room has a 22 foot ceiling with floor to ceiling windows. So lots of nature to look at and lots of natural light as well. Overall, it’s a warm and relaxing space with a cozy fire- place – and great beer too, of course. DS: The first location in ‘96 was very small – basically a nanobrewery, as I understand. I’ve been on board for three years, but I’ve heard the stories. We’ve been in the new building since November and it really is specifically designed for brewing beer. It’s definitely maintained a Mom and Pop feel, a family feel, but it’s doubled in size and tripled in capacity. We did about 6500 hectolitres last year and we’re planning to take that up to nine or 10 this year – and the capacity of the brewery is at least 15. So we are in the position to be able to supply British Columbia and some of Alberta and Saskatchewan as well. “The number of staff doubled because we had to hire chefs and servers and bartenders but I finally got the retail area and tasting room of my dreams!” TL: Our first beer was the Begbie Cream Ale – and we only sold locally in the beginning. We’ve won three gold medals with it since, along with numerous others in 22 years. Not long after we introduced our Tall Timber Ale, a brown ale, and our High Country Kölsch. I read that there were 29 other countries represented competing for the title of World’s Best Kölsch at the World Beer Awards 2017. How did your High Country Kölsch come out on top? TL: Ingredients play a big part. Bart has really perfected that beer over the last 22 years and now more than ever we’re seeing people come into the new tasting room who want to try the World’s Best Kölsch– it’s really great to see. DS: When the High Country Kölsch won the world champi- onship that definitely led to a spike in sales. But it’s also been our number one seller for the past 20 years and I think that’s because Canadians grew up drinking beers like Molson Canadian. That is a beer that
almost every Canadian is familiar with as far as flavour profiles go and Bart wanted to do something different. He didn’t want to make a lager like everybody else so he brewed a kölsch, which is a cold fermented, lagered ale from Germany. So it really walks the line between popular European flavour profiles and Canadian ones. High Country Kölsch is also made using an authentic kölsch yeast that comes from Germany so it offered something new to something very old. I think it had a lot of compet- itive advantages that way. Today, we see many kölsch or kölsch-like beers in the North American market. About 15 percent of the malt comes from Europe and only about 5 percent from the U.S. About 80 percent of our hops come from the US, mostly from Washington State. Only about 5 percent from Canada, but those numbers are changing now because hops are in such high demand here now. With the amount of breweries growing, the need for local hops has gone through the roof. Out of the 12 beers on the Mt. Begbie menu, what is the most local in terms of ingredients? DS: There’s really only one beer that we do that is 100 percent local and that’s a German lager called Tail Whip. Tail Whip is a Munich Helles lager and it’s very flavourful. We get the hops from Eagle Valley Hops in Malakwa and we get the malt from Armstrong – so it’s 100 percent B.C. There’s a lot of catching up to do with specialty stuff in Canada. There is a big opportunity for more hops and malt farms to start producing European crops to compete with the overseas markets. The craft beer industry is improving in every sense of the word; it’s getting better and better. There is incredible growth opportunity for anything to do with the beer industry. Last year was the first year since pre-Prohibition in the U.S. that breweries surpassed the pre-1920s numbers – and it’s still growing. There are now more than 5000 breweries south of the border and beer drinkers aren’t always looking for a variation on a familiar theme. People need change and we’ve really seen that happen in the last couple of years. People started to want hoppier and hoppier and bitterer and more bitterer beers. They wanted anything that was higher on the I.B.U. [Internation- al Bitterness Units] scale for a while and now people have The malt for our kölsch comes from Gambrinus Malting in Armstrong, BC, which is very close to us.
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