About

Origin story >>>

They say coincidences usually mean you’re on the right path.  Rorschach’s story began in 2006 when three soon-to-become chemical engineers, Matthew Reiner, Chris Ristevski and Mohan Pandit, met each other in the halls of the Wallburg building at the University of Toronto.  After countless hours in the departments’ infamous ‘Unit Ops’ lab, they came to discover a course once offered by the department that taught beer making and fermentation, but had stopped years previously.  So they naturally took things into their own hands and set up shop in Matthew’s basement studying the magic of fermentation.

Beer has a remarkable history and is brewed in many different styles  all over the world.   On their travels throughout Europe, North America and Asia, Matt, Chris and Mohan were able to explore countless breweries, beer gardens, local beer and regional cuisine.

One day in early 2015, they met at The An Sibin Pub, just around the corner from what is now the Rorschach Brewery and tasting house, and, after many years of brewing countless beers, decided it was time for them to open their own craft brewery.  They hope, someday, and with a lot of convincing, to resurrect that beer making bioprocess engineering course!  

Our philosophy

we believe in brewing beers we want to drink.

This is our main consideration.  We want our beers to be not only creative and intriguing, but also pleasant to the palate and drinkable in a social setting.  The word ‘balance’ gets thrown around a lot in describing beers, and while we agree with the premise, we don’t necessarily always agree on the execution. 

A lot of people view the main point of balance in a beer to be the balance between hoppy bitterness and sweet maltiness, and while the sweet-bitter balance is always present in every beer, we don’t feel that the counterpoint to hoppy bitterness always has to be derived through malt.  We believe that the balance of a singular dominant element in a beer, such as bitterness in an IPA for example, can be balanced with several different counterpoint elements, not only sweetness, but also malt choice, mouthfeel, timing of hop additions etc.  Showcasing a specific element in a beer does not mean that the beer is not balanced, unless that component dominates every other aspect in the beer.

We value hop character over hop bitterness.  We love hops, but we don’t necessarily love an overpowering hop bitterness in our beers.  When designing our IPAs, we are continually trying to pack as much hop character into the beer as possible, while at the same time minimizing the effect of the hop bittering compounds on the overall character of the beer.  This means a large amount of hop additions late in the boil, as well as in the dry-hop.

The IBUs in our a beer are not a great consideration for us; we judge a beer mostly on the overall hop character, flavour and aroma, and we feel that this results in an IPA that doesn’t create palate fatigue after a single glass.  There are many very unique and interesting hop varieties available to brew with, and we strive to transfer as much of that character from these hops into the finished beer as possible, without masking their character with overwhelming bitterness or maltiness. Ultimately, this allows us to create a well rounded IPA with powerful citrus, tropical fruit, pine notes that jump out of the glass, waiting to be enjoyed.