CALEB NICKERSON
ROCKLAND Nov. 25, 2020
A local brewery has expanded operations across the river to Ontario.
Brauwerk Hoffman opened the doors of their Campbell’s Bay facility in late 2018, and earlier this month they introduced their new location in Rockland Ont., just east of Ottawa.
Todd Hoffman is the sole owner of the Campbell’s Bay brewery, but said that he is working with . . .
a team on this new venture.
“In Rockland we brought on other partners. The main partner is Eric Mainville, who’s from originally Demers Centre, Allumette Island,” he explained. “Eric he’s a professional brewer as well. He’s the brewer there, he’s managing and running it.”
The new brewery is double the size of the original location, but will be offering up a very similar lineup of German style lagers and ales.
“We’re keeping basically all the same branding. It’s the same styles of beer that we’re brewing there,” Hoffman said. “There will be a couple of styles of beer that will be exclusive to there that are more suited to that demographic and local area, and some of the brands of beer that we have here won’t be over there.”
He said they selected the location because Rockland is an up and coming community, and also a way for them to break into the Ontario market, due to the difficulty of selling alcohol across provincial borders.
“It’s a pretty vibrant community. It’s not the city of Ottawa proper, but it’s like 30 minutes to downtown Ottawa, 20 minutes to Orleans, yet it’s outside of Ottawa so you don’t have as high of taxes,” he said. “It’s a growing community, a lot of people that live in Ottawa are moving out here, so there’s subdivisions being built, there’s a school being built.
“It’s a shame … if we had that cross-border trade we could have done more in Campbell’s Bay. We could have run both jurisdictions out of Campbell’s Bay,” he continued. “You can go into the LCBO and buy beer that’s brewed and made in Germany, but you go to the LCBO in Renfrew or Pembroke, and you can’t get beer that’s brewed 16, 20 kilometres away. It makes no sense. We found a way to circumvent it, to go around it which was a little more costly, to start a facility in Ontario.”
Hoffman said that they outfitted the space with equipment they had to disassemble from an old brewery in Kingston. The pandemic presented some delays in opening up, and has prevented the restaurant portion of the business from operating at full capacity.
“We bought that brewery and we moved it up here, because Kingston’s a little too far for us … we’d seen more potential up here in Rockland,” he said. “It took a while, took us about three weeks to tear it all down in Kingston … The hard thing was, we should have been open sooner than we were, it was right in the heat of COVID, so trades weren’t working, [we were] waiting on supplies, it threw us behind a good three months.”
