Neustadt Paints a Portrait

Neustadt Springs Brewery has been receiving a lot of press lately, due in large part to Steve Peters, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. Back in June of this year, Peters led a tasting for his fellow MPP's at Queen's Park in an effort to choose six Ontario craft beers to be the official Legislative beers for 2008/09 year. Peters also chose a 'speakers' beer that turned out to be Neustadt's Scottish Pale Ale, thus the heightened attention.

Since then Peters has gone on to win an Editor's Choice award at the Golden Tap Awards, had his efforts highlighted in the summer issue of TAPS: Canada's Beer Magazine, interviewed for a podcast for the OCB website and he was recently presented with a beautiful painting from Val and Andrew Stimpson of Neustadt.

We felt honoured that the Speaker of the House (Steve Peters) chose Neustadt Scottish Pale Ale as his beer of choice for 2008/9.

The fact that he was making history, by choosing only Ontario Craft beers to be served in Queens Park was a big step forward for our industry.

We felt he deserved to be recognised for promoting Ontario Craft beers, so we commissioned Gary McLaughlin from Riversong Gallery to paint a picture of the speaker. But we wanted to keep it a surprise, so we worked closely with his office manager Anna who was sending us e-mails and pictures secretly. We then had to find a pretext to have him visit Neustadt. Lo and behold we managed to do it all without him finding out, when he came to visit last Friday and was presented with the portrait he was over the moon.

What a great painting! The OCB logo above the Speakers head and a can of the Scottish Pale Ale in place of a mallet. Terrific, thumbs up indeed. It is nice to see Peters receiving some accolades for something that should have been done long ago.