The new brew system at Norsemen Brewing

Onbeer.org has just learned that Camrose, the small city of 16,000 about an hour southeast of Edmonton, will soon be getting its own brewpub. Called Norsemen Brewing Company, it location is particularly fascinating. On the surface Camrose would not seem to be the ideal demographic for a craft brewing operation – agriculture and oil and gas are the dominant industries out that way, known for hard working men and women who tend to like their beer, um, cold and wet. There is a small University – Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. The town also sees its share of travellers, many of whom might be looking for something out of the ordinary on their way through town.

I made a call to the brewery to get a better sense of their plan. The owner, Sean Willms, is also owner of the Norsemen Inn, a mainstay of the Camrose main street. The brewpub is located in the hotel and will service the Inn’s revamped lounge and nightclub , formerly called Cadillacs, now called The Tap Room and Gravity Lounge. Willms says he was looking for something “to light a fire in our business” and create some new energy and build new clientele. So he closed the bars to renovate, and installed a small 6 hectolitre system with two fermenters and six conditioning/serving tanks.

He and local Camrose homebrewer, Lynn Clark, are jointly handling the brewing duties, “learning as we go”, says Willms. They have received some help and assistance from the cadre of brewers in the Edmonton area in the form of yeast slurries and helpful tips and advice.

The beer, at first, will be quite mainstream. “I want the transition to be smooth”, says Willms referring to the unexplored palates of the region’s beer drinkers. The design is for each beer to be similar “but hopefully better” than something customers might be used to. To start they will have three beer: Longship Lager, an all-grain pale lager; Horned Helmet Wheat, an American wheat ale similar to Grasshopper; and Eric Red Lager, an amber lager akin to Rickard’s Red. Once things are running smoothly, Willm hopes to expand the line. “We hope to have five regular beer plus a rotating seasonal which would allow us to experiment a bit”, and push into more craft-oriented tastes.

The two lagers are fermented and sitting in the conditioning tank, with the wheat scheduled for brewing this week. The launch of Norsemen Brewing is February 26.

This is an encouraging trend. This is the first prairie brewpub outside a major centre or tourist hotspot. For some time now I have felt that the beer culture was slowly changing, and that increasing numbers of people were open to trying craft beer. I recently did a beer tasting in Camrose and was very happy with the interest level and beer knowledge of those in attendance (admittedly mostly Augustana Faculty that night). I am hopeful that this is the next stage in that growth. Just the fact that a Camrose businessperson thinks there is potential for a project like this suggests something is afoot.

No doubt Norsemen will experience some growing pains in the next few months, like any start-up, and in particular since they admit they have lots to learn about brewing good beer. But here is hoping once they have their legs under them and start producing a full line of beer, they create many more happy converts to all-malt, craft beer.