The BC Craft Beer Guild hasn’t always had it easy. Founded in 1989 as the Craft Brewers Association, it was marked by false starts, fledgling brands and in-fighting that resulted in the organization disbanded in 2011. But the following year, Don Gordon, director of sales at Northam Beverages, Phillips Brewing’s Matt Phillips and Tree Brewing’s Tod Melnyk saw the wave of craft beer craziness about to take BC over and started the Guild up again. They hired Ken Beattie as executive director, who doubled the membership in two years, and helped establish the BCCBG as a provincial stakeholder and a guiding force in the BC Liberal’s new liquor laws, which are taking effect April 1.
I sat down last week with Gordon, Beattie and board member Jim Lister, general manager of Turning Point Brewery, to discuss the BCCBG’s philosophy and plans for 2015. The conversation was long and unwieldy – as tends to happen in a conversation with four people and several pints of beer apiece – so here’s a portion of that interview, edited for brevity.
Westender: But what was the catalyst for you guys getting the guild back together? Were you aware of what was about to happen?
Don Gordon: I would say 2012 was when everything was coming [together]. I don’t know the order of which breweries started appearing in Vancouver, but that would have been Parallel 49.
WE: Is that why you got the Guild back together? You could see this thing coming?
DG: Yup. We see trends too. We’re watching trends in the States, and also the beer market and the beer share, you could see the beer market dropping. Beer volume has gone down in the province for the past 10 years. It’s driven by the big guys, by the massive decline in national brands. At the same time that that’s happening, we see an influx in these municipal breweries opening up, and now our business is growing.
WE: Do you think that decline [in national beer sales] is independent of the growth of the municipal breweries?
Jim Lister: To some degree it is. I think it’s independent because the consumer base changed. The people following those brands, the heavy consumers driving that trend, were aging.
WE: And they’re switching to wine?
JL: Yup. That was the beginning of a downward trend. That was the start of it. It wasn’t all of it, but that was a big part of it. If you look at the alcohol categories, that was the time right when wine went the other way.
WE: So they were drinking Kokanee and Canadian…
JL: Right. They hit their 40s and 50s and say, “I’m not drinking a 15-pack of Blue anymore, I’m going to have a bottle of wine.”
Ken Beattie: And then the liquor age, 19 and up, those people coming in are not necessarily beer drinkers anymore. They’re hard-liquor drinkers. It was coming from both ends and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing [beer out].
JL: That was right around when the Donnellys got hot.
KB: Yes. It was about the romance of the cocktail again.
DG: So [beer]’s being attacked from all different angles, and then you get the neighbourhood brewery opening up, and that’s hot.
WE: And as this is happening, [the Guild] has not coalesced, or isn’t talking to each other in any way.
DG: No. Don’t forget, this surge of new community breweries are opening up because of a culture and a love of beer, not necessarily what the old breweries – what we call the legends – have done, which is to sell six-packs at the liquor store and build a brewery, and sell beer everywhere in the province.
These guys are saying, “I want to be part of the community.” It’s almost like an art gallery or a deli that they put their heart and soul in to, to service their neighbourhood. Why would they want to join a guild to get better tax breaks for packaged beer and a liquor board display? It doesn’t make any sense. But in fact, when they come to meetings and they understand what Ken is all about, and the help that they can give everybody, it’s better for everyone.
WE: When you started it up again in 2012, what was the mandate then?
DG: [It’s about] the collective voice. If you ask what was the underpinning, the reason for getting this whole thing going again, it was to make sure the message was clear to everybody. Whatever that message was, we had a collective voice. It’s about awareness. And, quite frankly, knowing where we came from. Knowing the BC craft beer background, and where it’s going.
JL: Alcohol in Canada is, other than tobacco and now prescription drugs, it’s the most the most regulated industry, probably in North America, but certainly in Canada. It’s good and bad, but because of that, there’s government involvement and huge profit margin pools for big companies and governments. They’ve had a mutual interest in revenue growth. Whether it was brewers or distillers, they all had big government lobbying groups where their guilds were just about government relations. That’s really all they do, because it’s about protecting profit. The guild for craft, while there is an element of that, it’s really about not getting left at the doorstep from the big guys. It’s about having a repository for knowledge and education so they don’t fail. Because if we get 100 breweries open and 60 of them fail, it’s damaging beyond repair for our total industry, and all of us will not succeed through it. We’ve taken a centre-of-knowledge approach, as well as a voice, as well as an advocacy role.
KB: It’s kind of two things. We want to add value to the menu for the members, and ask as a resource for the members. It’s kind of the big buckets that everything gets weighed against.
Keep an eye out for The Growler Craft Beer Handbook, coming to a brewery/bar/liquor store near you very soon. You can follow The Growler on Twitter at @TheGrowlerBC.
