On 21 December 2011, Village Brewery had thirty kegs of beer and no customers yet.
Six partners had built the thing. By the brewery's own account of that morning, two of them — Jim and Tom — got into separate carsand drove off in different directions, each trying to be the one who made the company's first sale.
Both of them arrived. Both bars took the beer. And in the brewery's own telling, years later, both venues were still claiming they were first.
Nobody kept a stopwatch. That is the whole charm of it.
It is a small story and it will never be settled, which is roughly why it is worth writing down. Most of what an archive preserves is structural — founding years, ownership, closures, volumes. Almost none of it captures what a brewery's first day actually felt like, and the details that do survive tend to survive by accident, in an anniversary post somebody wrote for their own customers.
Village is still independent, still in Calgary, and the race is still a draw.