The Sault’s Brewery

It is finally here.

After many years of hard work the boys at OutSpoken Brewery are set to have the taps flow into our community.

They have been teasing us for the last couple of months, debuting their product at the Festival of Beer – Part III “The Trilogy”, they were a huge part of Downtown Days in July till they ran out and again stepped up just in time to be part of the first ever “Emergency Festival”.

But now they have indicated that they will have product all the time. Their new system is up and running and fully operational. This means that they will not only be part of the Greyhound’s Season Opener Street Party (September 26th – mark in your calender) but they will have product at Loplops for that weekend as well… and the next weekend… and the one after that.

This is a happy day for our community. We finally have a beer that is ours again. Something that we can be proud of and support.

If we go back a hundred or so years, every little village would have their local brewery. They didn’t ship it out to other villages or towns, what they made was theirs and it was supported by the community that thanked them. Big business changed that. Even Soo Falls Brewery (our first brewery which you can still see written in the bricks of the stack tower at the old Northern Brewery site) fell to this kind of “trend”. Dorans bought Soo Falls as well as breweries in Sudbury and various other small communities. In the late seventies only Labatt, Molson and Dorans were making beer with any consistency. Second round pioneers of the trade like Great Lakes and Black Oak started making changes though. Not too long ago only the bigger centers would have breweries, then mid sized cities would have them (the rule was if you had an OHL team you should have a brewery in your community). Then little dots on the map started getting microbreweries, nanobreweries and even virtual breweries. It is nice to see the cycle come full circle.

But the Sault was left out – a void was left in Sudbury and the Sault with Northern closing. We had missed the micro movement and were left behind becoming the two biggest communities in Ontario without their own brewery. Stack Brewery came along in 2013 to fill the first hole and now OutSpoken has come in to make things right again.

Congrats to Vaughn and Graham for making their dreams come true.

Congrats to Sault Ste Marie for getting their brewery back.

Author

Steve Alexander

Fun loving kinda guy with an appreciation for good beer.