TORONTO, ON – In a lengthy blog post published earlier this week, Bellwoods Brewery has revealed the winning entry of its first homebrewing competition – although in an interesting twist, the top pick was submitted an amateur brewer who has subsequently started working for a competing brewery.
Midnight Pilot is a 7.2% abv coffee stout created by David Everitt, a homebrewer who was hired as a junior brewer at Duggan’s Brewery – a brewpub located just a few blocks away from Bellwoods in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood – after he brewed and submitted his beer to the competition.
According to the announcement, a variety of criteria was used to select Everitt’s beer as the winner out of more than 100 submissions:
We had a really hard time narrowing it down to just one, and feasibility did inevitably have to enter into the mix. We also asked questions like, can we realistically make this on our system in a reasonable amount of time (considering we have no long-term storage space)? And what do we actually want to brew? It seemed like we each had a different favourite, and for a while I thought we weren’t going to be able to decide on anything. But what sealed the deal, was a submission that tasted great but also incorporated an ingredient from a local Toronto business, a coffee roaster that if we were to be perfectly honest, sustains, fuels, and facilitates the work we do everyday here at the brewery. Pilot Coffee Roasters, life-source, blood in our veins — I’m looking at you.
Bellwoods will now be booking a brew day with Everitt, and the resulting batch of Midnight Pilot will be available to try at the brewpub soon afterwards.