As if out of nowhere, British Columbia has become Canada’s ground zero for artisanal distilling. BC’s seventy-plus distilleries comprise nearly one third of all the distilleries in all of Canada. Like many overnight success stories, this one took time. Dedicated believers patiently lobbied politicians for more than a decade in order to lay the groundwork for today’s flourishing distilling scene. That certainly does not mean distilling is new to BC. What the province is experiencing today is a reprise of another boom that began late in the 19th century. In Victoria, for example, two distilleries and countless breweries kept 24-hour-a-day saloons hopping. Drinkers in BC once knocked back more alcohol per capita than those in any other province or territory.
At the turn of the 20th century, brewer Henrich Reiffel Sr. and his family tapped into that cash cow by purchasing Braid’s Distillery in New Westminster, BC. They turned Braid’s into the renowned British Columbia Distilling Company. But when BC officially went dry in 1917, Reiffel decided to set sail for Japan, where he opened a brewery.
In Canada, prohibition was a provincial matter rather than a federal one, and for the most part, provincial politicians gave it little more than token attention. British Columbia’s brief flirtation with prohibition had very little support and ended in 1921. The public’s favorable opinion of wine and beer had survived mostly unscathed, largely because wine and beer are bulky—so less attractive to illicit producers—and therefore largely out of sight. In contrast, bootlegging during that four-year period tarnished the reputation of “hard” liquor, making politicians queasy about supporting its production even after prohibition ended. Then, when America enacted its own Prohibition in 1920, whisky smuggling quickly captured headlines on both sides of the border, leading to the perception that hard liquor was the devil’s dram. Smuggling beer or wine just didn’t have the same front-page charm as axe-wielding constables smashing barrels of booze.
Shady practices had not been limited to private entrepreneurs during the ban on booze in BC, nor did they end when prohibition was repealed in the province. In 1922, BC’s Liquor Control Board Commissioner, JH Falconer, accepted $15,000 from the British Columbia Distillery Company as a “thank you” for the thousands of cases of whisky sold through government stores. This confirmed the growing belief that the liquor business did not always operate above board. For nearly a century after prohibition, this perception of distilling being a crooked business lingered like a bad hangover. While the province supported its small wineries and craft breweries over the years, BC has not welcomed small distillers until very recently.
Large-scale commercial distillers, on the other hand, did thrive when they returned to the province in the mid-1920s. With the sale of alcohol legal again, Reiffel returned to Vancouver and fired up his stills. He wasn’t the only one; Reiffel’s first competitor locally was Vancouver’s United Distillers Ltd. And Samuel Bronfman and his prolific Seagram’s Company Ltd. touched down in BC in 1942 when he purchased the British Columbia Distilling Company, a trendy maneuver emulated by other big firms throughout the early 20th century. Similarly, in the early 1970s Schenley Industries acquired the Canadian Park & Tilford Distilleries Ltd. in North Vancouver (which went silent, then closed in the early 1980s). As the century progressed, Hiram Walker expanded its operations to Winfield, BC, in 1971, opening the Okanagan Distillery to keep up with demand for Canadian Club, only to cease operations in 1995. It was the last distillery to operate in BC until 2004, when BC’s first small mom-and-pop operation, the Okanagan Spirits Craft Distillery, opened its doors in Vernon. Meanwhile, McGuiness had acquired the Calona firm in the Okanagan Valley in 1990, primarily to bottle Canadian whisky purchased from others, including the former McGuiness Distillery in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, and Hiram Walker & Sons Distillery in Windsor, Ontario.
Investing in a small distillery in the political and regulatory climate of 2004 seemed like folly. Provincial officials had only ever dealt with large commercial distilleries; they didn’t know what to do with small ones. But the province’s wineries opened the doors to artisanal production a decade earlier with an agreement that saw the government support industry-wide restructuring. Nascent micro-distilleries had a model to work from—and hope, as the provincial government was keen to be seen as supporting small business in a difficult re-election campaign and encouraged several new distilleries to get up and running. The election was lost and the world’s longest poker game began, with the new government constantly shuffling the deck.
Distillers joked that they’d be fine as long as no one bought their products because, by law, the alcohol belonged to the provincial Liquor Distribution Branch (LDB). Whenever a bottle was sold, all the money went to the government, which took a cut, then mailed a check to the distillery. At that time, a $40 sale saw a return of about $9—less than the cost of making it.
It took almost 10 years to develop a helpful Craft Production Agreement for distillers. The 2013 agreement required craft distillers to use BC ingredients exclusively, and to ferment and distil them onsite. It significantly increased profitability by exempting small producers from paying the government markup on their first 50,000 liters of finished product. Beyond that, markup was introduced incrementally until annual sales reached 100,000 liters, when full markup was applied. But the hangman’s noose awaits: any distillery that goes even one liter over this 100,000-litre cap is reclassified as commercial rather than “craft,” even if it continues to distil from 100-percent BC ingredients. A commercial classification means the provincial liquor board takes over the sales function, the distiller can no longer sell onsite, and thus they endure high markups and low profits.
Still, new distillers eager to get into the game welcomed the changes. The novel concept that the government would support farm-to-bottle production, provided it used 100-percent BC ingredients, transformed the industry. Craft distilling exploded into a movement across the province. With more than 70 operating distilleries (the most in any province) and dozens of applications waiting in the wings, a groundswell is forming to bring more change and finally soothe any civil servant’s pessimistic hangover.
In BC, private liquor stores operate alongside the government-run BC Liquors. These private stores must buy their inventory through the government distribution system, although they do have access to a much broader range of spirits than BC Liquors sells. Unlike the rest of Canada, where distilleries are scattered geographically, BC’s distilleries fall naturally into three regional groupings. We begin with those in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, then tour Vancouver Island, before finishing in the BC Interior.
Excerpted from The Definitive Guide to Canadian Distilleries: The Portable Expert to Over 200 Distilleries and the Spirits they Make (From Absinthe to Whisky, and Everything in Between) by Davin de Kergommeaux and Blair Phillips. Copyright © 2020 Davin de Kergommeaux and Blair Phillips. Published by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
