Brew Life Story

The foundation for GoodLot Farmstead Brewing Co. beer was laid in 2011, when Gail and Phil Winters planted the first crop of organic hops on their 28-acre farm on Shaws Creek Road near Alton. As their regenerative farm practices proved successful, they launched GoodLot in 2017. Today the Winters grow eight varieties of hops and produce 16 varieties of beer, as well as other beverages in an eco-renovated barn powered by a 20-kilowatt solar collector on the roof. Overseeing the process is brewer Mike Brooks. He doesn’t like being called “brewmaster” – too pretentious.

Mike has a degree in computer science, but decided he didn’t want to sit in a chair all day looking at code. He worked as a shift brewer before coming to GoodLot and now enjoys managing the process from end to end. Tall and easygoing, he has a ready smile and a sense of humour that finds many laughs in everyday life. He says his big boots make him look taller, but when I slipped on the wet floor on a recent visit, I realized why he wears them. An epoxy-coated concrete floor slopes toward a drain trough that runs down the middle of the room to the double door at the end, and throughout the process, anything that pours onto the floor is quickly hosed down the drain.

The floor is about as clean as the tanks arrayed along the east wall, and as neat as the tables, pallets of grain bags and paraphernalia along the other. A small pile of stainless steel pipes, elbows, clamps and probes awaits various steps of the brewing process. The tanks on the east wall are fermenters, and the occasional burp in the buckets of water at the ends of the vent pipes announce the process is underway.

Bags of oats, malted barley and rice hulls sit on the platform that provides access to three stainless steel tanks: the water heater, the mash tun (a tall, cylindrical vessel) and the wort kettle. This is where the brewing process begins.

Today’s beer is an IPA – India pale ale. Mike explains there are many different recipes with varied tastes and strengths, but this one is light, hoppy and refreshing – very popular in warm weather. It takes about seven hours to get the brew going.

6:30 a.m. Mike gets up at his home in Guelph, feeds the cat, drinks two coffees and grabs a piece of toast. “It’s a 35- to 40-minute drive,” he says, “mostly back roads, which is an opportunity to wake up, listen to some music.” Mike is also a musician, which explains the guitars hanging on the wall of his open-plan office space. Between steps in the brewing process, he sometimes grabs a little time to practise.

8 a.m. He starts a fan on the floor near the workbench and lays out the tools he’ll need: a refractometer to provide a rough measure of the sugar content, a pH meter, a hydrometer for a more accurate measure of the sugar, a bucket of cold water to chill samples before measuring and two buckets for adding the hops. There’s also a scale, brewer salts and food-grade acid for adjusting the pH. “Along with that is a clipboard with today’s brew sheet,” he says, “and the sheet for the last time I made today’s brew, so I can cross-reference to make sure things are going according to the last batch or I can make pivots to change today’s batch.”

8:30 a.m. The process begins. Mike starts with the rice hulls, a filtering medium that settles to the false bottom of the mash tun. Over that layer, he adds hot water, oats and malt in turn, little by little, to make sure the grains are well blended and the temperature stays about 66 C. 

9 a.m. He closes the lid of the mash tun and starts mixing to create the wort, the first liquid in the process. The mixing lasts 75 minutes. Meanwhile, he prepares the fermenter tank, where the wort will become beer, but he also keeps an eye on the mash process. “I cut the stirrers at times,” Mike explains. “I want it to sit and chill so the grains can relax into a flat surface for the liquid to pass through without it caving in or channelling.”

10:15 a.m. The wort is transferred to the kettle. Mike adds more heated water at the same time. “The recipe is way too strong at first,” he says. “So while running that off, you can rainfall fresh water on top to pass through the grains in the mash and extract leftover nutrients. It’s called sparging.” This will get the fullest flavour and sugar out of the grains.

With all the wort in the kettle, Mike raises the temperature and cooks the brew for an hour. Meanwhile, the chickens get their treat. Since early this morning, the chickens have been hanging around the brew house door, pecking at gravel, and when Mike empties the mash tun, they get first dibs on the spent grains. (The GoodLot logo incorporates a chicken and a hop flower.)

Interrupting the chickens, Jean-François Morin from neighbouring Chickadee Hill Farm picks up the bulk of the spent grain to feed his livestock. GoodLot works with a few of the neighbours. They need more hops than their own, so they buy hops from other farms, using all-Ontario hops in every beer. They also collaborate with Everdale to supply their farm stand, and partner with Wastenot Farms, which collects GoodLot food waste and returns it as vermicompost for their soil.

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1:30 p.m. As the boiling time ends, Mike whirlpools the wort to settle any leftover solids. They will pancake in the bulb at the base of the kettle and the liquid is taken from a tap on the side. “That way,” he says, “it’s a nice, bright, finished wort.”

As the wort is pumped into the fermenter, it goes through a heat exchanger and is quickly cooled to about 16 C. “This gives the ferment a super gentle kickoff because I’ll throw the yeast in at this point for a gentler end result. Once you’ve added all your yeast, you go away and let it do its work.” Fermentation will continue for three to four weeks before the beer is canned and ready for sale. During that time, Mike will add the hops.

But today Mike must prepare for a double batch tomorrow. So he cleans the mash tun and all the associated equipment and stacks the bags of malt, oats and rice hulls on the platform so he’ll be ready to go first thing.

At 4:30, he sets out for home, where he’ll feed the cat again, then either relax for the evening or head out to rehearse for his next gig with the Guelph-based band The Flamingos or one of the other bands he sometimes plays with.