Bandit Brewery

It was over pints at a Toronto craft beer institution that Stephane Dubois first met Shehzad Hamza through a mutual friend. It was a fitting location as they quickly bonded over their shared passion for interesting and unique beers. Stephane was a homebrewer and the two would often drink Stephane’s concoctions while joking about how fun it would be to start their own brewery.

“One day, we just really talked about it and said, ‘Okay, maybe we can do this’,” Shehzad recalls. “So we just went for it.” Bandit Brewery, named after the city’s notorious garbage-scavenging creature, opened in a former Roncesvalles auto mechanic garage in the summer of 2016.