As a medical student in the 1990s, BioWare cofounder Greg Zeschuk told his future wife that if he could, he’d make video games for a living. But he knew better than to plan his life around it. “It was a pipe dream,” is how he put it back then.
The story of how the pipe dream became a reality—one that saw BioWare turn out blockbuster games including Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic before being sold to Electronic Arts along with another company for $860 million in 2007—is something of a folk legend in Edmonton, Alberta, where Zeschuk has spent most of his life.
Now Zeschuk, 53, is living another dream: He’s started a brewing company, Blind Enthusiasm, and he runs two microbreweries, the Market and the Monolith, along with a restaurant, Biera, which is considered one of the hottest eateries in his hometown.
Zeschuk always liked beer, and long before it was considered cool to visit craft breweries, he made a point of doing so whenever he was in the United States. However, it wasn’t until he began spending extended amounts of time at BioWare’s Austin, Texas, office in 2007 and 2008 that he developed a genuine passion for brewing as a business.
The craft beer scene in the Texas capital was exploding, and during the rare time Zeschuk wasn’t working on games, he checked out local breweries. A naturally curious person, he soon began interviewing brewers and posting the videos online as “The Beer Diaries.”
In 2017, the PBS affiliate in Austin approached him about doing a bigger, international version of “The Beer Diaries.” Zeschuk had been retired from BioWare for five years by then; running a company had run him into the ground, especially the near-constant travel that kept him from his wife and children in Edmonton.
Still, he wasn’t ready to settle down. He was considering saying yes to PBS. Then his wife pointed out the obvious.
“You quit games because you were traveling so much, and now you want to do a show where you travel around the world and interview brewers?” she asked.
Forced to reassess his priorities, Zeschuk opted for a different angle. “I thought I could make beer,” he says. “I could build a business that made beer. And that’s kind of what happened.”Alberta is an ideal place to brew. The province’s barley, one of its main agricultural exports, is among the world’s best. Hops grow like weeds, though the market for the Alberta-grown product isn’t nearly as established as that for hops from neighboring British Columbia and the northwestern United States.
For years, the provincial craft beer industry was constrained by the Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, whose stringent regulations made it nearly impossible for small brewers to gain a foothold.
“They said you had to make 5,000 hectoliters a year to start a brewery,” recalls Zeschuk, whose two facilities currently make around 1,000 hectoliters a year. “All the little startups, the ones with two people working in a storage warehouse, they couldn’t do it because they weren’t big enough.”That changed in 2013, a year after Zeschuk retired. The handful of small craft brewers who had managed to make a go of things—some by brewing their products in British Columbia—had formed a professional organization, the Alberta Small Brewers Association. They were looking for an executive director. Zeschuk was looking for something to do.
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For three years, he helmed the ASBA. During that time the provincial government removed the minimum regulation requirement, paving the way for the industry to take off. Today there are about 130 craft brewers in Alberta, and the number continues to rise.
Zeschuk has remained an active and generous member of the community, always willing to share his expertise, both with the association at large and individual members.
“His historical knowledge of craft brewing in Alberta and in Canada and the US is invaluable,” says Blair Berdusco, the current director. “He’s definitely someone we go to for the history of craft brewing here, or insights into what’s going on.”
Zeschuk handed over the helm of the ASBA because he was ready to start his own business. He’d bought an aging strip mall and the parking lot kiddy-corner across from it at a major intersection in Ritchie, a primarily residential neighborhood a couple of miles from his house on Edmonton’s south side.
His plan was to open a brewery but city zoning regulations stipulated that a brewery in a residential neighborhood had to be attached to a restaurant. While Zeschuk considers himself a foodie, he’d never contemplated a career as a restaurateur. But he’s a pragmatist. “I said, okay, I have to have a restaurant. I’ll have a restaurant,” he recalls.
That sort of pragmatism is easier when you have the kind of financial security that comes from selling your first company for hundreds of millions of dollars. But equally critical to Zeschuk’s success is his ready embrace of a challenge.
“If I want to try something and do something, I learn it and do it and think either, ‘I like doing that’ or ‘I don’t like doing that,’” he says. “It translates into business as well. I’m bored easily, but I’m also not afraid to try things.”
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Another strength: he’s willing to acknowledge when he doesn’t know something. “If someone is really passionate and has really good ideas, I let them run with it,” he says.
Rob Monk, the head brewer at the Market, can attest to that. Monk had years of experience running microbreweries in BC and the Yukon when Zeschuk hired him in 2016.
“He’s very open to my opinion,” Monk says. “He’s very willing to hear me out if I disagree with him. He very much encourages you to speak your mind and be the manager. He has ideas and certainly has things he wants to see, but he is very open to allowing me to run the brewery how I see fit, which not everyone is able to do in this world.”
Respecting those whose expertise differs from your own has worked for Zeschuk throughout his career. It’s what enabled him and classmates Ray Muzyka and Augustine Yip to get BioWare off the ground in the first place.
Their initial focus, in the early 1990s, was developing medical education software to replace what they saw as the substandard product foisted on them as medical students at the University of Alberta. When that proved successful, they decided to turn their attention to what they really wanted: developing the kind of role-playing games they loved.
“We were all computer geeks,” Zeschuk recalls. “We had experience playing with software. We weren’t particularly great at it, but we realized we could hire people and that led to that coaching mentality of making teams and growing teams. We’d make big, complex games that people could play. That was our secret weapon: hire the right people and help them succeed. It’s not that different from what I do at the restaurant and brewery.”
The strip mall Zeschuk bought in Ritchie was home to one of Edmonton’s best butcher shops, Acme Meat Market. Zeschuk had never shopped there (he’s a vegetarian) but when he learned that one of the butchers, Christine Sandford, was a trained chef, he reached out. Sandford was working at Acme to get better at cutting meat, something she’d already done during a brief stint at Dario Cecchini’s butcher shop in Tuscany. What she really wanted was to run her own restaurant.
Like Zeschuk, she’d never done that. However, she’d worked in a number of establishments, including La Buvette, In de Wulf, and De Superette in Belgium, and she had a strong vision of her ideal menu.
“Christine wanted to do something different, and I wanted to support her in something she wanted to make,” Zeschuk says. “With what we were doing, from a beer perspective, it was something that would work.”
Biera’s menu changes nightly. What’s consistent is Sandford’s highly inventive and creative treatment of protein and produce, some of it sourced locally, some from across the country. Typical offerings run along the lines of Canadian morels roasted in ramp butter with thin slices of marinated “Paris” mushrooms and lemon geranium vinegar, and beer tartare made with grass-fed Alberta beef and an emulsion of cold-pressed Alberta canola and smoked beef fat.
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Sandford also makes an effort to incorporate flavors from the brewery, whether that means glazing Korean-style short ribs with wort (the liquid extracted from mashing the barley malt) or baking sourdough bread using spent grain to enhance the hydration, flavor, and texture. She’s also made sourdough ice cream with milk crumbs and cocoa nibs.
Pre-pandemic, it was a challenge to get a reservation at Biera. That hasn’t changed. But while the restaurant has been a staple on Canada’s Top 100 Restaurants list, the menu doesn’t appeal to everyone.
“We’re not your typical ‘brewery restaurant’ by any stretch—we don’t do burgers and wings, popcorn, peanuts,” Zeschuk says, laughing. “Almost every month we get hate mail from people calling us pretentious, saying, ‘You should be sticking with the regular stuff.’”
The beer isn’t “the regular stuff” either. Blind Enthusiasm produces ales, lagers, and mixed fermentation beers aged in barrels acquired from wineries in Italy, France, California, Washington State, and British Columbia’s Okanagan region. The lagers and ales are brewed at the Market brewery.
The mixed fermentation beers are produced a few blocks west at the Monolith, a three-story facility Zeschuk had built expressly for that purpose. The Monolith brewer is Doug Checknita, a 29-year-old Edmontonian who became interested in barrel-fermented and barrel-aged beers while studying beermaking at Olds College, two hours south of Edmonton.
By the time Checknita graduated in 2015, he was working on a business plan for a brewery that would use spontaneous fermentation—basically opening a window and letting natural yeast waft in. That’s how Belgian brewers make their unique lambic beers. In fact, as part of his plan to bring spontaneous brewing to Alberta, Checknita arranged to work at Cantillon, one of the most notable Belgian breweries.
Almost nobody was brewing that way in Canada, but that didn’t deter Checknita.
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He began seeking advice and information from equipment manufacturers and consultants he’d met while working at a Quebec brewery that uses mixed fermentation.
One of those consultants was working with Zeschuk, who was in the early stages of building what would become Biera. “If you’re seriously considering this,” the consultant told Checknita, “you should talk to Greg, because you’re from Edmonton, and not a lot of people would want to move to Edmonton to do this crazy project.”
Checknita knew about Zeschuk. He’d grown up playing BioWare games. As a teen, he’d stand in line for the midnight release of the latest version of Mass Effect. But he didn’t let on when he pitched his idea.
“It was one of those things—I wanted to keep it about the business and not gush over it,” he says. Nearly a year went by before he let his fanboy bonafides slip. He and Zeschuk were at a craft beer convention in Portland, sitting around with a bunch of other brewers, some of whom had come from the gaming industry.
“Someone said they had mastered KOTOR, because you could play it on a tablet now, and I said ‘oh my God, I used to play that game so much,’” Checknita recalls. “And Greg looked at me, kind of funny, and said, ‘I didn’t know you used to play my games.’”
By then Zeschuk had bought into Checknita’s vision. He, Monk, and Checknita were committed to introducing Edmontonians to a new kind of beer, some fermented in steel tanks, some fermented in barrels, some blended with fruit grown in British Columbia, all aged in barrels for up to four years before being sealed in glass bottles imported from France. It’s more like wine than beer, which isn’t common in Alberta. That means Zeschuk and his brewers will have to invest time and effort educating and cultivating their clientele, something that wasn’t really necessary in the gaming industry.
As always, though, Zeschuk is up for the challenge. And nearly 10 years after retiring, he has more energy.
“My life has slowed down by a factor of one hundred,” he says. “I’m in control of it, and that’s the biggest difference.”
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When Zeschuk and Muzyka were running BioWare, they had no time for anything but games. They stopped practicing medicine by 2000, shortly after Baldur’s Gate became a worldwide hit. That’s when Yip left the company to become a full-time doctor.
“All your mental energy is focused on this one thing, and it’s very difficult to do long-term,” Zeschuk says, recalling the deadline pressure of the industry, and how angry gamers would be if they had to wait longer than promised for a new game. He doesn’t miss that.
“If our beer doesn’t come out on Tuesday it’s like, ‘Oh well, it’ll come out on Thursday.’”
Another welcome difference is that Zeschuk has time to play games for fun. Among his current favorites is Apex Legends. “It’s social, so I have three people, me included, in this little group and we run around trying to shoot other three-people groups,” he says, reflecting on yet another positive in his post-BioWare life: “We don’t have the 20-year-old’s reflexes, but we have old man strategies.”
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