What Makes Our Beer Special: Ingredient Selection

We’ve always had the philosophy of using the best possible ingredients in everything we make and not cutting any corners.

This has led us to initially importing specialized European ingredients similar to those already being used by the Belgians in their Lambic beers. Over time this philosophy has changed as we’re finding that our local ingredients are at least equivalent to the European options and in many cases superior. We’ve discovered this thanks to our partnership with Alberta-based Red Shed Malting, a family run business just down the highway from our brewery. They’ve been supplying us the Unmalted Wheat used in all of our beers. Their wheat makes up 45% of the grain bill of our regular production at the Monolith and is of exceptionally high quality. The fine folks at Red Shed grow us specific varieties of wheat that hit our technical and flavour targets.

The other 55% percent of our grain bill is barley and for the last few years we’ve been using Pilsner Malt from Dingemans, a family-owned maltster operating since 1875! Their barley malt has been used by Belgian brewers for many of the beers we all know and love. As time has passed, we’ve been focusing on an all-Canadian ingredient philosophy for our beers and been working with Red Shed on finding a local barley that fits our requirements. Interestingly this has led them to looking at older varieties of barley that a no longer in vogue but that work well for our technical and flavor targets. We’re pleased to report that search is going well, and we should have local Alberta barley as a key ingredient very soon.

We add whole fruit to a number of our beers at the Monolith. This can be done with either spontaneous or mixed fermentation base beers and the results are amazing. One reason they turn out so well is that our fruit is exclusively supplied by Steve and Dan's Fresh BC Fruit. They have been our sole supplier of fruit since the beginning and if you've had a chance to try any of the Fruitful Pursuits beers you're enjoyed their fruit. Steve and Dan's attention to detail and their close relationship to our team had led to beers like Fruitful Pursuits Quince. Quince wasn't even on our radar and they recommended we try it as they had an amazing crop and we couldn't be happier. Keep watching for more varied fruit beers going forward from the Monolith.

The final, and locally most challenging ingredient is hops. We can grow hops in Alberta, but the industry is still developing and not quite ready for our needs. Consequently, we’re looking further afield and are exploring hops from both the east and west coasts of Canada.

Our use of hops in the Monolith beers is quite unique as we use aged, rather than fresh hops. And we use whole cones, rather than pellets. As always, we do the opposite of everyone else.

Using aged hops involves aging the hops in special bags on site for years before we actually use them in the beer. If you’ve done a tour of the Monolith, you’ll likely have seen this process, and if not, you should check it out! Happily, we’ve found some great Canadian hop suppliers that we will be working with going forward. We’ll be giving you a sneak peak of an all-Canadian (and in fact all-Alberta) special release later this year, but it will be a couple years until we’re truly all Canadian in every beer from the Monolith.