Serving up suds in the Sault: partners revive Northern Ontario brewing stalwart.

AuthorKelly, Lindsay
PositionSAULT STE. MARIE

Driving home from work every day, past the crumbling Northern Breweries complex, Mike Oknianski would muse about Northern Ontario's rich brewing history, dismayed that nothing was being done to preserve it.

"I wonder if anybody's going after the intellectual property rights," he recalled thinking.

"I wonder if anybody's interested in that."

Three years, hours of research, and a financial investment later, Oknianski and partners have launched Northern Superior Brewing Co. out of a 3,200-square-foot space at the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre on Sault Ste. Marie's waterfront.

"Our flagship is Northern Superior Lager," Oknianski said. "We chose the lager because Northern Superior was so prevalent in Sault Ste. Marie, and we wanted to come back with that."

It's a working brewery that's producing a close replica of the Northern Superior Lager of old, while doubling as a heritage site to preserve and display artifacts from the 100-plus years when beer-making was a bustling industry in the North.

In the early 1900s, a number of brewing companies were operating in Northern Ontario--in Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Port Arthur, Fort William, Timmins--until J.J. Doran, who hailed from North Bay, started buying them up, finally consolidating them under the Doran's Northern Breweries banner in 1960.

Doran's enjoyed a sales monopoly across Northern Ontario for decades, thanks to the Wartime Alcoholic Beverages Order of 1942, which was enacted by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to limit transportation routes so transport could be focused on munitions and supplies for the war effort.

The repealing of the act in the 1970s made way for bigger breweries like Molson and Labatt to enter the Northern market, and Northern Superior Lager's popularity dwindled. The brewery, which became known simply as Northern Breweries, changed hands several times before finally ceasing production in 2006.

Launched just before Christmas, the new Northern Superior Lager is already being sold in 16 bars and restaurants throughout the Sault, Oknianski said, and that number continues to grow as word spreads of the revival of the homegrown brand that had been revered and consumed for decades.

"Everybody knows Northern Superior," he said. "They're...

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