Lisa Watts wanted to plan a fun trip for her husband and decided to take him on a brewery tour in Montana.
What started out as a simple outing turned into a newfound love for beer and the craft of making it.
However, the Okotoks couple weren’t trained brewers. Lisa Watts was a Chemical Engineer, and Mark Watts was a geophysicist.
They decided to start out small, and instead of brewing the beer themselves, Lisa and Mark began the business of making brewing kits so that consumers could make beer from home.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to grow their brand. Fans of their kits wanted to taste Mark and Lisa’s beer and hire them for events.
That’s where the idea of Hubtown Brewing started.
To put this plan into action, both Mark and Lisa took the American Brewers Guild course in Vermont so they could make and sell beer. From there, the next step was to actually start the brewing business and find a name.
From ‘Strange Brew’ to ‘Hubtown’
Originally, they wanted their brewery to be called “Strange Brew,” inspired by the 1983 film with the same name. However, when they went to register under the name, it had already been taken a month before.
So instead, they were tasked with developing a new name for themselves, and it fell right into their laps at an Okotoks town council meeting.
“Finally, at one of the meetings, somebody in the town said, well, we want you to be the hub of the downtown,” said Mark.
Each beer gets a custom name
Today, they are giving each brew a custom name. Coming up with the names for their beers is much easier than brainstorming a brand title, and they are usually named after something from their brew day.
“One of our original IPAs, somebody (Lisa Watts) was putting together some condiment holders using a nail gun and stuck a nail in her finger, so we called that one Nailed It IPA,” said Mark Watts.
But how exactly do they make their beers?
Lisa Watts shared that the secret is made of four simple ingredients.
“There’s malted grain, so whether it’s barley or oat or I guess the oats are malted, but barley, oats, wheat, rye, those types of grains, yeast, hops and water,” said Lisa Watts.
Starting with malted grain, they mix it with boiling water at around 150 degrees Fahrenheit (65 Celsius). From there, the grains are removed, leaving behind a sugar water that is boiled once more, with hops added. This is the fermenting stage, and hops are added to impart aroma and flavour to the beer. To ferment the beer, you add yeast to convert the sugars into alcohol.
Lisa and Mark, though, take an extra step to introduce an enzyme into their process to reduce the gluten content in their beer—this makes it suitable for those who are gluten-free.
From their brew kits to their brewery, Hubtown has worked its way into Okotokians’ hearts, as described by Frank Chinsky, a member of the Okotoks community.
“They got a great business here and excellent presentation, and, kinda the history of it all, that’s kinda unique, and it’s definitely a huge asset to Okotoks.”