Our bottles are here! We had a lot of hoops to jump through to get to this stage and we’re now distributing our Hogsback Lager in bottles to LCBO stores in the city. Check the “Find Our Beer” link on the website to check which LCBO outlets have the beer. Now, you can purchase our beer to have at home…while watching the game!
We’ve also started distributing our bottles to several restaurants in the city. Check the “Find Our Beer” link to see the new restaurants and bars who are serving Hogsback Lager.
Cheers!!
We’ve wended our way through the approval process, working with the LCBO, and have now received provisional acceptance from the LCBO that they will carry our bottles, woo hoo! In parallel, we developed and refined our label and box artwork and you can now see the box for the first time. These have been approved by the LCBO and are currently being printed and we will shortly complete the final step which is to submit a production example of the bottled beer in our box to receive final approval from the LCBO. If all goes well we hope to be showing up in Ottawa area LCBO stores by mid-November. Please ask your local LCBO why they aren’t carrying us 
The box and bottles have been designed by our great partners at Insight Communications to further reinforce our brand and for the first time for us they feature a background of Hog’s Back falls in the artwork
HogsBack 6-Pack Box
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Let us know what you think!
HogsBack Vintage Lager bottle
Hi everyone and thanks for your continued support. One question that we get asked regularly is “when will we be in bottles?” and so we are pleased to report that we have been making steady progress with the LCBO and that we hope to have them on local store shelves by early to mid November, just in time for the Christmas rush. I’ve attached an image of what our bottle should look like and will attach an image of the box in the coming weeks. It will be sold as a 6-pack of 341ml bottles in a closed box. We’ll advise as we get closer where they can be found around Ottawa.
In other news we have been extended by the Heart & Crown on Preston to stay on guest tap until the end of October so thanks to Alex and Steve and their staff for the opportunity.
Cheers!
Well it’s been about five months into starting to sell beer and it’s been quite a learning experience. We’re so encouraged by the feedback we’ve received at the various events we’ve gone to and the responses to the blog so we’re determined to do a better job of posting information of what’s going on. I think we’re getting into the groove now of the ordering and sales cycle and just need to get out to meet more establishment owners to get our beer into more places. We hope to expand more into eastern Ottawa and Orleans as we’ve had a number of requests from people out there to get into somewhere more local for them.
Exciting news is that we’ve begun the process with the LCBO to get our product approved for sale in bottles. This then gives us the option of selling in the LCBO, selected Beer Stores and directly to licensed establishments in the Ottawa area. This process will take a few more months but we hope to have this all ready and approved by November. We will package a 6-pack box and we are working on the artwork right now for the label and box. Fun stuff to try and find the right visuals and colours to reinforce our brand and we’ll post what it will look like once we settle on the design.
Around town we have been lucky to be put on guest tap at the Heart & Crown on Preston since the 1st of August and that has been going great. Steve, Stephanie and the staff have been doing a great job selling and our volume has grown to the point that in our third week there we were already one of the very top selling products in the bar and that includes anything they sell of beer, wine and spirits. Woo hoo!
Cheers!
In case you missed it we were very fortunate to get an opportunity to be on the local A Channel morning show to talk about our beer. Pretty cool to be on the set, meet everyone and get our brief moment of TV time. Check it out on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a18pQj16xFc
In other news it was a great coup for us to be given the opportunity to have our beer trialled at the Heart & Crown on Preston. The staff have been great there and have been instrumental in selling a LOT of beer in the first two weeks. We’re on tap there until the end of September so swing by and give it a try.
Thanks for your support
Hello everyone and sorry we’ve not been blogging as often as we had planned. We’ve been running around doing a lot of things to get our feet under ourselves but I think we’re getting into a groove. We are now doing all of our own deliveries with the van we procured and that seems to be going well, thanks to Jerry for that, as he’s not just the delivery guy he’s one of the owners. We’ve also been out to a few events to showcase the beer a little and gather feedback and have been really encouraged by the very positive response we have been getting from people on our recipe and branding.
With all of our logistics now sorted out (we hope) we just need to get out there and talk to more bar and restaurant owners about our product and give them a chance to sample it. It is certainly harder than we expected to get the timing right to find establishments with a tap open or coming open so we just have to be patient and talk to a lot more establishments. Such is learning the beer business. One example of learning the business is that looking to procure branded patio umbrellas in June is waaaay too late for this summer so we’ve missed the boat for this year and we’ll have to get to get on that in January to be ready for our clients for next year.
Thanks for your support and ask for us wherever you buy draft beer!
So apologies for not blogging sooner but we have been really busy in our first month on the street. Tremendous thanks to those establishments who have been early adopters to take us on and put us on tap and you can find them on our website. We also had a tremendous experience at the Bon Appetit Charity food show at the Aberdeen Pavilion on the 4th of May. Check out the attached photo of the booth we had at this show before the hordes descended upon us. I think this was a very valuable event for us to expose more than a thousand people to our brand and we were more than happy with the positive feedback on the flavour of our beer. We look forward to doing more of these charity events and getting ourselves out into the community.
So a recurring question we have been regularly asked is “what kind of beer are you goingto make?” and likewise the recurring question we asked everybody else is “what kind of beer do you think we should make?” So over the first 8 months of the 16 month process we gathered opinion on what the market may like, what we would like, what is likely to sell, etc etc. Some of the informed opinion we received from industry consultants was to not stray too far from mainstream on our first style because we needed to be able to reach a wide audience and you don’t want to turn people off. On the other hand we were told to not create a ‘copy cat’ beer of a common style as we’d be lost in the crowd. So we tried to take this all in and along with ton’s of free advice from many all while remembering that free advice is often worth what you pay for it.
We first decided to go with a lager as that represents 80% of beer sold in Ontario we were told. From there we talked about the types of beers that we enjoyed and kind of came up with a mantra of “a little more flavour, a little more colour” and started from there. Once we started working with a brewer to help us develop our recipe we also decided to not limit ourselves to the parameters of a particular style but rather aim for a pleasing outcome. We brewed three batches in Ottawa starting right from the grain of the chosen malt types and narrowed the flavour and colour to a pretty close rendition of where we wanted to be. From there we took this sample and recipe to Cool Brewing in Toronto where we worked with Michael Duggan, master brewmaster who founded Mill St Brewery, who took us the last mile to our first production batch.
That batch arrived in Ottawa on Friday and we are now out hitting the streets to get ourselves into establishments on draught. We really like the final product ourselves and are looking forward to feedback from the marketplace. I’d describe it as a flavourful lager for sure and maybe a tweak here or a tweak there in the future but we’re confident we’re close to the mark.
Ask for it, give it a try and let us know what you think.
Cheers
So about 4 months into the education process a regular topic of discussion had become what do we call this notional brewery under consideration. This discussion went on for quite a while with a variety of names being thrown around. We all have an aviation connection so aviation themed names were suggested like Old Aerodrome Brewing Company. Historical names were considered like Dominion Brewing Company or Empire Brewing Company but none really had the feel we were looking for. Names were thrown out purely as a joke like The Yellow Snow Brewing Company only to find out there is a beer by that very name in the US, look it up, and you wouldn’t want to get in a pissing contest with them over rights to that name
Our goal was to find a name that had a local connection but if you weren’t local it would still work as a name and ideally something that would lend itself to an easily recognizable symbol. So some local names started to be considered like Rideau Brewing Co. or Bytown Brewing Co. but each had some issues we felt. Then after researching a list of historical local names that were read out loud at a meeting the one that seemed to reasonate with everyone and fit the bill was “Hogs Back” which describes the local falls which has a lot of history but also lends itself to a very recognizable symbol. Our website will describe the historical connection between Hog’s Back Falls and the very first brewer in the Ottawa Valley. So armed with that name we approached Phil Jones of Insight Communications, known to me from pick-up hockey and that he had some sort of advertising company (he claimed) and they took on the job to run with it to produce our branding and logo you see above. They’ve done a terrific job and that extends to our web-site to be revealed this week.
The unique hog for those who follow swine is a breed called British Saddleback that used to be very plentiful and are apparently known for their fine bacon. A name the hog contest will follow at some point.
Next up became what style should we brew……
So with the four of us thinking it would be good to work together again the challenge became to find the right idea. Jerry wanted to push his hobby of men’s pairs figure-skating into a business but the rest of us weren’t comfortable with that….ever. Then it turns out three of the four of us were at the same military simulation tradeshow in Orlando in Dec 08 and were all out one night with a large group imbibing to some excess. The idea of a new micro-brewery in Ottawa was suggested by somebody that night and miraculously the idea was remembered the next day. How many ideas to benefit humanity never make it to the next day because nobody can remember the brilliance of the night before?
So now investigating that idea turned up a number of resources who have been very supportive in sharing their knowledge and experience while we learned what it would take to get into this business. One of the first people I talked to was Allen Sneath who had written a great book called “Brewed in Canada” that described the history of commercial brewing in Canada and after reading that I found him on the internet and contacted him. He was very helpful and in turn put me on to to John Hay of the Ontario Craft Brewers who has met with us several times and also shared a great deal of knowledge. John put us on to some industry expertise who reviewed and commented on our developing business plans. Thanks to Doug Berchtold and Drew Knox for their industry expertise in advising us. Locally we met with other brewers including Tim and Steve from Beau’s All Natural Brewing in Vankleek Hill, Ron Moir and Donna Warner of Heritage Brewing here in Ottawa and Patrick Fiori of the Clocktower BrewPub. Special thanks to the great folks at Beau’s for the number of questions they have answered for us.
So we got to a point of thinking this really could work in Ottawa and then started thinking about what to call this brewing company…..
