Spark Beer & Pizza

Spark Beer ages sours and Belgian-style beers in oak foeders for months at a stretch — its Delima quad rests eighteen months in oak before it is poured — which is not what most people expect from a place that also runs a serious pizza kitchen. Spark is both, on purpose. Andrea Gormley and John Sproull built it around an electric brewhouse on Somerset Street West, in the heart of Ottawa's Chinatown, and handed the kitchen the same long view they gave the beer. The pizza is no afterthought to keep drinkers in their seats; it is its own program, made with as much intent as the barrels working behind the bar.

The pizzas are ten-inch rounds on house-made dough fermented a full twenty-four hours, hand-stretched and finished, more often than not, with Grana Padano and Vietnamese parsley. The Number One Pizza in Heaven is the one to know: cup-and-char pepperoni and pickled jalapenos under Korean chili flakes, a drizzle of honey, and that herb finish. Genius of Love carries a sausage made to Spark's own spice blend by Valley Sausage Co.; Skankin' Pickle stacks garlic butter, crisp dill pickles, and fresh dill; Shroom With a View leans on a mushroom medley and a secret umami seasoning for the table that skips meat. The East Coast Donair and the garlic fingers, both served with house donair sauce, nod hard to the Maritimes. On the beer side the range is wide — How About Italy?, a dry-hopped Italian pilsner; the hazy, dank Ominous Whooshing IPA; the featherweight Canadian Dreams pilsner; and Voices Carry, a deep-red sour conditioned on blackberry, blueberry, and raspberry. Even dessert pulls from the cellar: stout brownies built on Spark's own Black as Midnight.

The name is the tell. Spark refers to the electric brewhouse the owners installed, not to Sparks Street downtown, and that literal-mindedness runs through everything. Fermentation is the thread that ties the two halves together — the patient sours and oak-foeder Belgian releases on one side, the slow-proofed dough on the other — and so is the supply chain. The malt comes from Mississippi Mills, the hops from the Ottawa Valley and Quebec, the yeast from Escarpment Labs; the kitchen reaches for St. Albert mozzarella and that Valley Sausage Co. blend. Some beers take their time by design — the anniversary Belgian Fête spent better than six months in oak — and the dough answers to a clock of its own. Beer and kitchen run on the same regional producers and the same patience.

Gormley and Sproull spent the better part of a year restoring a red-tiled building in Chinatown before opening in January 2020, turning a worn storefront into a working brewhouse and kitchen. They have lived in and around the neighbourhood for more than twenty years, and they describe Spark as a neighbourhood business first and a brewery second — less a slogan than a plain account of who comes through the door. The brewing has the medals to match: the wood-aged Cloudland took gold and Best in Show at the 2024 Ontario Brewing Awards, while the oak-aged saison Amiable and the fruited sour Voices Carry collected earlier ones.

What that adds up to, day to day, is a Chinatown corner that works on more than one register. Tuesday through Sunday it runs as taproom and pizza counter at once — somewhere to put away a few slices of the spicy-pep with a glass of something barrel-aged, or to carry home a four-pack and a box from the cooler. The draught list turns over as the foeders and the sours come due, and the pizza names keep rewriting their own jokes, from Skankin' Pickle to Wasn't That a Party. On Friday and Saturday the kitchen holds on past midnight, pulling ten-inch rounds while the next sour ticks quietly toward ready in its barrel.