Steel & Oak Brewing Company was hopping at the 2016 B.C. Beer Awards.
S&O took first place in the European Dark Beer category with its Dark Lager and in the Specialty Beer category with its Roggen Weizen at the recent competition in Vancouver. Its Weizenbock won third place in the German Wheat Beer category.
“We were really happy. You go in there and there are some really good breweries that don’t get to take home anything,” said Jorden Foss, co-owner of the local brewery. “Even just winning one is always something you feel very fortunate about and proud of.”
Not only is Steel & Oak getting better at “dialing in” its recipes and improving the overall quality of its beer, Foss said it’s also getting better at determining what categories to submit entries.
“It is a bit of an art, choosing the right categories. Some beers we switched categories three times, because they’re so close,” he said. “It’s about finding the right category that fits your beer and making sure that it’s of top quality when you send it in.”
This seventh annual B.C. Beer Awards, which celebrate the best in craft brewing from around B.C., featured more than 750 beers from 73 breweries in 30 categories. A year after taking home one award, Steel and Oak tied with four breweries for eighth place overall.
“We like to think our beer is a pretty high quality,” Foss said. “We always go in feeling positive but you never know. When it’s something that’s judged, it’s judged subjectively. You don’t know if someone is trying your beer later on in the day when they’ve had a lot of beers. There’s a lot of things that happen that might cause somebody to feel differently. We were fortunate to do as well as we did.”
Foss and fellow craft beer enthusiast James Garbutt sought to focus on quality over the bottom line when they started Steel & Oak in 2013. They hired Peter Schulz as the brewmaster and secured a site at 1319 Third Ave. for their brewery and tasting room, which opened in 2014.
“There was only a few other craft breweries doing the same thing we are that were open,” Foss said. “To be entirely honest, we basically threw a dart at a dart board and hoped for the best. We had no idea what the production was going to be and we have been fortunate enough to have a team that has really good palates and brewers that make incredible beer.”
Things are going to get even more “interesting” at the New West brewery in the new year, as it follows up on a recent mini expansion with another growth spurt.
“We will have gone from basically being able to produce 120 hectolitres at any given time to being able to produce 570 hectolitres at any given time,” Foss said. “We will have jumped up quite a bit in terms of production capability in the first couple of years here, which means that for the people in New West we will have more room to make more interesting beers for the tasting room. So people can expect more specialized beers and limited releases and fun stuff to come down and try.”
If he had a chance for a do-over, Foss said he would have gotten “a bigger space and bigger everything” from the get-go.
“But you don’t know. We were just two 30-year-old guys with not a ton of money trying to do something cool,” he said. “We are just fortunate it’s turned out the way it has.”
Once the upcoming expansion is complete, S&O will have maxxed out its growth potential on the existing premises.
“I’d like to think as long as our landlords let us, we would always keep this location, but we are always on the lookout for what Steel & Oak 2.0 might look like or any other projects that we might want to do within the city or abroad in the future,” Foss said. “For us, we have put so much love into this space that I just don’t ever see us leaving it. We have put a lot of money into it, too.”
