Welcome, gentle reader, to the much-awaited first liquor column of the New Year. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the past year, and how the face of beer drinking changed in our fair province, and across the country.
The Alberta beer market has seen some ups and downs, with a few breweries going out of business, but several more new startups quickly filled the void.
Edmonton did not fare so well, with Amber’s Brewing and Hogshead Brewing shutting their doors over the summer.
However, small-town Alberta is booming with new beer, with Red Deer, Lethbridge, Canmore, Cochrane, and Turner Valley all seeing new craft breweries open during 2015, or in the final phases of construction for an opening early in 2016.
The rapid growth of small breweries in Alberta is thanks to the Alberta Gaming & Liquor Commission, who did away with minimum production requirements a few years back, which drastically lowered the investment required to open a brewery.
Closer to home, Calgary has a trio of new craft brewers that are still just a few years old, and are still growing. The Dandy Brewing Company is the smallest, and they just opened a tap room that serves the freshest beer in town. Your humble narrator can’t get enough of the Dandy In The Underworld Oyster Stout, available on tap at better drinking establishments, and in the bottle at well-stocked booze merchants.
Last Best Brewing & Distilling also opened a restaurant above their brewing facility on the former Electric Avenue strip in downtown Calgary, making the beer flow again in same seedy environs that your intrepid liquor reporter frequented in the days of his squandered youth.
Tool Shed Brewing was the first to set up shop in Calgary after government regulatory changes made it possible, and are continuing to grow in leaps and bounds.
Further afield, our Ontario brethren are now able to purchase beer in grocery stores instead of the monopolistic Beer Store chain run by the megabreweries.
This was an early Christmas present for those boozers in the center of the universe, with dozens of grocery stores in Toronto now having a broad selection of beer available. The government is still dragging their heels on wine and spirits, but local boozers are hopeful that there will be progress in 2016.
British Columbia, long considered the closest thing to a socialist nanny-state government we have in Canada, has loosened up some of their antiquated liquor legislation, with the government-run liquor stores now open on Sundays, as well as opening up the retail market to allow booze to be sold at grocery stores.
In even more welcome news for BC boozers, cold beer will finally be available for sale. Yes, gentle reader, up until this past summer, the only beer available for sale in BC was room temperature, forcing you to take the beer home and chill it yourself before drinking.
Even our neighbours in Saskatchewan, long a bastion of prohibition-era government regulations is modernizing their industry, with plans to shift from a government monopoly on liquor retailing to a series of privately owned liquor stores, similar to what Alberta did way back in 1993.
However, it’s not all sweetness and light in the Canadian liquor industry. Faithful readers may recall that the federal government passed Bill C-311 back in 2012, which essentially overturned an old Prohibition-era law that forbade transporting booze across provincial boundaries.
Everyone cheered the feds for that one, but the provincial governments still have their own liquor monopolies to protect, and most of them have not seen fit to allow consumers to transport or ship wines from other provinces, in a Soviet-esque attempt to keep all the booze revenue for themselves.
So far, only BC, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia have passed legislation allowing consumers to order directly from out-of-province wineries, while the rest of the provincial liquor monopolies have been doggedly defending their antiquated business models of telling the consumer that they’ll take whatever swill the government offers and be pleased with it.
The Canadian liquor industry continues to evolve, and is slowly becoming more consumer-friendly. Your intrepid liquor reporter eagerly awaits the opening of each new Alberta brewery, with plans for a month long road trip to visit every brewery in the province this coming summer!
long road trip to visit every brewery in the province this coming summer!
