Ingersoll Man Wins Brewery Of The Year At Canadian Brewing Awards

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Sunday, 19 May 2019 07:08

Left to right: Eric Muller, Jeremy Boyd, Brad Clifford, Al Pearson. Photo credit: Clifford Brewing Company

Ingersoll's Brad Clifford and his brewing company won Brewery of The Year.

INGERSOLL - An Ingersoll man's brewing company won big at the Canadian Brewing Awards.

Brad Clifford owns Clifford Brewing Company in Hamilton and it took home Brewery of The Year.

Clifford says he was very happy to receive the award.

"It was amazing, couldn't be happier. It was, yeah, a great honour for sure because I've been brewing now for ten years, started out just as a home brewer, like many brewers do. and then kind of the dream was one day turn this into a professional career. And definitely I'd say I've been brewing professionally for the last five years, but it was only about a year and a half ago me and my father opened Clifford Brewing at 398 Nash Rd North in Hamilton."

Clifford grew up in Ingersoll before moving to Toronto for nearly 20 years, where he began perfecting his craft. He opened the brewery with his dad about a year and a half ago.

Since winning at the award ceremony, which took place on May 4th in Toronto, Clifford says they've received a lot of praise from their community.

"It's been fantastic. We were already getting fairly well established out here. We're in East Hamilton so we like to say proudly brewed in East Hamilton because we're the only brewery on the east side of Hamilton. There's only about six craft breweries in Hamilton now, but go back about three years ago there was only one. So quite a few have opened but compared to other cities like some smaller cities like Kitchener, Cambridge I think they're up to about 15 craft breweries now, maybe even more than that. So yeah, basically I'd say the community's really embraced us here and it's been a great experience and people just love the beer. It's fun, people coming in, getting the reaction at first. Not everyone's necessarily a craft beer lover right away, but once they try, we'll give them a few different samples to try, we'll usually something they like and then usually we see them coming back at a pretty regular basis."

The brewery also won other medals across 55 different style categories. Clifford said out of the seven beers they entered, four of them medalled.

Their Clifford Porter received gold in the Porter category, their Clifford Barrel Aged Porter picked up a silver in the Wood and Barrel-Aged Beer category, the East Hamilton Lager came in second in the Pilsner group and the brewery also received a bronze for their Marigold - Belgian Golden Ale, featured in the Belgian Ale category.

Based on the accumulation of their medals, Clifford Brewing Company were the highest scorers at this year's ceremony and received the award as a result.

They were among the 2,000 entries in this year's competition.

Moving forward, Clifford says they're looking at expanding their business across Canada.

"Definitely expansion. We're starting to get some more attention from other provinces already. Now, I already was shipping some beer out to Newfoundland but now we're looking at possibly Manitoba, Saskatchewan. So probably some more interprovincial, exporting beer, definitely just selling more beer in the Ontario market, Southwestern Ontario."

If you want to learn more about Clifford Brewing Company, their website is available here.