The Pass Beer Co.

Opening a taproom in the spring of 2020 was, on paper, the worst timing in modern brewing. Indoor service was banned before they could use it, so The Pass Beer Co. started life as a pick-up window selling growlers to a valley that had nowhere else to go. It worked. Five years on it runs twelve taps, wood-fired pizza and made-from-scratch poutine out of a Blairmore storefront, in the middle of the same corridor that made Emilio Picariello rich a century earlier. It is the geographic and moral centre of the Alibi Run: the Crowsnest Pass finally has a legal brewery of its own, in the exact spot the illegal stuff used to change hands.

The founding thesisDanielle Radvak and her husband opened a small-batch brewery on Blairmore's main street in 2020 — a coal-town valley that had spent a century moving other people's liquor and had no brewery of its own.

1. 2020
   The pick-up window

   Danielle Radvak and her husband open The Pass Beer Co. in Blairmore during the pandemic. With indoor guests restricted, the brewery launches by selling growlers out of a pick-up window.

2. 2020s
   Twelve taps and a kitchen

   Grows into a full taproom and restaurant — twelve taps, wood-fired pizza, made-from-scratch poutine, flights, growler fills and keg sales, with a pet-friendly patio looking onto the mountains.