Midweek Mugging: Tidehouse Brewing Company

Peter Lionais and Shean Higgins, co-owners of Tidehouse Brewing Company, are the recipients of this week’s midweek mugging.

Located downtown at 2-5187 Salter St., Tidehouse is a small brewery with big flavours.

“One of the things we’re getting known for is this unique environment, this little tap room,” Lionais said. “People come in and they’re like, ‘What am I doing here?’ And by the time they leave they’re like, ‘I’m telling everybody about this place.’”

With new beers on tap every week, the two men said they get their inspiration from a variety of different things.

“It can start from anywhere,” Lionais said. “It can start from an ingredient, it can start from wanting to work in a different style.”

“Sometimes it starts with a name, like even just a concept of – ‘Oh that’s a funny character from a show, let’s make a beer around them,’” Higgins added.

Hibiscus City, a recent creation brewed by Higgins’s wife Shannon, sold out in less than two days. Higgins described its flavour as “somewhat salty, kettle-soured, very fruity…super dry, easy drinking, basically just juice. It was awesome.”

Both Higgins and Lionais were involved in brewing for a few years before realizing they wanted to set up their own brewery.

“It’s a very collaborative industry, so it’s really fun,” Lionais said. “It’s not very cut-throat competitive, so it’s very different than a lot of other industries. We all support each other and hang out afterwards.”

“I’d say 60 per cent of my interest in opening up a brewery was more or less just to have a lot of beer, and then the other 40 was a mix of tired of working for other people and really wanting to be a part of the beer scene in Nova Scotia,” Higgins explained.

Currently, Tidehouse supplies beer for aFrite restaurant on Lower Water St., and has rotating accounts at a few other venues in the city. Higgins and Lionais said at their own store, they receive customers across a large age range.

“It’s what we find so interesting, the mixture of people in such a small tap room here, everybody’s forced to talk,” Lionais said. “I sort of like that aspect, where you’re not just stuck with your own crew, you mix and match and learn some new things from different people.”

Customers are also able to fill growlers at the shop, which Higgins said was originally the main idea they had for the brewery.

“Clearly, if you look in this weird little back hallway, there wasn’t a real plan to have a place to sit,” Higgins said. “This was meant to be sort of a growler-fill station only, kind of like a bottle shop type of thing.”

The idea to add a bar came largely due to customer requests. 

“Every single day someone came in looking for a flight, and we wanted to stop turning people away,” Lionais said.

Higgins built the small bar that Tidehouse has now, giving visitors a chance to take a seat and try the different beers on tap.

“And we’re packed all the time – I mean, of course we’re packed all the time, we can only seat eight people,” Higgins laughed.