We are living the land of plenty. Plenty of beer, that is. Yes, gentle reader, our beloved province is now home to more than 60 breweries, quadrupled from just four short years ago.
Calgary alone is home to 17 breweries, with several more in various stages of construction. What could have brought about this renaissance of brewing, you might be wondering right about now.
It all began in 2013, when the still-new NDP government decided to abolish a bunch of red tape that made it prohibitively expensive to open a brewery in Alberta.
Prior to 2013, one of the requirements to get a brewery license was a pre-existing capacity to brew half a million litres of beer per year. Yes, gentle reader, before the government would even let you apply for a license, you had to build a giant and ridiculously expensive brewing facility,
That was a high bar indeed, and the cash outlay requirements to build such a large facility meant it was impossible for a small brewery to open on a shoestring, and grow slowly over time. The cynical readers in the audience may wonder if sneaky lobbying from the Molson and Labatt megabreweries had anything to do with that legislation, but I will leave that as a mental exercise for the conspiracy theorists.
The plucky geniuses behind Calgary’s own Tool Shed Brewing were the first to take advantage of the elimination of minimum production capacity requirements, and were at the door of the AGLC office on opening day to become the first licensee under the new regulations. Your humble narrator can’t get enough of their Red Rage, an Irish-influenced red ale that seems to be particularly popular with the ginger-haired tipplers in my social circle.
Countless other small breweries followed suit, some barely larger than what an enthusiastic home brewer might have in their basement, all the way up to multi-million dollar facilities that can pump out more beer than the wildest fever dreams of your intrepid liquor reporter.
After the provincial government removed most of the red tape in 2013, municipal governments threw their weight behind the craft beer boom, removing many of the zoning regulations that had banished breweries to the wastelands of industrial parks. Calgary was the pioneer in this regard, and now allows breweries to open in commercial and retail areas.
The hip Inglewood shopping district in Calgary is a great example of this, with High Line Brewing and Cold Garden Brewing opening their doors just a few blocks apart, making it delightfully easy for your humble narrator to stumble between their respective tap rooms.
Sadly, we haven’t seen a craft brewer open their doors east of the big city, so Chestermere residents will still need to drive to Calgary for a fix of the freshest beer available.
The beer drinkers of Alberta still have a ways to go if we want to catch up with our neighbours in BC, which has long been the pioneer of the craft beer movement in Canada. While craft beer makes up only around 5% of beer sales in Alberta, BC boasts a whopping 25%, as well as more than twice the number of breweries.
Your globetrotting liquor reporter remembers the days of taking beer vacations in BC, just so I could obtain some of Canada’s best beer, but those days are over. With the rising tide of craft beer washing over our fair province, your humble narrator is struggling to keep up with sampling the wares of each new Alberta brewer. There have been pilgrimages as far south as Medicine Hat to visit two breweries that opened last summer, and as far north as Fort McMurray to visit a craft brewer / distiller not long after the wildfire of the century narrowly missed destroying the only brewery in town.
Not only do we boast world-class malting barley here in Alberta, but our clean and pure glacial water from the Rocky Mountains ensure that only the best ingredients go into Alberta beer, making us the envy of other brewers both at home and abroad.
Instead of reaching for another tired old macrobrew, broaden your horizons by visiting an Alberta craft brewer, or seek out their wares at your friendly neighbourhood booze merchant. As the old saying goes, think globally, but drink locally!
