Village Brewery celebrating 10 years making craft beer

Village Brewery celebrates 10th anniversary One of Calgary's first craft brewers turns 10 and celebrates by honouring a group of Calgarians on its labels. Kevin Fleming reports.

CALGARY — They weren't the first craft brewery in southern Alberta but operations manager Jeremy McLaughlin says Villagre Brewery, 10 years old, were looked up to.

"The craft brewing scene has really exploded here in the last five years so that tells you a lot about how long we've been around," he said. "People look at Village as if we're the big brother of the brewing industry for craft breweries."

The first kegs were sold on December 21, 2011 and Village Brewery has worked thousands of festivals, civic engagements and community initiatives ever since.

On top of that, it lives up to its name by giving back hundreds of thousands of dollars to the community.

FOUR DISTINCT PRODUCT CHAINS

The brewery stands out across the country with four distinct product chains.

"We've got our beer and it's what built Village," said McLaughlin. "We came up with a cider, it's been incredibly successful for us, we then came out with a line of non-alcoholic beers that's been really, really successful for us and then we also have our Seltzer, which has been successful for us in the summer time."

Now, to celebrate 10 years the company is featuring people from the community who are making a difference. The faces of 12 people are on six varieties of beer cans.

"When we started it was all of our family members on the cans so we always had characters on the cans," said Jackson Stuart in marketing with the brewery. "10 years later we want to show real people doing really awesome things in the community that make up sort of our village so that's where we have these new people in the cans."

MATCHING PEOPLE TO BEER VARIETIES

Stuart says staff worked to match people with beer varieties.

"What we did is we actually took each beer, so we've got the blacksmith, the wit and we kind of have like an ethos around them," said Stuart. "So the wit is sort of performance, the nomad is about adventure so we took each of these people that kind of fit in these subcultures and showcase them on these beers."

Big metal artist Ian Rice is one of the faces featured on blacksmith. He's proud to be chosen and made sure he has enough of the cans to give to friends and family when they're released early next year.

"It's almost like an extension of the art because it just feels really kind of vindicating, and gratifying to have the work recognized like that and to see that we're now getting established in Calgary and we're able to set up and be taken this seriously is really rewarding," said Rice.

He's focused on his art for the last four years at his studio called True North Absurdities and isn't sure if this will help him get some commissions.

"But if anything comes from this hopefully True North Absurdities will reap some rewards," said Rice. "Maybe we'll get into a few more gigs but yeah, we're just going to keep doing this thing, and I love it."

Village Brewery is planning anniversary celebrations throughout 2022 and will start with a new product line to be released in February.

Learn more about Village here: www.villagebrewery.com