For a small brewery with a limited advertising budget, a quality product is worth its weight in marketing gold. At the Howe Sound Brewing Co. (HSBC) in Squamish, brewing award-winning beers has been the most effective way to spread the good word beyond the boundaries of the community, and they do it with panache. The locally owned and operated brew pub was the recipient of a gold, silver and bronze medal at the 2011 North American Beer Awards held in Idaho earlier this month. Whistler Brewing Company received a gold for its Weissbier Wheat Ale (a Bavarian style Hefeweizen). The medals put HSBC's tally at those awards at 12 over the past three years and only three years after expanding into the retail market, HSBC ales can be found as far as Minnesota and California.
"By putting our beers in these festivals, by entering our beers in competitions and by using the social media channels that are available to us we are able to get the word out and the word about our brewery is we are a craft, quality brewery," said Howe Sound Brewing Co. general manager Trevor Magee. "We only use natural ingredients, we don't add any artificial ingredients and we have established a growing reputation among the beer geeks and the foodies and the people who like to get on the blogs and like to tweet, so the word spreads quick."
Howe Sound Brewing Co. won five medals at the 2010 North American Beer Awards - a North American Brewers Association-sanctioned event - and enter as many beers in as possible in other contests throughout the year. This time around it was their Pumpkineater Imperial Pumpkin Ale that took bronze, the King Heffy Imperial Hefeweizen that scooped silver and the appropriately named Goldtooth Berliner Wiesse that landed gold.
"The Goldtooth was a unique beer we brewed specifically for Vancouver Craft Beer Week, so it was a small batch and not one we do every year. It ended up winning," said Magee.
The light Berlinerweisse beer has roots in - drum roll - Berlin, and is customarily served with a small dollop of syrup to sweeten the finish (typically a classic Woodruff or fruit syrup). The imperial beers are bigger, stronger ales, with higher alcohol and hops content - brewing techniques employed to extend shelf life. These beers (also known as India Pale Ales or IPAs) were designed to wet the whistles of colonizers in Australia and the West Indies and were brewed to endure long ship rides over vast stretches of ocean without spoiling.
The craft brewing movement has existed since the dawn of beer some 5,000 years ago - it's impossible to separate it from its "craft" roots as it was made at home with local products as part of everyday female domestic duties. Fast-forward to the 20 th Century when technology allowed for mass production and the unique styles of beer brewed by individual brewers were largely overthrown in favour of cheap and reliable (if unexciting) beers made by the Labatt and Molsons of the world. A series of major buyouts over the past few decades has left the mainstream beer industry - including the once Canadian Labatt Brewing Company - in the hands of just a couple of companies - the largest is Anheuser-Busch InBev N.V. (which makes a few you might have heard of - Budweiser, Labatt Blue, Beck's, Stella Artois and Alexander Keith's)
So a once diverse and dynamic product was forced underground and into basements where it was left to the devices of die-hard enthusiasts who maintained their craft until around 20 years ago, when craft-breweries again started putting down roots. Since then, hundreds of small brewhouses have established themselves and craft beer is enjoying a renaissance of epic proportion.
"There has been quite an explosion in the craft brewing industry in the past five years. In fact the macro breweries, the Molsons and the Labatts and the larger breweries in North America have been down four to five per cent every year for the past five years and craft breweries are exploding," said Magee. "Us in particular, we're seeing a 30 - 40 per cent increase in our volume every year, and that's higher than the craft industry standard but the craft industry in general is up 15 - 20 per cent per year."
Part of the trend has to do with awareness - buying local has never been so hot (well, not since someone figured out Canadians would buy watermelons in January), but it goes beyond that. Citizens are proud to share a hometown with a quality product (think Sidney Crosby and Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia).
"People want to drink local, they want to support businesses that are in their backyard, and people are becoming more discerning about beer, it's like wine 20 years ago," said Magee. "People are understanding that there are all kinds of different styles of beer, different flavour profiles and people want to experiment, not just drinking beer on its own but pairing beer with food as well."
HSBC uses their beers in various recipes and offers pairing suggestions on their site (www.howesound.com). Along with selling to 75 licensees in the Lower Mainland, the brewery has also negotiated a contract with the American Whole Foods grocery stores to sell beer on their shelves. Bottoms up.
Note: Other local-ish heroes from the North American Beer Awards include R&B Brewing Company of Vancouver, which took two bronze and a gold and Bowen Island Brewery, which took a silver for their honey brown lager.
