B.C.'s First Class Micro-Breweries
The B.C. beer in my glass is the result of a dream, the descendent of a revolutionary beverage concept hatched years ago by a handful of first class micro-brewery aficionados.
Golden nectar cascades from the polished chrome tap, gurgling to the brim of a tall sleeve. The bartender sets it down on the hardwood countertop. I raise the sleeve to my lips, tilt and receive a mouthful in return. If beer could have a texture, this one has a satin character with a flowery hop finish, and as the cool beverage slides down my throat, I’m assaulted with an array of flavours that might elicit the kind of descriptive prose usually reserved for sommeliers. It tastes like something that was brewed with care and attention, a libation best enjoyed slowly, pondered and savoured, rather than inhaled mechanically while watching hockey or monster trucks down at the speedway.
The beer in my glass is the result of a dream, the descendent of a revolutionary beverage concept hatched years ago by a handful of beer aficionados that included Paul Hadfield, proprietor and one of the founders of Spinnakers Pub on Victoria’s Inner Harbour. A revolution in beer brewing has been underway in B.C. and elsewhere in North America since the early 1980s, when Victoria’s Hadfield and another hophead named John Mitchell – the founder of the short-lived but pioneering Horseshoe Bay Brewing – and a handful of like-minded beer enthusiasts decided the public needed more choice in the beer market.
Today the world of beer is a diverse ecosystem, full of unusual species like honey browns, organic wheats and hemps, and even more obscure and rare life forms. However, 25 years ago, when Hadfield, an architect by trade, Mitchell and a few other beer lovers hunkered down in a friend’s basement ruminating about the generic state of Canadian brewing, O’Keefe Extra, Old Stock was about as exotic as beer got. The landscape was completely dominated by big, lumbering dinosaurs that churned out a homogenous breed of carbonated stuff loosely dubbed Canadian lager.“John Mitchell brought a suitcase of beers back from Europe and we sat around and tasted them, as well as some homebrew.” Hadfield recalls. “Here was a whole range of flavours that B.C. didn’t have access to and some of the best beer was our homebrew, so we knew right away that we had the ability.”
Just as Fidel Castro and his entourage of revolutionaries clandestinely planned to overthrow a Cuban dictatorship, Hadfield and Mitchell plotted a craft-brewing incursion into the world of mainstream beers. They may have had no illusions about overthrowing the big boys, but when they decided to open a pub that brewed its very own beer and served quality food to boot, they hoped to at least shake up the industry a little. It was also more than a tad self-serving – these boys wanted the chance to drink a wider variety of beers.
A pub with tasty beer and gourmet food: It was a blasphemous concept without a Canadian prototype, and completely uncharted territory. Remember, back then, B.C. was still bogged down in the obsidian dark ages of the drinking establishment. Beer on tap was unerringly too fizzy and bland or just plain flat, pub menus consisted of suspicious items that looked as though they had been bobbing in a jar of brine since opening day, and the sour odour of nicotine and spilt beer oozed from filthy carpets pockmarked with cigarette burns. “When we talked about opening a pub, the government wanted to know where the windows would be and the location of the stage where the dancers would take their clothes off,” remembers Hadfield with a laugh.
Hadfield and company were determined to eschew this worn-out, unsavoury model, and do something innovative, loosely based on the friendly Irish village pub, but with a certain effervescent West Coast je ne sais quoi. In 1982, Spinnakers Gastro Brew Pub was born and so, too, was a revolution. The concept, which now seems as Canadian as Saturday night hockey, was to serve quality beer and food in a convivial environment. Today, brew pubs with gourmet menus are regular fare in the food and beverage industry, and at last count there were 30 craft breweries in the province, in communities as diverse as Yaletown, Vancouver and Revelstoke in the shadow of the Selkirk Mountains.
But exactly what is a craft brew? If the stuff that froths from the pumps at Molson and Labatt is the mass-produced but rock-solid, reliable and predictable economy K-car, craft brewers like to position themselves as the horse and buggies of the business – not always winners, but invariably adventurous.
Hopheads often cite the anachronistic Bavarian Purity Law of 1516, which states beer must be brewed with the traditional natural ingredients of barley, hops and water – without preservatives, the way it was historically brewed. It may be one of the oldest consumer protection laws on the books, and today the law lends a grandfatherly, authoritative tone to a marketing campaign, a way for some modern brewers to distance themselves from those that use preservatives and substitute barley with sugar, rice and corn. The truth is, exotic – some might say heretical – ingredients such as honey, blackberries and even coffee are finding their way into beer recipes, impurities that would make medieval Bavarian brewmeisters roll over in their graves.
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