Brewery construction set to begin

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Published on Thursday, September 10, 2015

Farmery co-founders Chris (left) and Lawrence Warwaruk (right) and Bob Mazer (centre)

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The Neepawa Banner

If all goes to plan, by next spring, Neepawa will be home to North America’s first estate brewery.  On Sept. 3, Farmery announced a deal to purchase the former Mazer Equipment building on Highway 5 North in Neepawa. The goal to have it brewing and offering tours for the spring of 2016.

“It’s been four years since we announced our estate brewery vision and launched our Farmery Premium Lager, and a year-and-a-half since we’ve been on Dragon’s Den,” says Chris Warwaruk, co-owner of Farmery Estate Brewery. “Every year, we’ve been working on our farm and had successful harvests of our premium malt barley and have been growing and establishing our hop yard to the point where we will be commercially harvesting it this fall.”

Farmery Estate Brewery, once established, will be North America’s first “estate brewery”, where the brewery not only brews beer but also grows the ingredients that go into the beer, thereby ensuring premium quality right from the farm to the customer’s hand. It’s worth to note that many breweries are sourcing their ingredients as locally as possible and it’s a trend that’s not going away.

“We’ve been doing grassroots marketing and getting our message out about what we want Farmery to be: local, prairie-grown and produced,” adds Lawrence Warwaruk, the other co-founder of Farmery. “We want to use ingredients sourced from us and other rural farmers as locally as possible. After all, the best malted barley is grown on the prairies, so this is where we need to be - out in the country.”

Lawrence and Chris believe that supporting a grass roots initiative is what will resonate with existing and future customers.

“Once you try how real beer tastes, made with all grain ingredients done the traditional way in small batches, you won’t want to go back to the macro-styled beer made with cheap adjuncts and corn syrup,” says Lawrence.

Chris and Lawrence grew the ingredients for their beer, and were getting their Farmery Premium Lager partner-brewed by Muskoka Brewery of Ontario. Focusing on marketing and building their own niche with a supportive customer base was paramount, building the brewery ,on the other hand, was going to take more time and a lot more money.

Then an opportunity arose. As Chris and Lawrence were exploring different options of how they wanted to get the brewery going, they noticed that the local Mazer Group Dealership was moving out of their building.

We called the number on the sign and the owner of Mazer Group, Bob Mazer picked up the phone. ‘Bob, we want to look at your building for a brewery,”’ says Lawrence. “From that point, the process seemed like it took forever, but after a little over a year, we were able to strike a deal with Bob.”

Bob Mazer believed in the boys and the Farmery Estate Brewery vision enough to invest in Farmery. “It’s the right fit and it makes sense for a great community like Neepawa,” said Mazer.

The added genuine touch is that the building used to house farming machinery and implements. There is ample room to construct a brew house, taproom, gift store and outdoor space to hold large events.

The Neepawa location gives the brewery the double advantage of accessing visitors going through the town of Neepawa as well as providing proximity for tours of the hops yard and barley fields.

“It’s about giving the public a very exclusive opportunity to not only see how the beer is made in the brewery, but to actually walk out into the barley field and hop yard to touch the ingredients that go into our beer,” says Lawrence. “Out of the thousands of breweries in North America, Farmery will be the first brewery to provide this prairie experience!”

“It’s great to see our hard work starting to pay off,” said Chris. “And the best thing of all is that once this brewery gets built and we get to start brewing beer on site, we will have completed the circle of what we said we were going to do all along by being Farmery Estate Brewery. It’s going to be exciting!”