community and build the craft beer com-munity
across Alberta.
“‘It takes a village,’ is the motto. That
started the Village Breweries ethos, which
is to not only brew high-quality craft beer
with local ingredients, but to also sup-port
artists, craftspeople and community
across the province,” said Stuart. “The part-ners
hand-selected a group of 50 investors,
known as Beer Barons and each of these
investors are engaged Calgarians doing
interesting things in various industries.”
The Beer Barons act as ambassadors
for the brand to create meaningful pro-grams
and relationships. From the outset,
Village Brewery engaged with the com-munity
and organized initiatives, such as
Village Hump Day socials, a meet up on
the first Wednesday of every month in
the taproom.
Village Brewery participates in more
than 300 events every year and creates
in-house projects and events that contrib-ute
to the community such as the Circle
Carnival. The company hosts the annual
two-day music festival and carnival. With
everything from YYC Food trucks to the
Bass Bus featuring local musicians, food
and beer to weiner dog races, the Circle
Carnival is a hit with young and old.
“Village Brewery offers more than
excellent ales and lagers,” said founding
partner Jim Button. “Beer is the conduit
through which we bring communities
together. Our commitment to support-ing
local artists, gardeners and musicians,
and building community is what makes
us unique.”
Acting as the board of the company,
the seven founding partners still play inte-gral
roles. A team of managers run the mar-keting,
sales, operations, HR and account-ing
departments with the help of support
staff. Supervisors oversee functional areas
such as the taproom, the brewing team,
the packaging team and the event and
tasting team.
Village Brewery’s
beermaking process
As with most microbreweries, Village
Brewery uses a hands-on, “craft” approach
to making beer. Stuart describes it as
“hands-on” because the process is not a
large-scale automated one.
Village Brewery operates a 30-hectolitre
brewhouse and usually runs two brews a
day, but during busy periods the team runs
24-hour brew days. The brewhouse has 24
fermenter tanks, six of which hold 20 hec-tolitres
and the other 18 hold 90 hectolitres.
There is one centrifuge for filtration.
Each brew requires approximately
six hours of painstaking attention as the
brewmaster adds ingredients and mixes the
ale before it is transferred to a fermenter.
After yeast is added, the fermentation pro-cess
takes about two weeks. The team then
moves the beer into a storage tank where
it waits to be packaged into a keg, can or
bottle. The brewhouse has one canning line
and one bottling line onsite.
The onsite laboratory is a centre for
both the science and the creativity that go
into craft beer. The team uses it for every-thing
from monitoring quality and shelf life
to recipe development.
In the early days, Village Brewery pri-marily
served Calgary from the brewhouse
location. As demand grew and craft beer
became increasingly popular, the distribu-tion
channels grew and the beer entered
Edmonton and then other markets in the
province. Today, Village Brewery craft beers
are widely available throughout Alberta
and parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
The beers
The raison d’être of microbreweries is to
brew small-batch handcrafted beers with
premium, local ingredients. Some micro-breweries
flounder and experiment before
they get the brews right. That wasn’t the
case with Village Brewery. With 180 years of
collective experience, Village Brewery got it
right off the hop, literally and figuratively.
Village Brewery operates a
30-hectolitre brewhouse and
usually runs two brews a day,
but during busy periods the
team runs 24-hour brew days.
B R E W E RY P R O F I L E
Village Nomad, one of Village Brewery’s flagship
brews, is an India pale ale
14 § POURED CANADA § www.poured.ca
/www.poured.ca
