It’s been a fixture on Vancouver’s landscape for almost 60 years:
that monolith at the southern foot of the Burrard Bridge. It sits on
prime Kitsilano real estate that many Vancouverites drive past daily and
jog around—way around—heading off the bridge to Granville Island.buychristianlouboutin
For Women - Buy Online Cheap Brand products. It might be ignored
completely if not for the blue box on top of the building that relays
the time and temperature.
Relatively few people have cause to
enter the Molson Coors Canada Brewery, which has 250 employees; most of
the activity is hidden behind chainlink fences that guard the main
entrance on West 1st Avenue. At first glance, you might think the
brewery is part of the Seaforth Armoury next door—and it might as well
be,marcjacobsshoes,
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closed off it’s been to the general public. But all that changed last
week, when the brewery opened its doors for public tours for the first
time in its history.
On September 13, Vancouver Food Tour kicked
off its twice-weekly forays into the brewery. The tours are scheduled
to run indefinitely and take visitors through the history of the
building, besides giving them a behind-the-scenes look at the brewing
process.
Vancouver Food Tour owner Melody Fury told the Straight
on-site that the tours are a joint effort with the brewery, which
approached her company. (Vancouver Food Tour also runs a craft-beer tour
of Gastown.) “They want to show people that the beer is actually made
locally and consumed locally,” she said, explaining that 90 percent of
the Molson Coors products consumed in B.C. are brewed in Kitsilano.
So
why open the doors now? Molson Coors spokesperson Julie Gathercole said
that preparations had been in the works for about a year, and involved
modifying the building for public access and developing display
material. “Beer drinkers are becoming more knowledgeable about beer and
finding out where it comes from and what goes into it,” she said. “We
wanted to let them see exactly what we do.” The company is also trying
to reach beer drinkers through its new website, the Beer Host, which
focuses on beer and food pairings.
I took an abbreviated version
of the 1.5-hour tour at a media preview. Before I arrived, I was sent
the detailed dress code that tour participants must comply with, which
mandates wearing closed-toe shoes and long pants, and removing all
jewellery, including rings, earrings, studs, and facial piercings. “This
is a working brewery, and it’s for safety considerations,” Fury
explained. You must be 19 and have picture ID to enter.
Our
group donned safety vests and headsets and followed our guide, Carlos
Gomes, into the building. The entrance hallway gives an overview of the
history of the company and the building itself, with a display of
archival photos. The brewery was built in 1953 for Sick’s Capilano
Brewery Ltd.; its location was chosen for its proximity to water and the
rail lines that brought in the malt and barley. Molson purchased it in
1958, and it became Molson Capilano Brewery Ltd. in 1959. In 2005,
Molson merged with Coors, which is based in Colorado.
As the tour progressed,womenssandals shoes wholesale, cheap tn shoes ,Representing the Art of Fusion in stainlesssteelwatches,
we learned that the 500,000-square-foot Vancouver brewery is the
largest in Western Canada. It’s the third-largest Molson Coors Brewery
in Canada, after the ones in Montreal and Toronto (neither of which
offers public tours). It has a production capacity of over 2.2 million
hectolitres of beer per year, or about 600 million cans. The brewery
makes not only mainstays like Molson Canadian and Coors Light, but over
30 brands such as Asahi (brewed under licence and exported to the U.S.)
and Calgary Beer, which, ironically, is usually sold only in
Saskatchewan. Nearly 90 percent of what’s produced is distributed within
Western Canada and hits liquor -tore shelves within about a week of
production.
The tour continued with a peek through a window into
the fermentation room, which lies under the towering silver tanks you
can see from the street. Then, we went up to the brewhouse filled with
massive kettles, where Gomes explained the brewing process. The room’s
three-storey-high windows face west down Cornwall Avenue, allowing a new
perspective on Kitsilano.
The highlight, however, was the
canning and packaging room, where we put on eye protection and got a
long view of the process from an elevated walkway. Here, cans shoot past
on conveyor belts—at a rate of 1,500 to 1,600 cans per minute—and
branch off into aluminum rivers.
The tour ended in the “John
Molson Academy”—aka the polished-wood staff bar and lunchroom—with a
view of Burrard Street. Here, participants are offered four samples of
beer made on-site, along with a lesson in beer-tasting. “If you want to
insult the brewer, drink from the bottle,” Montreal brewer David Hamel
had said in a short video shown earlier. That’s because when you pour
beer into a glass, you can better appreciate its complex flavours and
aromas. “It’s all the difference between a peck on the cheek and a good,
proper French kiss.”
Visitors can’t buy beer at the brewery to take home. But when they see it in stores, they’ll know where it came from.
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