the green bottle though, not these little brown bottle foolishness. The big 750 mil green bottle that gets slightly skunky. Quarked and never come again. Delicious. Do you remember when they came? Were you in Newfoundland at the time or back in Ontario when they came to Ontario to the LCBO and the 750 mil quarked bottles? Oh yeah. Yeah, I bought it. I bought it. I bought a case. Yeah. Best brew you've ever toured. So best is hard. So one right now I'd like to get back to see again is the exchange. No, the exchange actually, well, it's close to Sazon. But it's the exchange in Niagara on the lake, which is a really beautiful facility. It's really well set up. We were lucky enough when we were at Foley to brew a beer with Sam Max power out there. He was formerly a jelly pumpkin and one point in his life. Exactly. Makes amazing barrel age sour beers, funky beers, all sorts of stuff. And the way that facility is set up, it has multiple layers. It has barrel area, it has bright tanks that are direct to tap. It's a, I'd love to get back out there and walk through that facility again. Okay, Sam, got him over there. If you weren't in the beer, what would you be doing? I think I'd be teaching history. I mean, I think I would have stayed down that. What kind of history? So I was doing history of technology. So it's close enough to beer anyway. I mean, that's kind of what we are. We're technologists making, making something with their hands. But I would be, I did engineering. So I think I'd be teaching history of technology. You know, that's always the big goal. And so I think I would find a way to find my way back to PhD and finish that up. Did you listen to the podcast we did here with Dan Malik? I don't think I does. Oh, you, okay. Well, I wonder if you would like that one. If you could have a beer, which is one person in the whole world, dead or alive, famous or not, who would you choose? I'm not just going to say my wife because that's like a top out answer. I really would love, like just my love of beer writing. I would love to do Michael Jackson, the beer writer Michael Jackson. I've always, like his books were so fundamental to me in learning about beer. And great beers of Belgium. I have a whole bunch of old editions of some of the classic beer guides. Have you ever watched his beer hunter shows? Yeah, you go back and find those. I watched, I will, I watched, remember when the documentary came out, there was a showing at the Rhino in downtown Toronto. Even Beaumont did a little talk beforehand. And I really deeply, that's like the kind of community stuff I love. And so if I could have some time with Michael Jackson, that would be, that would be, that would be, I take a long time. See this is rapid fire and we're screwing it up again. Sure, sure. But we were just talking about Michael Jackson to someone else and we were talking about the messy desk syndrome. And if you've ever seen the inside of Michael Jackson's old office, which was in a garage, it looked like a car garage, but converted into an office, that is the epitome of a messy office. He had notes and books and beers, everything everywhere. And I could just imagine how fun that would have been with a sober, or somber face. But after he died in 2009 to go into that and just browse his archives, which would be pretty crazy. Last one, what's next for Chris Conway and Old Credit? For me personally, I'm looking forward to going on my honeymoon in Scotland. So that's, that's personally, I'm excited for a break. I haven't taken a break since I started at Old Credit. So just to switch gears a minute, do some hiking, drink some whiskey, that's going to be really fun. And for Old Credit, we're ramping up for the summertime. So working on farmers markets, we're working on events that we're going to tie into. We're always a big part of things like the South Side Shuffle and import credit. So basically, we're doing all the event logistics right now. That's what we've been spending some time on this week is just figuring out, okay, when's this event? We're going to do because beer in Hamilton, which you've never done before. We've never really participated in a lot of these kind of things. You're going to get a little bit more. Trying to get Old Credit out a little bit more because a lot of people just don't know about us. And if there was a new brewery opening for credit, if you're going to get a little bit more, everybody would know about it. But when you're established, when you've been around, it's a double-edged sword. You have the tradition, but a lot of people have not thought about you in a few years and it's like, oh, is that still around? And so we're trying to get out there a little bit more. Show phase, talk to people about our history and our product, and just really get people excited about what's happening in their community. And go visit the group. Sorry, the tap room. Yeah, just a tap room, please do. So Chris, this is the kind of conversation I had hoped for. I knew you'd deliver. You've got a genuinely remarkable journey, I think, in this industry, which is fantastic and fascinating. So you're one of those people. You could get the smile, the sense that you really love this industry. You love beer. 50 breweries last year. You're not just doing that because you're doing research. You're doing it because you love this industry. So I get it, and I hope people listening got that as well. And I can't wait to see really what you do with old credit. I know it's only been like I said less than two years, but already you can already get the sense that the wheels are in motion and change is coming and change while respecting the legacy of what's been dealt already. So wishing you and the whole crew, Rolfie down at poor credit and incredible year ahead, and appreciate you coming on. Thank you. Thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that's it. That's all folks. Episode 60 with Chris Conway, general manager at Old Credit Brunco has moved from the mass ton to the fermenters. If you enjoyed our conversation or any other episodes, please leave a review or a comment wherever you get your podcasts. It genuinely helps more than you know. Today's episode is filled by cans of sunny side session IPA, big on the taste, low on the Alcuhuki Hall, a springtime, summertime, anytime treat, which you can now find all over Ontario at the beer store, or else you'll go select grocery stores, convenience stores, and at Bogeylb retail stores. Cans are also available online at Great Lakes Beershop.ca for free local home delivery for $65 a case. You can visit the brewery at 30 Queen Elizabeth Boulevard in a tuba coat, or grab some delicious eats and fresh pours at our brew pub at 11 Lorde Darvers Street in Toronto. If you have any content you'd love to hear us discuss on the show, guest ideas, or just want to tell us what you're drinking, drop us a line at [email protected]. Until next time, please remember to keep tipping your glass of fresh GLB in the right direction, supporting local never tasted sooo good. Ain't that right, bye. To learn more about what's happening at Great Lakes Brewery, visit GreatLegspier.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter or follow Great Lakes Beer on your favorite social media platforms. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]