The team behind Niche Brewing, Fredericton’s newest brewery, are not what you’d imagine belonging to a modern species of craft brewers. They don’t possess any of the stereotypical qualities: no big shappy oil-dapped beards framing a couple of round-spectacled faces and topped with dock worker tuques. It is not only the first wave of Shawn Meek and Rob Coomb’s beers that are flying in the face of what people might now come to expect when they think of “craft beer,” it is how little they care about what’s trendy and how much they care about what’s tasty.
Meek, originally from Prince Edward Island, and Coombs, originally from Labrador City, have over 250 batches brewed under their belts. They explain with eloquent simplicity why they chose now to throw their hat in the ring in New Brunswick’s increasingly crowded craft beer scene. Their story is simple: Niche is a brand about simplicity in work ethic (get it done when you can), nuance in flavour and love for a product that has brought both of its creators a lot of joy.
Their juice-coloured hibiscus sour may sound like the height of pretension, an attempt to impress with a title rather than merit, but Meek and Coomb’s “Ruby Tuesday” is delicious, clean, crisp, full of flavour and just sour enough. They could call this beer “Better than You” and I’d still happily call for one over any crowded bar.
“We brew beer that we like to drink. Even now with lots of craft breweries out there, we are making beers that still aren’t readily available. We plan on brewing a fair amount of sour styles, and we really enjoy working with wild yeasts,” says Coombs.
“We already have six or seven strains of yeasts we are brewing with. working on isolating and developing. Yeasts are definitely the underestimated ingredient in the brewing process, we feel, for achieving unique and bold flavour profiles. It is a driver for us and how we choose what we brew,” follows Meek.
Staying on the topic of how Niche plans to stand out and carve their place in the crowd, Shawn dives a little deeper on their brewing process and how they select the beers they bring to market. With 13 years of combined experience in brewing, the two are always experimenting and trying to put their own spin on beer.
“We definitely have beers we will use as anchors with niche that we will keep coming back to, but we have so much we want to do and we are not the type of guys to sip a beer and go “oh that’s perfect, leave it alone”, you can always improve and keep evolving,” says Meek.
Hearing the guys talk about sours, and brett yeasts, and isolating strains, and all the minutiae of brewing, shows anyone outside the industry just how far the craft beer scene has come in the span of a decade. Which so much variety available it’s surprising how much even the casual consumer knows about beer these days.
Coombs feels that with such a rapidly expanding industry the opportunity to start a brewery, and occupying a specific niche within that market, might have a limited timeframe.
“I don’t think this stuff—sours [or] even the really popular hoppy stuff—would have worked ten years ago. I would maybe have picked five years ago if I could have. People were coming around to it and feeling more adventurous then. I am not sure I would pick winter of 2018 again as a launch point, but hey, here we are,” he says.
“The craft beer scene is different than other markets because it has created a consumer that is not looking back at what used to be available to them, those beers will always be there, but people are seeking out different things now. If you make a product you believe in that you feel is as good as you can make it, the product will stand on its legs. We are just going to keep making beers we want to drink and we will pay attention to our customers feedback and keep trying to get better at what we do.”
Meek went on to point out that history might have done them a favour when it comes to exploring that niche, even if they did take a roundabout way through prohibition.
“We are not worried about a bubble bursting. We have been really involved with the home brewers association here in the Maritimes for a while now, we have looked at the numbers and we really took our time developing our business plan accordingly. It is also interesting to think that back when prohibition started, there were beers like ours around, but prohibition stopped a lot of that. When prohibition was lifted, it was only the big breweries that were able to continue producing and that time period shifted the entire market. Now that it is back, I don’t feel it is going anywhere. People obviously missed what used to be available or are now able to discover it anew.”
And with that said, we might all breathe a sigh of relief. There you have it, straight from the experts: craft beer isn’t going anywhere.
The alchemy ale lab they have created in the small community of Hanwell is sure to release wave after wave of creative, delicious and varied beers for this ever-growing populace of beer lovers. The line of beers they have introduced so far have been a colourful collection, including a coffee sweet stout, a hoppy Grisette, a brett table beer, a milkshake IPA, a New England IPA, and their Ruby Tuesday hibiscus sour ale.
Right now you can find Niche on tap throughout Fredericton, Saint John, and Moncton, and they’ve had a few beers show-up on tap in Halifax at Stillwell and 2 Crows Brewing.