Sawdust City Brewing Co.

The gravy on the poutine is made from the brewery's own stout, and the haddock in the fish and chips arrives battered in one of the beers poured a few steps away. At Sawdust City Brewing Co., the kitchen cooks with what is on tap. The place is a brewery and saloon on Muskoka Road North in downtown Gravenhurst, where eighteen taps anchor the bar and a full kitchen turns a tasting stop into a sit-down meal. The beer brings people in; the kitchen is built to keep them through dinner.

The food leans into the brewery rather than away from it. The Skinny Dippin' Poutine buries squeaky cheese curds and herbs under a gravy built from Skinny Dippin' Stout, and the fish and chips sets Little Norway-battered haddock over Kennebec potato fries with house tartar. The Sawdust Smash Burger stacks two seasoned beef patties with pimento cheese spread, house pickles, a nippy garlic mayo, and shredded lettuce on a seeded bun. Around those sit shareables with more going on than the format suggests: cheeseburger spring rolls filled with seasoned beef, pickle, onion, and cheddar and served with Joppie sauce; a Reuben on marble rye with house-fermented sauerkraut and pastrami; gnocchi with spicy chorizo, spinach, and garlic cream. Comfort plates round things out, from a house meatloaf with garlic mash and mushroom-onion gravy to bangers and mash in a juniper red wine gravy. Even the salad gets a pun — the Sawaldorf, with Ontario greens, Granny Smith apples, grapes, and roasted sunflower seeds in a lemon-thyme vinaigrette.

The taps are where the saloon makes its case. Eighteen lines rotate through Sawdust City's own range — pilsners and a helles lager, an amber alt, IPAs, stouts, saisons, wheat beers, pale ales, the occasional kettle sour and cider — alongside collaborations, one-off batches, and guest pours, so the board rarely reads the same way twice. That churn is the point: it rewards the regular who comes back to see what is new as much as the visitor working through the core list. This is not a token tasting counter bolted onto a production floor. The bar runs a full slate, Saturday nights bring live music from eight to ten, and the patio extends the saloon in warmer months. Parties of eight or more are common enough that the house seats them on a single bill.

The name reaches back into Gravenhurst's history. The town was a nineteenth-century lumber centre — "Sawdust City" was its nickname — and the brewery claimed it, then set up in a former Canadian Tire building and finished the bar in live-edge pine. It opened in 2014, founded by Rob and Karla Engman with co-founder and brewer Sam Corbeil, and grew into one of Muskoka's established craft labels. A recent merger with Lake of Bays folded the two breweries together; local reporting frames it as continuity rather than absorption, with the Sawdust City name, the beer, the Gravenhurst location, and the staff staying in place.

What holds it together is the through-line from tank to plate. The stout that thickens the gravy and the beer that crisps the haddock come off the same tanks that fill the eighteen taps, which is why the kitchen and the bar read as one operation rather than a restaurant grafted onto a brewery. In a town that swells with cottage traffic each summer and quiets after, the long Friday and Saturday hours and the Saturday band give the saloon a second life after dark, equally at home with travellers passing through and locals who treat it as their own. Order a flight alongside the poutine, and the stout in the gravy traces straight back to the lines behind the bar.