C’est What’s history as a brewery dates back to founder George’s formative experiences as a home brewer. Initially attracted to the idea of a seemly inexhaustible supply of inexpensive beer, he soon found that the best reason to DIY in the 1980s was flavour. In those days you could try any two brews selected from the “wall of beer” at the “Brewers’ Retail” and be hard pressed to tell any difference beyond the design of the label.
In the early 1990s the rise of brew your own shops gave C’est What the opportunity to add some overlooked and unexplored beer styles to our draught menu without sacrificing any precious customer space for equipment. We first brewed at Select Brewing on Mowat Avenue. Although it was set up as a malt extract brewery, the proprietors helped us add full grain flavour by fashioning a makeshift mash tun out of spare parts. After production, the wort would be transported in 50L plastic carboys back to the restaurant in the back of an old Nissan Sentra. Once back at the pub, the yeast would be pitched and the remainder of the usual brewing would be carried out with bits of jury-rigged equipment. It is during was during this time that Toronto’s original Coffee Porter was born.
After a couple of years, we moved production out to Simon Cowe’s Lakeside Brewing, near The Beach. This is where Simon developed the first Hemp Ale recipe for us. It is also where we crossed paths with Alan Moore of Al’s Cask Ale fame. Al would be our brewmaster through a foray in contract brewing at Trafalgar Brewing where we bottled the Coffee Porter in 625 mL bottles for sale at the LCBO.
Over the past couple of decades, we have produced most of our house brews at Durham Brewing, Bruce Halstead’s largely one-man show in Pickering. Bruce’s attention to detail, love and understanding of balanced brews, and obsessively cleaned brewery were a good fit for us. So good a fit, that in 2021 we turned our common-law marriage of convenience into a bigger commitment: C’est What Durham Brewing.
The opening of Brewing at the Market – a nano-brewery, beer store and tasting room, in the St. Lawrence at Market Street and The Esplanade, is the latest chapter in this long beer odyssey.