With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/309075
ivefold, to $2.7 million. Over those same ve years, Molson Canada's B.C. sales dropped 18 per cent and Labatt Breweries of Canada's B.C. sales fell 29 per cent. n igel Springthorpe's big- gest challenge is keeping up with demand. The sof t-spoken co-ow ner of Brassneck seems almost embar- rassed by his success. "I don't think we're the goose that laid the golden egg," he says, adding that there's lots of room for improvement. Pointing to the chalkboard listing beers currently on tap, he explains that "originally we wanted to have that board really busy, six to 10 beers up there, rotating all the time. We're managing to keep some of that promise, I guess...." He trails o . "We're tiny," he says. "We have 50 seats and a shop, and that's it, and right now we can't keep up with demand." Josh Michnik, owner of 33 Acres Brewing Co. on Sixth Avenue, a few blocks down the street from Brassneck, points to a $60,000 bottling machine sitting on the brewery oor, unused because it's all he can do to keep up with demand from his on-site lounge and his restaurant clients. "We can't sit on beer; we have to sell it," he says. "If we sell it to draft accounts, they're going to keep wanting beer." Michnik explains that soon after his July 2013 opening, he realized his original busi- ness plan, predicated on sales to a small but loyal local clientele, wasn't realis- tic. "We had to reinvest right away and order more tanks." David Bowkett, founder of Powell Street Brewery, tells a similar story. "Our original plans included bottling, but we haven't done any bottling lately; all the product is going out the front door," says Bowkett, who with his wife, Nicole, owns and operates Powell Street Brewing. The two-person opera- tion is the smallest of small nano-brew- ers, producing just 200 hectolitres last year (the equivalent of less than 1,000 six-packs a month). The former home- brewer moved cautiously into com- mercial brewing, planning to keep his day job as an architectural technologist while trying it for a few years. However, expansion has come sooner than he BCBUSINESS.CA JUNE 2014 BCBUSINESS 31 DE ST I NAT ION B R E W E R I E S : The Big Get Bigger As neighbourhood microbrewers scramble to meet demand, mid-sized players in the local beer market are expanding on a much a bigger scale, boosting production and adding lounges and retail stores. ■ Central City Brewing opened a $20-million, 65,000-square-foot brewery and retail store in Surrey last November. The company will triple its production this year, to 25,000 hectolitres. It expects to reach 100,000 hl within ve years, and has an option to expand to an adjacent two-acre site. ■ Red Truck Beer, owned by restaurateur Mark James, is building a brewery and restaurant on the False Creek ats, at 295 East First Avenue. The 200,000-square-foot facility, designed by the same architecture rm that designed Central City's new brewery, will start out with annual capacity of 25,000 hl, expandable to 50,000. ■ Eli Gershkovitch's Steamworks brew pub is expanding into retail production, with the opening of a 30,000-square-foot brewery and restaurant at 3845 William Street in Burnaby, expected to open this summer. ■ Alberta's Big Rock Brewery Inc. is currently installing a $3.5-million brewery, restaurant and lounge at the corner of West Fourth Avenue and Alberta Street near Vancouver's Olympic Village. The brewery, slated to open this year, will start out with capacity of just under 10,000 hl a year, and will add capacity according to demand. "B.C. has the most sophisticated craft beer palate in the country," says Big Rock president Robert Sartor. "If we're going to be part of the craft beer party in B.C., we have to be local." p28-35-Beer_june.indd 31 2014-05-05 3:28 PM