Summertime at Collective Arts Brewery

Collective Arts‘ bustling beer garden gives beer lovers a cool space for a cold beer. I recently visited the Steeltown brewery to check out their new snack menu and see what they had on tap.

Collective Arts is known for their fruit flavoured sours and IPAs and they have a huge core lineup of beers plus always changing limited releases.  But they also make cider, sparkling teas, hard lemonades, gin and sparkling gin cocktails. If you prefer something non-alcoholic, they’ve recently released sparkling botanical waters in some pretty great flavours like black cherry and vanilla, white peach and cardamom or cucumber lemongrass lime. 

Their snack menu has everything from chips and salsa to sweet corn salad, grilled eggplant and smoked pork belly bun. It’s all made in-house in their food truck or sourced locally. Everything I tried was delicious. 

If you’ve seen a can of Collective Arts beer, you’ve likely noticed the eye-catching artwork on the label. They combine the creativity of craft beverages with the talents of artists from around the world, featuring limited-edition works of art on their labels. They’ve commissioned thousands of pieces of work and each quarter put out a new call for artwork. That creativity also extends to the brewery’s walls, they’re covered in murals and artwork giving the beer garden a fun vibe. 

It’s hard to believe they’ve only been around since 2015 when they moved into the vacant Lakeport Brewery in Hamilton’s north end and purchased two small canning lines. 

Fast forward to today, they now produce 60-thousand barrels a year – each barrel is about 120 litres — and have become a major player in the Ontario craft beer scene. They’re one of the fastest-growing breweries in North America and you can find their beers in about 20 different countries.

The 55-thousand square-foot brewery has a rich history, it first opened in 1947 and was the first brewery built in Canada after the end of prohibition, its changed hands several times over the years. 

You can find Collective Arts on Burlington Street East in Hamilton, at their new space on Dundas Street West in Toronto, as well as on the road with the Mobile Mixer! This 1966 airstream is serving Collective Arts brews, sours, ciders, cocktails, and they even made their own Caesar using Collective Arts Distilling gin. They are pouring at the Watering Can from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm from Wednesday to Saturday.