OctOber 2015 BCBusiness 75
In case you've been too busy drinking
craft beer to notice, B.C. is currently undergoing a dis-
tillery boom. Just three years ago, there were barely
a handful of distilleries in the province, but in 2013 a
new kind of licence was launched by the provincial
government—a craft designation that allows distillers
to keep a larger chunk of their sales free of markup
by the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch (
LDB). The
move opened the ‚oodgates, increasing the number
of licensed distilleries operating in B.C. from 17 in
March 2012 to 48 as of August 2015, with eight further
applications currently in progress.
Patrick Evans is one of those who are hopeful
that the recent changes herald a renaissance for B.C.
distillers. Evans, a third-generation farmer, began
construction on his Shelter Point Distillery in Oyster
River, B.C., south of Campbell River, in 2009 and
opened for business in 2011, with James Marinus as
distiller. Shelter Point's main product will eventu-
ally be whisky, though it has yet to sell a drop of it
as whisky takes years to age (the distillery hopes
to release its "rst batch this fall). In the meantime,
vodka—which takes just 14 days to get from grain to
glass—is Shelter Point's bread and butter. "When we
started there were just a few distilleries in B.C. and I
thought, Wouldn't it be amazing to have more?" says
Evans. "The way I see it, one distillery is cool to look
at, 10 is an industry—but 50 is a destination. Look at
Scotland: they have 30,000 square kilometres, includ-
ing their islands, and they have 3.9 billion litres in
whisky exports. How about we get a fraction of that?"
