What’s Brewing at Graystone
As one of Fredericton’s newer breweries, Graystone Brewing is still perfecting its recipes.
Graystone’s marketing director and assistant manager Zach Atkinson says that since they’re still relatively new, there’s still plenty of work to be done to get their beer to where they want it before thinking about expanding beyond Fredericton.
We caught up with Zach in the Graystone tap house to find out about their latest brews.
What’s the latest beer at Graystone?
We just had the Shivering Songs festival, which Graystone sponsored so we just brewed the Shiver Stout last week. It was our first attempt at a coffee stout. We used Whitney’s cold brew coffee, so local coffee roasters. It has a nice coffee aroma, wasn’t too much coffee taste. It wasn’t overpowering, really smooth. A first attempt at a coffee stout for us for sure.
What’s in the works now?
Right now, it’s sort of in development, but we’re working on this citric pale, which will be a gluten-reduced beer, which is something we were talking about way back when before we really got going. We’re going to see how this first batch works before we do anything with it. In the tap house we sell strictly beer and cider so for anyone who has wheat issues, gluten issues, there’s not a whole lot for them to try except for cider. We’re going to see how that turns out here in the next couple weeks.
What plans do you have for the brewery generally?
The big thing for us right now is [figuring out] how much beer we can create out of this small brewery and tap house … Since [we got started], pretty much every other week we’ve been putting out a different style. So we went from two styles and we’re up to 11 right now with the Shiver Stout. Everything from a pilsner, white IPA, a red, a brown, a pitch stout and more.
The short term is just to keep this place busy, people coming in, enjoying themselves in the tap house. We haven’t really moved outside the city in terms of delivering. As part of the long-term plan, our goal really isn’t to expand outside of Fredericton. We just want to be focused on servicing the restaurants and bars in Fredericton and servicing people in the tap house, doing growlers, crowlers and just working on more and more styles of beer that we’re happy with. We want to make sure the beer we’re putting out is up to our standards and people are responding to it. So before we go getting bigger … there’s always going to be refining. We want to get it down to the point where we’re happy with it each time it comes out.
What’s the deal with crowlers?
People are really excited about it. We don’t see them in the Maritimes. We’ve had a lot of people from Ontario and across Canada come through and they’re saying ‘this is new to us. We haven’t seen this thing.’ … We were able to grab hold of that idea and run with it when we opened.
The benefit to us was the quality of the beer was number one. [With] growlers, the more light that gets to a beer, it starts to degrade the quality of the beer. The idea of a crowler is it’s enclosed, there’s no light getting in. It’s purged with CO2 so there’s carbonation there. It keeps the beer fresher longer … we’ve been told crowlers are good for 60, maybe 60 plus days. The idea is that when you open it at home or wherever, you’re going to feel like you just poured it out of the tap.