Granville Island Brewing

Grandville Island is one of Vancouver's biggest destinations, for tourists and locals alike. It has a huge market, a harbour, fishermen selling their salmon right off the boat, an arts college, and of course, the Granville Island Brewery. Sunday was a warm, sunny day, so Darrell and I hopped on our bikes for an afternoon of fish and chips, gelato, and shopping at the farmer's market for dinner.

I'd known since my first visit that the Granville Island Brewing taproom was there, and had always meant to visit, but I had never got round to it. Since we were passing by, we decided to talk to the woman under the tent outside the building, and by sheer luck we learned that it was the brewery's Customer Appreciation Week, and they were promoting it with free brewery tours.

Their taproom and retail store
right in the busy part of the island

We had a whole afternoon open, so we walked into the retail store (okay, ran) to get on the tour list. The tours were popular and there was a long wait ahead, but the free sampling of two new specialty beers helped  stifle my impatience.

Sampler guy, with his samples.

Before I talk about the beer, though, I'll say a bit about Granville Island Brewing from the perspective of a non-native British Columbian.

Granville Island Brewing - Some Background

Granville Island Brewing, founded in 1984, claims to be Canada's oldest microbrewery. In many ways it is like Vancouver's equivalent to Toronto's Mill Street Brewery. Its beers can be found anywhere, even across the country. (GIB's English Bay Pale Ale was the first BC beer I'd ever seen, in Ontario pubs and the LCBO. Likewise, MSB's Tank House and Coffee Porter appear in quite a few pubs over here.) They're the biggest player in their segment, producing 8,000,000 litres annually - keeping them just under the 10 million litre mark that would end their "micro" status. They're very popular, and their beers, while unquestionably better and more interesting than the big commercial brewers' products, still manage to appeal to a broad base of people. They're the good local beer that everyone knows, and in a way it represents the city.

And they have two facilities - a big production area that they don't generally show people, and a smaller-scale system where they brew their one-offs, seasonals, and experiments, attached to a pub in a trendy tourist destination. In other words, for my friends in Toronto, it's exactly like Mill Street, except with more variety.

Lots of variety.

The Tour

I love brewery tours. Even though they all give you the same basic information about the brewing process, it's interesting for me to see how brewers at different scales manage the brewing process.

Granville Island Brewing is definitely a big-budget operation. There's no homemade equipment here. With 8 million annual litres of production, every tank, pipe, and machine is pristine and efficient. Check out this system of pipes:

The grain mill. Not a great picture,
but you can see the vacuum pipe
that sucks up the milled grain.

Pipes criss-cross the ceiling
pumping different liquids to different
distinations automatically.

Mash tun. Pipes from the grain mill
feed directly here.

Pipes line the ceilings, pumping grain, mash, wort, refrigerant, and beer into the appropriate tanks. I know this is a pretty common setup in bigger breweries, but it never fails to impress me. Even the milled grain is pumped through the pipes, into a funnel that feeds into the mash tun, and can be moved to another mash tun if needed.

The system is so efficient that the brewmaster mainly works the entire brewery alone, until the beer gets to the bottling line. This is the kind of thing you can do when you have a lot of capital behind you. One of the biggest differences that this kind of equipment makes: the floors are dry. [This doesn't seem like a big deal, but at smaller breweries where more is done by hand, water gets everywhere. A completely enclosed system is pretty impressive.]

Here are a few more pictures from inside the facility:

Malt. They seem to mainly use Gambrinus
(a local maltster) for their base malts
and Bairds for their specialty grains.

I'm not actually certain what they've got here.
My first guess is yeast, from the foam.
Might also be sanitizer.

Tour guide explaining things.

Fermentation tank. Ferments about
12,000 bottles (650 mL "bomber" size) worth.

Conditioning (secondary fermentation) tanks.
This is where the beer goes when primary
fermentation is complete.

A bright tank, where "bright" (finished) beer
sits waiting to be bottled.
(The tag on it requests cleaning. Someone
drank too much before the tour, fainted,
and banged their head on the nozzle.)

The bottling line. At bottling time they pull
people from the retail store and the bar
in order to get this done quickly.

The Reinheitsgebot (German beer purity law)
framed over the office. I want a copy.

The Beer

Granville Island produces a wide variety of beer styles, and they're always doing limited releases, but even the wackier offerings aim for a sort of broad appeal. You won't find a super-bitter IPA, a really intense stout, or a crazy-sour lambic on their shelves... Just good beer that a large proportion of people can get behind. I see it as a brewery that can guide non-craft-beer drinkers into the craft beer world.

Let's look for example at the two seasonals they were promiting this week: Cloak and Dagger Cascadian Dark Ale (aka a Black IPA), and Ginga Ninja, a ginger beer with a cool name that has unfortunately been used by at least four other breweries.

Mmm, beer bucket

Ginger beers have started to catch over the last year or so. In Canada Phillips seems to have led the charge with a very spicy brew that tastes almost like the soft drink. GIB's version is less intensely gingery, more beery. And it's a lager, apparently, making it much clearer and lighter-tasting than usual. A good six-pack for summer.

The Cascadian Dark Ale (or Black IPA) is a style that blew up a few years ago. This is basically a stout that has been hopped like an IPA - thick and dark, but also bitter and aromatic. My first exposure to it was Flying Monkeys Netherworld, which I loved, but most of my (non-beer-geek) friends couldn't stand. More recently a number of breweries have played with it (my favorite: Puzzler by Great Lakes and Phillips which smells like flowers and grapefruits but tastes like black chocolate coffee), and I was pretty excited to see the style in bottles here. Cloak and Dagger is too hoppy for Darrell, but pretty mild for me. Definitely less intense than others I've tried, and again, a good way to coax people into trying the style.

But that was just the sampling in the retail store while we waited for the tour to start.

The Tap Room

BC's liquor licencing laws are very arbitrary and weird, so you never know what a given brewery will be allowed to do. In GIB's case, their licence allows them to do small samples only in the retail store, and they have to charge for tastings in their pub. So the guide will tell you that you can have a few samples in the Tap Room ($6 for three taster glasses), or if you want a proper drink, visit the pub around the corner. We elected to share a sampler.

This was taken before the serious partying happened.

The Tap Room is pretty much a pub that only serves samples. It was hopping, full of college-aged people chatting and laughing and getting themselves drunk while a three-man band played classic rock and Britney Spears covers. People that age will be getting drunk anyway, so it's nice to see them doing it with craft beer.

Your $6 gets you three sampler glasses with the beer of your choice in it. Darrell and I have different tastes, so we had to compromise on a selection that would be acceptable to both of us. The warm weather compelled us toward the summery beers, so we had the Maple Cream Ale, the Hefeweizen, and the Raspberry Ale.

They were all good - nothing mind-blowing, but all of them were brews you could happily down all night in the pub. Which seemed to be happening all around us. Lots of happy people in that room.