Home & Garden: From farm to bottle

When Josh Beach and his wife Kristen purchased their farm outside Creemore, they had big plans. Beach envisioned turning the old barn into a distillery to create small batch whiskey. Everything was progressing nicely until the pandemic. Suddenly, it was a very tough climate in which to launch a new business, and Kristen spent her entire maternity leave locked down in a community where she knew no one.

Since then, the Beach’s have moved to the Niagara region to be closer to Kristen’s family but they continue to spend weekends in the Creemore area, and they still dream of a distillery with a tasting room, lounge area and on-site retail at their farm just north of Cashtown Corners.

In the meantime, Beach is making Harris Beach Spirits in Niagara with rye grown at Cashtown Corners. The name is an amalgam of his surname and his mother’s maiden name, Harris, also the middle name of each of her children. Beach says the business name is an homage to the exceptional mother she was. He and Kristen continued the tradition by naming their son Theodore Harris. Young Theo loves the farm in Clearview, and is good friends with neighbouring farmer Robert McArthur, whom he calls Farmer Rob.

In the fall of 2021, McArthur planted 10 acres of Bresotto Rye, a special hybrid grain which Beach says makes a whiskey with spicy and nutty flavours. That rye wheat is now on its way to becoming a special single barrel whiskey which should appear on store shelves this fall. Beech says each label bears a QR code with information about the product, and he’ll definitely be telling the story of the local wheat.

Beach learned his craft in Scotland, where he earned a master’s degree in brewing and distilling. He took a job in Vancouver with Odd Society Spirits, where he became production manager and distiller. Then it was back to Ontario where he was the original distiller at Wayne Gretzky Estates. Four-and-a-half years later, he was approached by Georgian Bay Spirit Co. with an offer to use their equipment for his own projects while running their distillery.

A similar agreement is now in place at Spirit in Niagara Distillery, where Beach is in charge of production and distilling. Spirit in Niagara is a small batch distillery known for its fruit- based vodka and gin and whiskey made from 100 per cent Canadian corn aged in ex-bourbon barrels. The distillery, founded by Arnie Lepp, a fourth generation farmer in Niagara-on-the- Lake, has a tasting room and restaurant located on a 200-acre property where they grow the peaches, nectarines, plums and other fruits that go into their products.

The process of creating distilled beverages involves a lot of science and just a bit of magic. Initially the grains or fruit are mashed in large barrels, then mixed with water and enzymes to break down the starch into sugars. Next is the fermenting stage where yeast is added to consume the sugar and turn it into alcohol. The resulting slurry is boiled to separate the flavours and alcohol from the remaining waste product, or lees. Beach says whiskey comes out of the still with alcohol content in the high 60 to low 70 per cent range.