Art at Steel & Oak – Grand Opening

Our new rotating gallery space is a way for us to bring community into the tasting room and to celebrate diverse voices. As such, the theme of our first exhibition is “Community.” As the Arts Programmer, I am keen to help generate a platform for a multitude of voices to share their lived experiences through the arts. On that note, I am happy to pass this celebratory post onto the staff and collective members from the New West based organization, Pottery Works, to talk a bit about what community means to them.

[Pottery Works]:
“Community is important because the desire to belong is as basic as our need for food and shelter. Community brings people together to advocate and support each other, and the feeling that one belongs gives value to life and our experiences. The relationships we build in our communities are built on trust, respect, communication, caring, common interests and shared values.

Art gives people from all walks of life a way to share their interests, values and experiences and communicate in forms that may be easier, more comfortable or sometimes the only avenue available to them. Having access to art in our daily lives gives us validation for our feelings, and experiences. It helps us feel connected and motivates us to explore our own creativity and discover different parts of ourselves. Seeing art as an expression of others perspectives, gives us a larger view of our existence.

The theme of this work is the view of community from the perspective of artists who have struggled to find inclusion within it. These artists have used their creative abilities as a platform to find identity in their culture and a role in their community.

“I want my viewers to not only see what I see, but to be able to take a closer look at the things around them; the things they would normally pass by, and try to see the beauty in them. As an artist going through life with a developmental disability I would like people to see the beauty in things that may normally be overlooked.” – Sheri Lynn Seitz”

I’m really looking forward to seeing how the gallery unfolds. To kick off our opening exhibition, we would like to invite you to our official launch party! Join us on Wednesday, September 19th from 6:00pm – 9:00pm.

Hope to see you there!

-Heather

SOPROUD

We’re super excited to be bringing back a favourite event during New West Pride Week, SOPROUD.

SOPROUD takes place from 12PM – 9PM on Tuesday August 14th in our Tasting Room. We’ll be tapping two special Pride beers for this day only, Pinot Pilsner and Mango Strawberry Quayside Pale Ale, with 100% of the proceeds of glass sales going back to the New West Pride Society.

Leading up to SOPROUD we also have a limited amount of S&O Pride Growlers for sale. $6, with all of the proceeds going to the New West Pride Society as well.

So please swing by our Tasting Room on Tuesday August 14th for SOPROUD and celebrate New West’s diverse and incredible community.

Don’t forget that NW Pride week ends with a huge Street Party on Saturday August 18th from 3PM – 8PM on Columbia Street. More details by clicking here.

We’re Hiring: Brewer

Steel & Oak Brewing is looking for an experienced brewer to join our team!

Working under the Head Brewer, duties will include all aspects of production, starting from wort production to cellaring to packaging and everything in between. As a small team, everyone contributes across the board. Opportunities to grow with the company will be available.

A thorough understanding of the entire beer making process is essential. Previous brewery experience is a huge asset. You must have a passion for quality and a commitment to continuous improvement. You should have a penchant for cleanliness and detail-oriented work. If you’re handy and mechanically inclined so you can troubleshoot and fix things as necessary, all the better.

The brew crew works as a team but often you’ll be doing tasks on your own. Reliability and flexibility are key. The position will involve some early mornings, some late nights, and occasional weekend work. Many aspects of this job are also quite physical and will require, for example, lifting of 25kg grain bags and moving 65kg kegs. A valid driver’s license is an asset.

This will be a full time position with benefits.

If you think you’re a good fit for this position, fire off your resume as well as a bit about yourself and why you’d be the best person for this job to eric@steelandoak.ca. Please include “Brew Crew Application” in the subject line.

Call For Artists

 

CALL FOR ARTISTS

Steel & Oak is excited to announce its new community arts space within the tasting room. Our gallery will be rotating artwork on a quarterly basis. To celebrate our new gallery, our theme of our first exhibition will be Community. The theme is up to your creative interpretation, but you must draw inspiration from it.

All visual artists, established or emerging, from the lower mainland are encouraged to submit to Steel & Oak’s new community arts program.

Steel & Oak wishes to highlight how diverse our community is. In order to break down any exclusionary barriers and create a platform for marginalized voices, artists on the LGBTQ spectrum, non-binary artists, artists of colour, and disabled artists, are strongly encouraged to submit.

Submissions will be received up to 12:00pm (noon) on:
Friday August 10, 2018

Eligibility:

  • To apply to this Call for Artists you must be someone who creates art (including, but not limited to: painting, digitized art, visual poetry, mixed media, photography, drawing, printmaking, etc.)
  • Artwork must fit into the theme of Community

Details:

  • The gallery at Steel & Oak does not charge exhibiting artists to display their works. We strongly encourage artists to provide their contact information for interested buyers. Steel & Oak will not deduct any percentage of the sales of artwork from the artist.
  • Unfortunately, due to the size and nature of our space, we are unable to accept any sculptures or installation art. Please only submit 2D, and/or ready wall-mounted 3D works.

Application:

  • Attach to email no more than 5 images of your work (.jpg format- 300 dpi, no more
    than a total of 5MB).
  • Should you be submitting more than one work for consideration, please provide only 2-3 images of each work.
  • Proposed artwork must include title, material(s), dimensions, and date
  • A short bio (75 words max)
  • An artist statement that introduces your practice and artworks submitted (250 words max)
  • A curriculum vitae (3 pages max)
  • Selected artists are responsible for delivery of their works to and from the gallery at Steel & Oak.
  • Artwork must be ready to display (ready-mounted or framed)
  • Artwork must be available to be displayed for the durations of 4 months.

All submissions must be in pdf format and emailed to art@steelandoak.ca by August 10th at noon. Artists will be notified no later than August 15th if their submission has been successful.

Contact:

Should you have any questions regarding the gallery or your application, please direct them to the Arts Programmer, Heather Prost at art@steelandoak.ca.

For more information about the community arts program at Steel & Oak please visit our blog at: https://steelandoak.ca/2018/07/so-art-program/

S&O Arts Program

Hey friends!

Heather here! You may recognize me as the tasting room staff member who plays Paul Simon’s Graceland every Saturday afternoon. As most of you are aware, we recently expanded our tasting room so that we have more space for folks to hang out. Our occupancy expansion has allowed us the ability to facilitate more community based initiatives. On that note, we are very pleased to announce our new arts program at Steel & Oak!

I will be taking on the position of Arts Programmer, which will allow us to operate a new rotating gallery space within the tasting room. We want to create a space where people get excited to create and to celebrate community artists on our walls. Our gallery will highlight both established and emerging artists.

We want to share our excitement with you and to let you know that we will be posting our first Call for Artists late this week with the theme ‘Community’, please keep an eye out!

If you have any questions about our new program, feel free to send me an email at art@steelandoak.ca.

Looking forward to seeing what you all create!

-H

Steel & Oak Turns 4

Hey friends!

Save the date as we will be throwing a Birthday Party once again this year.

SO4 will be on Sunday July 8th from 3-6PM and will take place in the parking lot behind our brewery.

For beer, we will have multiple beer stations set up to avoid lineups, including a Simple Things station for a quick crack and go can.

For food, our buddy Pete from Pete’s Meat will be doing up a backyard style BBQ of burgers, smokies, potato salad, and other goodies. Earnest Ice Cream will also be swinging by to help keep you cool.

For the kids, we will be bringing in two bouncy castles, face painting, sidewalk chalk and an S&O Lemonade Co. stand.

For music, Social Medium will be playing a DJ set from the “cage” comprised of vinyl they find in our Tasting Room collection.

We’ve made a bunch of changes this year to the overall flow of the venue in order to get you in and hydrated fast. Hope you can make it and thanks for all your support during our first 4 years!

Oh and keep a lookout for an all new Sapperton Anniversary Sour Lager this year. We’ve decided to give it a new look, and a bit of a new twist for 2018…

-Jorden

We’re Hiring: Accounting x Bookkeeping

WE WANT YOU!
Steel & Oak Brewing is looking for someone to take on many of the accounting and some administration duties for the brewery. This job will be diverse, but a required core competency is the ability to pay attention to details and some accounting/bookkeeping experience.
The role will initially include accounts payable, accounts receivable and administrative duties for the brewery, but the goal is to ultimately be responsible for all aspects of accounting. You will be part of a relatively small team and we are looking for someone who is flexible and will enjoy helping out in other areas when needed.
Email resume and cover letter to cheers@steelandoak.ca!

Food Truck Schedule: July 2018

With our recently approved 50 occupancy we now have the ability to bring back Food Trucks! We’re pretty excited about this and have created a list of Trucks and the dates they’ll be here so far in July. This list will change as we add trucks.

 

Sat. July 7th: Rolling Cashew, 2-8PM

Sat. July 14th: Hunger Management, 2-10PM

Sun. July 15th: Rolling Cashew, 2-8PM

 

JOB OPPORTUNITY: Tasting Room Manager

Steel & Oak is looking for someone to play first base for our company softball team and be our Tasting Room Manager!

Duties will include but are not limited to:

  • Scheduling staff and tip outs
  • Working Tasting Room shifts
  • Manage the maintenance and cleanliness of the Tasting Room
  • Work with our Brand Manager on Tasting Room programming
  • Set expectations and evaluations for our Tasting Room team members
  • Deal with supplies and inventory levels
  • Customer relations

This is a full-time position with benefits.

Please send a cover letter and resume to cheers@steelandoak.ca with “Tasting Room Manager” in the subject line.

*You do not have to play softball, but it is a lot of fun.

-Jorden

2017 A Year in Review

It’s 6am on December 31st, 2017. Our 2 year old son was up at 5:30am but my wife graciously decided to give me a sleep in today however I couldn’t get back to sleep as I find every year around this time I get stir crazy about what’s coming up next. Always looking forward. That’s how we work. Planning brews, hop contracts, marketing, beer launches, festivals to attend, staffing needs, etc.

It’s hard to look forward to 2018 without looking back on 2017. So here we go.

2017 was a crazy year for us. Every spring/summer we fall behind because we’ve never had enough capacity to keep up. So this year we were finally able to get some new tanks in before May hit and for the first time ever we were able to keep up with demand and at the same time create some cool new limiteds and stretch our legs a bit from a stylistic point of view.

We went big with the new tanks (all three make 10,000L each) because back to that “looking forward” stuff our long term goal was to switch our Flaghsip beers into can format. This was a difficult decision for us because although we believe that people would rather have a Red Pilsner in a 473ml can than a 650ml bottle the truth about cans are that they naturally move more volume so you have to go a bit bigger or risk disappointing people without being able to keep up. So we set ourselves up to do this and so far I’m happy we have.

We made 36 different beers in 2017. This sounds insane to me but we had a laundry list of new brews we wanted to try out and also recognize that craft beer lovers are always on the hunt for something new. Two of these beers were new flagships for us. Roselle Wheat Ale was the first. We had been working on this beer for about a year trying to get the perfect level of hibiscus and refreshing finish. We wanted to create a wheat beer that could be paired well with food and enjoyed all year. We feel that Roselle is just that!  Then late this year we launched Simple Things Pilsner. Simple Things is another beer that we’d been working on for a while. The concept was to make a true craft beer drinkers Pils. Something with the highest quality malt we could find, a full 6 weeks in the tank, and a slap you across the face bitterness. I personally believe that Simple Things will become the most popular beer we make in the coming years… but I’ve been wrong before.

Photo Cred: Eat With Mao

We were lucky enough this year to win 6 BC Beer Awards! This was the most we’ve ever won and along with our homies at Twin Sails it was the most any brewery won that night! On a personal level I was also fortunate to win New Westminster Business Person of the Year! There is nothing more rewarding than starting a business in your own hometown, especially a business that people seem to dig and I hope that S&O proves to other soon to be entrepreneurs that our city supports new ideas and small businesses. Come here! Especially if you are a bakery or a coffee roaster….

2017 did bring challenges. There has been some confusion and a lot of red tape when it comes to our Tasting Room occupancy. We were under the impression that we were going to have 50 people allowed in our room before the summer of 2017 but this hasn’t been the case. It’s been frustrating for me personally and I know super frustrating for our customers who’ve had to wait to get in for a beer. If you’ve been by the brewery in the past week you’ll notice a couple new signs up in regards to zoning and my fingers are crossed that we will have 50 occupancy by the time summer 2018 arrives.

We’ve also been limited to what we can brew based on space. Light Industrial space (which we require) isn’t readily available in New West. It’s part of the reason why you don’t see a Brewers Row type situation in the Royal City. So we basically have the space we have now and need to make due with that. With the addition of the larger fermentation tanks we’ve had to shrink our barrel program and our bottle conditioned program is also a bit smaller than we’d like but it’s taught us to operate efficiently with space and time.

So what is 2018 going to bring?

Well my number one priority is to get that Tasting Room occupancy up to 50, with this increase I’m hoping that it will be more attractive for Food Trucks to set up shop again and will also allow us to do some cool stuff in the Tasting Room without running the risk of having a lineup of people waiting to get in. I want to make it a more engaging and fun space that people can feel confident coming to knowing that they can get in.

More community partnerships. Whether it be collaborating for events or setting pop up shops (for vinyl or beer) we are going to get even more active within New West.

Continue to innovate and perfect. Behind the scenes we are always continuing to perfect our recipes. We’ve just built a bigger lab and will be focusing on improving the longevity of our brews as well as creating new flavours for you to try.

IPA? So a big change for us this year is that yes, we are going to try to make sure there is an IPA on tap at S&O. This doesn’t mean we’ll be coming out with a year round IPA but it is part of the plan to rotate and create new IPAs often so that you do have something hoppy to try on tap when you come by. Selfishly this will also allow us to try a bunch of new IPAs and start to make decisions on where we would want our year round IPA to taste like. If we were to make one of course 😉

Things happen fast in our industry so I’m sure you will see many things I haven’t mentioned above.

I want to sign off by saying thank you. Thank you for coming to our Tasting Room and bringing your friends and family, thank you for being supportive, thank you for letting us know what you like (and what you don’t) and thank you for making Steel & Oak what it is today.

Cheers and all the best in 2018.

Jorden Foss and the S&O Family