A Quonset hut is not a subtle building. It is a half-cylinder of corrugated steel, designed to go up fast and shelter aircraft, vehicles or men without anyone worrying much about how it looked.
One of them went up at Calgary's Currie Barracks in 1936. Seventy years later, Wild Rose Brewery moved into it.
By the brewery's own account, the conversion was not a contractor's job handed over on a schedule. Its community helped turn the hut into a working microbrewery in 2006, and the taproom that came out the other side took the name AF23 — a nod to the building it had always been.
Very little in brewing is built for brewing. Almost everything is something else first.
That is the pattern this archive keeps running into. Breweries occupy creameries, rail sheds, garages, churches and, here, a piece of military infrastructure that outlived its purpose by seventy years. The building is usually older than the beer and will usually outlast it.
Wild Rose itself is a case in point. Founded in 1996, in the hut from 2006 — and in May 2019 the brewery was acquired by Sleeman, nine months before Banded Peak went to Labatt. The hangar is still the hangar.