Walking into Deadfall Brewing Company is a stop-you-in-your-tracks moment.
There’s a split second of ‘am I in the right place?’ doubt but once you get past the vivid art on the walls and cozy seating area and it finally sinks in there are actual brewing tanks in the back and beyond that’s when you start to get it.
Your eyes can’t take it all in at first, the space is a vast expanse that just seems to surprisingly keep going.
The live-edge table and comfy couch, an upright piano, a lending library, the old school rollie chairs around solid oldster tables – so inviting - and the art. You can’t even comprehend what you’re seeing on the walls it’s so expansive, colourful, alive... and dead. And that’s just the tap room.
And then you look up and there’s a row of freaking crowns – yes, like royalty – crowns on the top of a divider wall, in the row with all their other trophies and they’ve only been in business for two years.
Taking it all in leaves more questions than answers and isn’t that a perfect conversation starter.
Let’s begin with the crowns.
The Canadian Craft Brewers Association presents the Canada Beer Cup awards and this year they crowned Prince George’s Deadfall Brewing with six national awards. They won the most awards out of all the breweries entered into the competition.
They got five crowns and a rather ordinary-looking award compared to the heavy resin crowns but still a national award. Details look like this: Gold for Succession, gold and silver for Gloaming, bronze for Basal Brown, bronze for Aurora, bronze for Belgian Strong Ale and a silver from BC Beer for Grissette.
There’s a few beer awards and competitions across Canada and the Canada Beer Cup is the more prestigious one where they bring in international judges, Erin explained.
“The Canada Beer Cup is still in its infancy, this was only its third year,” Brandon Baewald, Deadfall's brewing master, said.
“It’s very quickly becoming one of the highest calibre, best run competitions out there and it’s just for Canadian independent craft brewers. Winning the awards is validation that our hard work is paying off.”
And he’s always tweaking to make it better. Ironically he tweaked it right out of taking the gold for the second time. It was his Basal Brown in the American Brown Ale category that won the grand championsip (leaving the typo because wouldn't that be great if they actually called a beer competiton's top spot the 'grand championsip'?) in 2023 and this year slipped into bronze. But don’t worry, even though he won’t go back to exactly what it used to be he’s already retweaking.
“Because it can always be better,” Brandon said and then echoed. "Always be better."
He continues to make subtle changes because that’s what the best in Canada does.
“We are pretty stoked for our little Prince George brewery,” Ivan Eytzen, sales and marketing manager at Deadfall, said.
Erin Baerwald and Brandon Baerwald, are two of the owners of Deadfall and it’s gotta be said baer wald in Old High German means bear power, so cool.
Erin is the bat prof, no seriously, she teaches and studies bats at UNBC, so cool. And Brandon with an ‘o’ also studied bats but now he’s a wizard because he makes the best beer in Canada. OK, maybe not a wizard but he is a master brewer, so cool.
They each started out as home brewers and somehow found each other in this crazy world and they speak this very unique and kinda strange beer language that only brewers understand, again, so cool.
Words like hazy pale ale, strong British dark, strong Belgian dark, mild dark, Basal Brown, session hazy, all inspired a plea to talk slower.
“We are a micro brewery and we can only make 700 litres at a time,” Erin said.
A micro biologist, Jane Fowler, and a doctor now studying to be a psychiatrist, Will Emery, are the other two owners and they all met at grad school.
Makes sense.
They came up with the name Deadfall because when a tree falls it causes new growth, Erin explained. It provides wildlife habitat, cycling nutrients and aiding plant regeneration under the canopy.
“So the idea behind the name, branding and all the art is beauty from death,” Erin said.
“So there’s beauty in the cycle of life and death and you can’t have beer without lots of generations of yeast, which are fungus, giving up their lives, so you’ll see lots of mushrooms in our imagery, lots of beautiful skeletons because that’s our jam.”
Erin really wanted the brewery to feel like a hole in the wall.
“Or let’s say when you flip that log and you see all the cool stuff underneath,” she grinned.
“I really wanted that sense of surprise.”
In the front half of the brewery people are invited to explore the beers on tap with tasting flights and if you don’t know what you’d like Erin will be happy to match you up.
“If you’ve never been in before -,” Erin begins.
“ - and it’s easy to tell because people walk in and they stand at the door for a while and look around and they’re like ‘oh, wow’ and we’re like ‘you must be new!’” Brandon finished what Erin started with a laugh.
“So people can get overwhelmed when they come into new places so I will ask what they normally like to drink,” Erin said.
Even if the person prefers wine, there’s a beer that might just surprise them, she added. And because they support local businesses, they have Northern Lights Estate wine on hand.
“I can provide beer education 101 and if they know the style of beer they like I can match them up,” Erin said. “Do you want a lawnmower beer? We got one. Do you want a campfire beer? We got that, too.”
Because Deadfall doesn’t have a kitchen people can bring in their own food and they are licenced for family friendliness.
“We had a group of ladies come in and they filled the table with charcuterie and just sat for hours talking and laughing,” Brandon said. “We had a couple bring in Tupperware containers filled with spaghetti. It’s just that kind of place. We love to see new faces and even if you’re not a beer drinker you might be after you’ve tried ours.”
Community engagement is important to Deadfall and they regularly host fun event, too.
For all the details visit Deadfall Brewing at 1733 Nicholson Street South or checkout their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/DeadfallBrewCo.
