Kateryna Topol –
The C’est What? Brewpub has been an Old Toronto institution at Church and Front Streets since 1988. Now it has an outlet inside St. Lawrence Market.
Owner George Milbrandt, who describes himself as a “recovering architect,” started homebrewing with friends in the 1980s, when “all beers tasted the same.” Pubs in the neigbourhood were trying to be English, Irish “and so on,” but Milbrandt wanted to open something simply Canadian.
In the early 1990s C’est What? begun to brew its own beer to add some “overlooked and unexplored beer styles” to the draught menu. The first few batches were brewed at Select Brewing on Mowat Avenue, but a couple of years later, production was moved to Simon Cowe’s Lakeside Brewing.
For the last two decades, Bruce Halstead’s “largely one-man show in Pickering,” has been responsible for the beers sold at the restaurant.
Milbrandt had his eye out for an opening at St, Lawrence Market, so when the space at the back of the lower market became available, he took it as a sign. Opening a brewing space inside a city-owned building came with a lot of governmental forms and barriers, but a year-and-a-half later, C’est What? finally opened inside the market.
The space is a nano-brewery, beer store and tasting room with a small terrace on Market Street. All brewing equipment is lined against the back corner, sourced second hand from Barhop and the current brewmaster, Michael Duggan.
The space is homey and welcoming, with patrons comfortably settled shoulder to shoulder at the bar. Wooden harvest tables are set against the windows adorned with stained glass art frames.
“We made the tables ourselves with wood from Woodstock,” Milbrandt explains. Each table has a line of barley englassed at the centre.
An average of a dozen beers are brewed in this space, in addition to the canned products stored in the fridge.
“The small tanks allow us to have some fun and do collaborations with market merchants,” Milbrandt noted, “be it the beer itself, like the Mocha Pour, which has coffee from Everyday Gourmet Coffee Roasters, or beer types meant to match market merchants’ specialties.”
The brewery concept is woven into the market community, allowing patrons to bring food from other vendors or order Scheffler’s Delicatessen snack boxes tableside.
Among the tap beers is a cask ale, a traditional English beer matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is then dispensed fresh, without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide. A rare find in the city core, cask ale will very likely be its own draw to this little beer pub.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow came by for the opening. “It was a nice visit,” Milbrandt reported. “She said a few words and unveiled the painting” – a large painting of a woman in the back of the room. “It’s called Eau de Vie, the water of life, and was painted by Laura Fetterley, who also works at C’est What? on Front Street.”
C’est What? St. Lawrence hours match those of the market, which means that the shop opens at 7 a.m. on Saturdays with the tap room team ready to pour coffee stouts at 9 a.m.
“I think it will be a good fit for the market. We always tell people that we’re here to make your shopping experiences easier,” Milbrandt chuckled.
Learn more at cestwhat.com.
