Drink in Alberta's boozy history at Turner Valley's Eau Claire Distillery

A tour group tastes the offerings at the Eau Claire Distillery in Turner Valley, Alta., Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh)

Turner Valley, Alta., was a few years into an oil boom when prohibition dried out the place in 1916 -- or at least that was what the policy was meant to do.

Liquor found a way to flow, thanks to bootleggers who hid moonshine stills in nearby hills that roll westward toward the Rocky Mountains.

A century later, Alberta's first single malt whisky distillery has a prominent spot in Turner Valley, a town of 2,500 less than an hour's drive southwest of Calgary.

Eau Claire Distillery's tasting room sits where the town brothel once was.

The adjoining building -- where the spirits are made -- was a theatre in the 1930s, and then a cinema until the mid-1990s.

The space is decorated with old movie reels that were collecting dust in the abandoned theatre when the distillery took it over in 2013. A movie projector is mounted above a still bubbling with spirits in a humid, high-ceilinged room.

Distillery president David Farran says alcohol stills -- like ships -- are often given female names. This one is Ethel Merman, and a black-and-white portrait of the musical-comedy star is propped against its base.

For four generations, Farran's family has lived in this stretch of the Cowboy Trail, a scenic highway that winds through the foothills to the Rockies. They have a hobby farm where they harvest barley.

"We were producing enough that we felt terrible about throwing it away and not enough for sending it to the Wheat Pool," says Farran, seated at a long, glossy wooden table crafted from the theatre's original floor planks.

"After a whisky one fall harvest, we said: 'Wouldn't it be fun to start a distillery?"'

He determined there had never actually been a single malt whisky distillery in Alberta.

"And to me, that was just crazy because we produce the best Alberta malted barley in the world and we ship it to Scotland so they can make scotch."

The distillery isn't selling whisky yet, since it needs three years to age in oak barrels. A small batch is expected to be released toward the end of this year.

In the meantime, the distillery has been producing spirits like gin and vodka, also using local barley. Its parlour gin and Prickly Pear EquinOx -- a spirit made from a cactus that grows in Alberta -- have won awards.

As a purveyor of gin, it was only natural that Eau Claire would start making its own artisanal tonic water.

"We were just concerned that a lot of the tonics on the market weren't complementing the gin. They were overly botanical themselves," says Farran.

Eau Claire has tours and tastings two or three times daily in the summer, less frequently in the off-season, and also hosts mixology classes and even yoga events.

Farran says the distillery started noticing groups coming down for book club meetings or afternoon outings, so it recently started a twice weekly G & Tea offering -- drawing on the British tradition of having a gin cocktail with afternoon tea.

A three-tiered platter of little sandwiches, cheeses, cured meats and sweets using products made or foraged locally is enough to serve four. Cocktails infused with ingredients like fennel and rhubarb are served in an ornate teapot and poured into matching china teacups.

Farran, whose eclectic resume includes stints as a diplomat and a veterinary clinic proprietor, says the distillery operates with a "farm-to-glass" philosophy.

"One of the reasons that we started this was really to be a showcase for value-added agricultural product in Alberta," he says. "And distilling seemed such a natural thing for a province that raises grain."

In addition to barley from his nearby farm, Farran says the distillery sources the grain from few other plots in south and central Alberta.

In each location, the work is powered entirely by horses -- not by machines.

It's part of the fun of it, Farran says, but it also serves a more serious purpose.

"We get an opportunity to protect and preserve a way of life that is fast disappearing."