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The quest for the holy grog (12 photos)

In this Following Up, we follow clues to a mystery left behind by a master builder, a master brewer and secret society nearly a century ago

There are few things Bill Harvie enjoys more than getting together for a few beers with friends,  and that is why, in 2013, he decided to convert his garage into a clubhouse.

He named it La Cochera, Spanish for 'The Garage' and christened it the official headquarters of the Central Street Gentlemen’s Club.

The renovation project sparked Harvie’s interest in the history of his century home in the old Exhibition Park neighbourhood where he lives with his wife and two children.

“I am fascinated by this stuff,” he said. “The house was completed in 1917. I assume they built the garage first in 1915, maybe to store building supplies.”

It was the home of Frank Johnston, a bricklayer by trade and a partner in the construction company Johnston and Williams Contracting that operated in the city during the first half of the 20th Century.

Examples of their work, such as the Nurse’s Home at 62 Delhi St, built in 1910 and still in use today, are testaments to the quality and durability of their work.

“He was a well-known builder at the time,” said Harvie. “A lot of buildings such as many at the Homewood, were built by Johnston and Williams.”

Harvie felt a kinship with Johnston and wanted to learn more about him, but that proved more difficult than he expected. All he could find was one photo of Johnston in the Guelph Civic Museum archives taken in 1902 to secure his membership in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge that, at that time, met on the third floor of the Petrie Building.

He was also able to locate the Johnston family burial plot and gravestone in Woodlawn Cemetery.

“Considering the amount of info available online on genealogy sites and stuff like that, it was tough to find anything about this guy,” said Harvie. “He built this house and lived here with his wife, Agnes, until his death in 1960. His obituary said he died suddenly somewhere on the premises in January. He was probably shoveling snow. I like to think it was here in the garage, maybe drinking a beer.”

His belief that Johnston, like him, also enjoyed a cold one at the end of the day became a fanciful part of the Gentlemen’s Club origin story.

“Part of it is romanticizing about Frank Johnston drinking beer in here and dying here,” said Harvie. “However, he left his trail of drinking beer around.”

Describing it as a trail may be a stretch but Johnson did leave behind a couple of beer caps.

“When I was taking a pile of old bricks out of the garage, I found a cap,” said Harvie. “I thought it was cool. It had a cork back. In the 1920s they did an addition on the front of the house. It doesn’t have a full basement, just a crawlspace, and when I was insulating it, I found a second beer cap.”

There were no dates on the caps, but they were produced by Holliday’s Breweries, one of the earliest breweries in Guelph that operated on Bristol Street from 1856 to 1933.

“To anybody but Bill doing this research, that cap would have meant nothing,” said friend and neighbour, Todd Craig. “That’s the awesome part of this whole story.”

When GuelphToday last spoke to Craig he introduced us to MAST Brewing, his high tech, home brewing system. He offered to brew the beer connected to the caps if they could identify what it was, so they organized a beer-brewing, brainstorming session with Gentlemen’s Club members at Woolwich Arms.

The caps had a stamp from the LCBO that was established at the end of prohibition in 1927 so that meant they were produced between 1927 and 1933 when Holliday’s Breweries went out of business.

“I found an image online of a bottle of their flagship beer, East Kent Ale, but it didn’t have an image of the cap,” said Harvie. “However, the yellow colour on the label of the bottle was pretty much identical to the yellow on the cap. I learned that the Holliday family came from Kent, England, to Guelph because they were looking for a good source of water for their brewery.”

Harvie and Craig brought what they’d learned to local brew master Doan Bellman.

“Doan was John Sleeman’s first employee and is the head guy over at Spring Mill Distillery,” said Craig. “He told us in that era, barley wasn’t as easily available, so the other fermentable sugars they had was corn. So, this recipe had a high percentage of corn in the grist build.”

They collected all the ingredients and on April 06, 2017, four years after Harvie found the caps in his garage, Craig invited members of the Gentlemen’s Club to a brewing session in his garage.

“It was fun and a couple weeks later when it was ready, I built a portable draft machine using an old Coleman cooler with a big coil in it,” said Craig. “I hooked the keg to it with a tap and put it on a little red wagon. I brought it up here and we drank the whole thing.”

They raised a glass to Frank Johnston who had been the inspiration for a four-year historical journey that brought them full circle to LaCochera, the garage he had built more than a hundred years earlier.

“I have told people the story about the garage a thousand times,” said Harvie. “They can be from a different part of town or even another city, but a lot say they wish they could have this sort of thing. I admit this is a cool thing but there is no reason it can’t be replicated somewhere else. It wasn’t like I invented this Gent’s Club and stubbornly pressed people to come. It was all very spontaneous. It sucks when the party is over. We have to keep this going.”