Intro by Shannon Hart and Conlan Donahue. Interview and transcription conducted by Shannon Hart and Conlan Donahue.
“Wow, this is beautiful,” We whisper to each other as we slip through the large metal gate into an outdoor patio, lush with plants and brightly coloured chairs. A door opens to our left and Kelti Baird welcomes us to Theoretically Brewing Co., the business she created with Kris Fischer. We step into the cool air of the building, grateful to be out of the September sun. There are vines crawling across the ceiling towards the door, beckoning us into the brewery. The inside is vibrant yet cosy; there are jewel tones and patterned fabric to get lost amongst, accented by southern Alberta décor. It isn’t hard to imagine the taproom, though quiet today, bustling with laughter and endless flights of delicious ales as people gather to discuss politics, pets, and everything in between.
Kelti is easy to talk to; she’s quick to smile and her excitement for both beer and history allow for effortless conversation flow. The passion for Theoretically Brewing, everything it is and everything it could be, become readily apparent as the interview progresses. Kelti’s eyes light up as she tells us about the intricacies of different brews and the importance local pubs and taverns have held within communities for centuries. The role of the brewery within Lethbridge is taken very seriously and this is evident as she states various goals in terms of community and sustainability. Her dreams are so big that they’re almost frightening, but her eyes are clear enough when she talks about them that you believe achievement is guaranteed. The Greek philosopher Epicurus once said, “We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.” Theoretically Brewing Co. certainly seems like a place where a friend is never far when looking for great company and even better beer.
1. If you could walk us through a typical day here at the brewery, what would that look like?
There’s a lot of different facets to this business that I don’t think a lot of people realise when they get started. Production is a six-hour day of meticulously brewing beer and that starts with picking your recipes; you weigh out the grains you need for it because there are different malted barleys that we use. You mill that, mash it in, and then go through the whole brewery process. After that, there’s a lot of cleaning and housekeeping that needs to be done because you have to keep everything extremely sanitary inside the tanks. Fermentation takes anywhere between 10 and 21 days depending on the batch and in that time, you’re processing the other batches. Packaging is a full day of kegging and canning for a 500 L batch, and that’s done with various staff members working on the canning line. There’s a lot of work we’re slowly automating instead of having, say, 7 people on a bottling crew hand-bottling all of our batches, which we couldn’t do over Covid.
We relied heavily on amazing friends and family who came in twice a week and we would bottle an entire batch by hand. We had already ordered a canning line in January of 2020 and Covid hit in March of 2020 and shut us down. We couldn’t bring in anyone so that stopped our production until the canning line got here in May. It was built in Calgary, so we didn’t even have to outsource that. That means that one person can do the packaging that seven people used to do. Then there’s the sales side, so it’s completely different. We do have a sales team and I’m part of that, even though I used to do the brewing. The salespeople interact with our wholesale clients, our retailers, and our restaurants. Then we also have off sales at the front, so customers can buy directly from us; we run the taproom as well. There are 8 or 9 spinning plates that we always keep in the air.
2. Do you try and locally source ingredients as much as you can?
We’re proudly 100% Canadian. That means even if the ingredient isn’t necessarily from here, we will source it from a Canadian supplier. We use Canadian middlemen and make sure that we’re reintroducing the money that we’re spending back into our local economy first before it goes elsewhere. We’re lucky in Alberta; we grow the best brewing barley in the world, so we have really high-end crops that we can access. The global situation around climate change and geo-political situations going on in Europe and Asia all have an effect on the cost of our ingredients even if we do source it as local as we possibly can because those international contracts have to be supplied before the local contracts. We get a lot of our hops from a hops farm out in Taber, now called “Flatland Hops”; they’re a wonderful family growing hops for the local industry and for B.C. as well. We support local as hard as we can; even our brewing equipment was built here in Lethbridge by Charlton & Hill. Keep local people employed.
3. Starting a food-centric business in Alberta and the challenges with Covid, what major challenges do you think you had to overcome with that?
We started in 2015 so we were open long before the pandemic hit. There’s a lot of regulation in Alberta, especially around alcohol manufacturing. This is a holdover from prohibition and it’s in every province. We actually started looking at opening a brewery in 2012 when I was graduating university and then the reason why we didn’t at that time was the minimum capacity requirements in the province. What that means is if you wanted to open a brewery in Alberta, you had to have a minimum capacity within your first six months of 500,000 litres a year. You had to have enough tank space to brew that amount, it’s a solid hundred times what we do now. That was a rule that was put in place at the end of prohibition in Alberta in 1924; they repealed it in 2013 which is why in 2014 through now, you have this massive boom in the brewing industry in Alberta because we were able to start as small as we wanted to and grow organically within our market. There’s still a lot of regulations from prohibition that are kind of playing havoc with brewers, especially in Alberta. One of the major factors in our market is that we’re a highly competitive market in Alberta. We’re still dealing with a lot of prohibition laws and it’s because each province came out of prohibition at a different time and formulated their own liquor industry.
4. What kind of role does water play in beer production?
When you think of the content of beer, it’s 5% alcohol while the other 95% is water; it’s just water that’s been infused with different things. What we essentially do when making beer is make barley tea and when we break down the complex carbohydrates in the barley, all of those sugars get absorbed into the water and we pull those out of the grain. We’re exchanging the liquid content, the sugar content of the grain, with water. We like the liquid; that’s the stuff that we drink; that’s 95% water. It takes about 14 L of water on average across the industry to produce 1 L of beer. Between all of the cleaning that also has to happen and the water that grows the barley and the hops is included in that, it takes a lot of water to make 1 L of beer. That’s why it’s such a valuable resource to the industry.
5. In what ways are you trying to make the whole system more efficient?
We would’ve loved to have started with a water recapture facility already built into our brewing house; you come out of the process with a lot of hot water that can easily be recycled into other parts of the system, like into the cleaning processes. If only we had tanks and filtration systems to recapture it and process it properly. Fortunately, all the chemicals that we do use in our process are all food grade and either they break down bio-organically or we can just eat them; it’s very safe environmentally. To brew beer, it’s water intensive; we would like to be able to cut it down or at least recapture what we’re tossing down the drain. We do try to be as water friendly as we possibly can and we recapture a lot of the water from our brewing process and actually feed our plants on the patio with it. Our hydroponic system uses it, but what we’re able to recycle is only a small portion of what we really should be.
6. What’s done with the waste products of the process, such as barley mash?
Right now, it’s being picked up by a local family who feeds it to their livestock. Some of it is picked by a local baker who exclusively makes dog treats. We’re a dog friendly facility so we provide the grain to her for free; she gives us some of the treats back and then we can hand them out to our four-legged guests. They get to partake in some of the beer products too even though there’s no alcohol in the dog treats. We have also diverted all of our organic material out of landfills, it’s all been either gone for livestock feed or ingredients for people food. My mother-in-law dried some of it and made it into flour and baked with it and it’s amazing; it’s just the extra processing that takes time. We’ve sent some to the bio-digester here in town as well.
7. Why have you made the decision to use GMO products in your beer?
Because that is what’s on the market. There is very little non-GMO grain and barley being grown, especially in Canada. It’s perfectly safe to use, a lot of the GMO products that we use are hardier strains than what has historically been produced. If we could see other varieties being grown in our marketplace, a little more biodiversity would be amazing. There are different types of barley and ancient grains that can go into brewing as well. If we can get our hands on some of that being grown locally, that would be phenomenal, but that’s basically conventional grain. Conventional barley is all modified and that is what’s available to us.
8. Aside from dealing with prohibition laws inconveniencing you, are there any positive aspects of history influencing the brewery and making your beer?
We look at the brewing industry and we look at our place in the community from a historical lens. When you think about places that didn’t experience a prohibition, we look at Europe as a model. For instance, Germany never had prohibition, Belgium never had prohibition, England never had prohibition. If you look at those places and historically what those places have done with their beer manufacturer, a city the size of Lethbridge or smaller than Lethbridge would support eight breweries our size. Our role in the community historically has been as brewers the gathering place. We’re the town hall, you know? We’re the tavern, the pub, all these places. In mediaeval England, the landowners would go to the local pub to collect their biannual taxes, tithes, or rents because it was the gathering place. Everyone got together; if there was an election, it was announced at the local pub. That’s historically what we are is the gathering place and that’s kind of how we view our space in Lethbridge. We’re here to support the community as much as the community is here to enjoy the product and support us, hopefully. We do everything through that lens, and that’s why we source as locally as we do. We try to use greener technologies where we can. We are hopefully looking towards a greener future and adapting technologies into our systems that allow us to be greener. CO2 recapture is a big deal in the brewing industry because we produce a lot of it. Fermentation produces CO2 but if we can recapture that and recycle it back into the system, then that’s one less output. We’re also aware that we’re in a desert and if our glaciers go away, where does the water come from? So, we are very in tune with various environmental things going on. It impacts us directly; we saw a geopolitical war in Europe impacted Ukraine, which is the breadbasket of Europe. They grow almost all of Europe’s barley. Pakistan just flooded; they can’t get their crop out. India had a heat dome, they couldn’t get their crop in. It’s basically Canada right now and Australia and that’s it. All these factors come into play and I’m a tiny brewery in Lethbridge. Which is why protecting our water here is so vital because that allows us to grow the grain that we literally need to survive.
9. As descriptive as possible, can you tell us about the sounds and smells of a well brewed beverage?
There’s two different kinds of methods for brewing beer. One is you’re very meticulous about your science and you have yeast strains that are propagated in scientific labs; that’s what we use. These are predictable microorganisms that will have a certain effect in your product and there’s also wild fermentation. For clean fermentation, we make the product that actually launched the brewery, our stout. Chris and I were sitting around his backyard, drinking our stout that was the homebrew version and we used to call it black hole beer; so, our stout is named BHB Stout and it’s blackhole beer, and that was the beer that launched the brewery. That beer should be served at cellar temperature, not fridge temperature. There are certain styles that do very well a little bit warmer and out of that you can get dark chocolate, espresso, all the toasted malt flavours, but we don’t add dark chocolate or espresso to the beer. That all comes from the roast and malt and balance with the hops. That’s just the chemicals and how your tongue picks it up. That should be very low carbonation, quite smooth on the tongue, nice but not super heavy. Still refreshing but basically, we have a little bit of stone fruit notes in our stout as well so it’s closer to really good German dark chocolate or Black Forest cake.
On to the second one: wild fermentation. We have a beer in the tank right now that is a farmhouse ale. It is brewed with a yeast from Norway called Fike and it has imparting notes of cherry and grapefruit, which is a weird combination. We fermented it really hot too. Normally, you want to ferment ales around 25 degrees maximum and down to 18 degrees. Some go up to like 30-35 degrees; for hepavisons and stuff, you get better flavour out of the ale yeasts that way. The Fike yeast we fermented at 40 degrees is very, very hot and it is all weird flavours right now. I’m really looking forward to how that one is going to come out. The brewer put juniper boughs and juniper berries into the mash so it’s got very ginny notes as well.
10. Where would you like to see Theoretically in 5 years? What would it take to get there and what would get in the way?
Prior to Covid, our plan for 2022 and 2023 was to build an addition onto the building that we’re currently in and move from a bi-hectolitre system to a 20 hectolitre system. We would quadruple our production capacity and basically sixteen times our holding capacity so we would grow significantly as a company. Covid put a damper on that, so we are now moving that to a new 5 year plan. Right now, our goal is to stabilise coming out of Covid because Covid shut down our main distribution channels; most of our product in the craft brewing industry is moved by restaurants and they were essentially closed for 2 years. In 5 years, I would love to see us at that 20 hec production point. I would love to see us in a facility that is 100% solar-powered, that has always been part of the plan. That water reclamation system that we talked about earlier is also part of that plan, and we are currently talking to a hemp crate manufacturer in Alberta to use hemp in our building process instead of traditional construction materials. We’re wanting to expand, we’re wanting to grow, we want to do it as economically, environmentally friendly, and as sustainably as possible to make sure that our operation is viable well into the future when we’re turning off fossil fuels. Pending approval, we want to de-pave our whole parking lot and put in a pocket park as well and recycle any water that’s not recycled into the system into bioswales. We’re also actively consulting with the area redevelopment plan for the warehouse district here and encouraging the use of bioswales. We’re looking at ways to positively reinforce nature within the urban centre of Lethbridge.
Watch Kelti Baird’s episode of OWC:Eats!
This was produced by the OWC as part of the "Uniting Rural Producers and Urban Consumers" program, which was made possible by the support of Canadian Agricultural Partnership program, the Government of Alberta, and the Government of Canada.
Thank you to Kelti Baird for her contributions to this project and to bettering the watershed for all those who live, work, and play here.
