of stuff, so we just built it all. We got the restaurant open in about seven months but we still had to renovate the pub side and install the brewery. There were nights where we were basically putting the pipes together for the brewery, dusting ourselves off and heading back into the restaurant for the dinner rush, serving, bartending, managing.” While a brewpub was something new to downtown Vernon – a thriving district that’s home to more than 550 business- es, 250 retail and service businesses, 52 restaurants and cafes, three art galleries, four parks, eight transit lines, 115 bike racks, and three public parking lots within 46 blocks, according to the Downtown Vernon Association – it was a culmination of every hat worn by the Martens. “Pearl and I both began our careers in hospitality,” Stefan explained. “We worked in a number of pubs, hotels, and restaurants over the years. I started when I was 18. I went to Germany back in 1993 to work in the beer gardens and one of the first things I noticed was the massive difference in beer flavours and styles compared to what we have here at home. Beer in Germany reminded me of milk: any age could buy it; it had an expiry date on the side; it was treated as a fresh product. I remember once I was back home in Canada, I found a can of beer from a fishing trip the year before, I cracked it open and it tasted exactly the same. I thought to myself, ‘What are they putting in this?’ and that really resonated in my mind. It also made my passion for beer and the craft side of it that much stronger. Not long after, I first heard of small breweries doing small-batch brewing with different flavour profiles. That meant that the same freshness I came to appreciate in Germany could be brought anywhere in Canada. That was a huge thing in my mind.” Stefan continued: “As funny as it is, at the time, I was actually more or less getting out of the hospitality world – I was building houses in the Okanagan. That’s when I got a phone call from a friend in my hometown of Williams Lake, B.C. about a start-up opportunity for a food and beverage location at a casino that was opening in town. It was a six month contract and it seemed like a great opportunity. He
also told me that he thought I should meet Pearl, who was bartending at a local pub. She was well-known and liked and I’d actually heard of her several times before. Once we officially met there was no separating us. It turned out we grew up just 10 minutes from one another in the same valley, sharing childhood memories of walking the same train tracks and swimming in the river which passed both our places, but we had never met. We hit it off and when my six month contract was up, we headed back to the Okanagan together. We went right into building together – our first house. And when I say built, I mean every aspect from the ground-up. My father was a carpenter and he taught me a lot, but what we didn’t know, we learned. After that, we started buying-up properties and renovat- ing them as rental units. Pearl has an amazing ability to see potential where others don’t and she’s not afraid to do any part of the renovation including the “drywall”. We did it all on a very small budget but you’d never know because of how amazing she would make these projects look. We started picking up more and more rentals and at one point ended up with 18 units. We were in full-swing rental mode – it was our full-time job. Then the housing crash hit and it really scared us. We realized we had all of our eggs in one basket. It was becoming difficult to rent some of the units and some of the one-bedroom units had up to five people living in them – things were getting as unpredictable as the economy itself. It made us really think about what we were doing.” “So we talked about opening a restaurant or bar. With our hospitality experience it only made sense to go that direction – it was a natural second choice for us. We started looking at properties available to lease or buy for a restaurant and as we shopped we talked about possibly starting a brewpub. I had brewed beer with roommates, but never anything on a large scale. I mentioned to Pearl a really good family friend from Germany, a Braumeister, who learned in Munich, who worked in Kelowna at one of the biggest breweries there – Stefan Buhl. He was our reliable contact in the industry. So after we found the vacant building on 30th Ave. we invited him to tour the space that was to become the brewery hoping that
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • DECEMBER 2016
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