Test Batches Brewery

A test batch is the small run a brewery makes before it commits to anything — a trial pour to find out whether an idea is worth scaling up. Test Batches Brewery built its whole premise on that habit and never grew out of it. By the brewery's own account, the name stands for constant experiment: new beer, new recipes, new chocolate, and a standing willingness to keep adjusting until something is right. What that produces in downtown Midland is a place doing three jobs at once — a brewery, a working kitchen, and a homemade-style treat counter — run by Jamie and Lesley Tripp as a family business rather than a brand dropped into town. It opened on Hugel Avenue, in the King Street core, in September 2023, with the food built into the plan from the start.

The current menu reaches well past taproom snacks. Its centrepiece is the Brewer's Board, a graze of meats and cheeses laid out with pickles, smoked brew mix, pimento cheese, seasonal vegetables, and focaccia crostini — the plate that tells a table the kitchen has made choices rather than just opened bags. Around it sits genuine range. Pretzel Bites come with a choice of dill-pickle-and-onion, cheesy beer-braised onion, or beer mustard dip. Flatbreads run from the Meat & Maple, layered with maple bacon, pepperoni, and banana peppers, to a Mexican Street Corn version finished with a chili-lime drizzle. The panini go from smoked Pork & Brie with apple butter and balsamic to a Chicken Shawarma with garlic tahini and peperoncini. A smaller Little Tray scales the same idea down for two, while a Mezze Trio of naan, hummus, whipped feta, and olives shares the page with a vegan Quinoa & Lentil Salad and a rotating soup — a sweet potato and peanut version arrives with grilled cheese.

That spread says something about how the kitchen sees itself. A Mediterranean and Middle Eastern streak — the mezze, the shawarma, the tahini — runs alongside the barbecue and pub plates without either side feeling like a guest, a wider reach than most breweries bother with, and one framed around local and seasonal cooking that shifts through the year. The best orders let the beer and the food share the work rather than making one carry the visit. The weekly calendar makes the same point: barbecue takes over Wednesdays and Thursdays from noon to eight, built around smoked and grilled food from the barbecue side, and Saturdays bring sheet-pan nachos. It is a lot of kitchen for a brewery — a menu a table could work through across several visits without repeating an order.

The Tripps bring a long history in downtown Midland business to the project, part of why the brewery read as a local venture from opening week rather than a newcomer finding its footing. The kitchen has names attached to it. Chef Carol Paznar leads the savoury EATS team; Lesley Tripp runs the treats side, the homemade-style chocolate and sweets that give the brewery a second identity; and a contributor named Tim handles the barbecue features. Local reporting at the opening noted the same crew and the same unusual service choices the brewery still keeps.

Those choices shape a visit as much as the menu does. Test Batches runs on counter service with tax built into the posted price and no tipping — a living-wage stance the owners set out when they opened — so a table orders at the counter and settles in without the usual bar-tab math. Beer leaves in cans as readily as it fills a draft glass, the patio opens when the weather cooperates, and Sundays are held back for private events. The Treat Flight, a twelve-piece run of whatever the sweets team is making that week, is the order that captures the whole idea in a single pass: a brewery that decided its dessert counter, its kitchen, and its beer were each worth getting right, and kept running test batches until they were.