Bellwoods Brewery

Bellwoods began as a small brewery, and pub in downtown Toronto. We officially opened our doors to the public in April 2012, and spent the majority of the first few years working increasingly unhealthy schedules to avoid running out of beer. Spoiler alert: we often failed.

After heading into our third or fourth busy summer season with the heavy realization that we couldn’t keep up – with demand, our punishing production schedule, or our very bad habit of working through lunch and arriving at peak hanger crises – we decided to begin the thorough planning and bureaucratic hoop jumping that would result in a second production facility. Those were some long, busy, stressful years, and it’s only because we’ve been able to put some time between now and then that we can laugh at the trials, triumphs, mental breakdowns, breakthroughs, near-fatal caffeine consumption, exciting releases, hyperbolic lows, barely concealed panic attacks, calculated risks, and inescapable insomnia that characterized much of them.