The Monolith is the only brewery in Canada purpose-built for spontaneous fermentation at production scale. Our brewers solely specialize in spontaneous and mixed fermentation beers.
All breweries have a multitude of decisions to make picking the right ingredients for their beers. In many ways it’s like a chef choosing the right ingredients for the perfect dish. It’s also fair to say not all ingredients are equal and there are many trade-offs brewers need to make when crafting a beer. Here are the details on how we make these hard decisions.
READ THE BLOG →The seemingly mundane topic of mashing (converting grain to wort which is then transformed to beer) is something we hold most dear, especially when it’s of the turbid variety. Read on to learn about our deepest secret.
READ THE BLOG →
Spontaneous fermentation uses the air of the region where the beer is being brewed in an open vessel called a coolship and the microbes literally drop into the cooling beer to inoculate it. Mixed Fermentation is where we add a mixture of microorganisms to the finished wort manually to inoculate the wort.
READ THE BLOG →Most breweries use stainless steel tanks to ferment their beer. At the Monolith we occasionally use stainless steel for fermentation, but the vast majority of our production ferments for years in barrels. Here we discuss the details about our processes and the reasons we like to ferment in wood.
Read the Blog →
The final step before packaging our beer is one of the most important: blending. While we occasionally have an amazing barrel that doesn’t need to be blended with others to be maximally delicious we’ve found that blending multiple barrels together gives us the ability to corral our unpredictable process and provide consistently balanced beers. Read on to learn about how we create the final version of our beers.
Read the Blog →Bottle conditioning creates one final fermentation where the beer is naturally carbonated in the bottle. In theory one could just force carb it and be done, but the outcome just isn’t as good. Bottle conditioned beers are more stable and better integrated. If you’re buying a special bottle why wouldn’t you want it to be the best it could be? Read on to learn more.
Read the blog →
What makes our beer truly special and unique? It can be cellared for years and years and will change and often improve with time. There are a rare handful of other beers that can be successfully cellared but these are few and far between. Read on to learn about the process of long term cellaring and we do to make it possible.
READ THE BLOG →
The care we take in brewing our beers has been recognized at everything from international to local competitions.
