Beer trail 03 · Calgary · Alberta, Canada
THEBig Four
The Stampede was financed by four men. One of them was a brewer.
- Distance
- ≈ 8 km end to end
- Driving
- Under 25 minutes driving · half a day done properly
- Stops
- 3 breweries
A short route through the oldest brewing ground in Calgary — the flats by the Bow where Alfred Ernest Cross built the city's first brewery in 1893, nineteen years before he put up a quarter of the money that started the Calgary Stampede.
Best travelled Year-round — but July, for reasons the route makes obvious
The history
The brewer who paid for the Stampede
Alfred Ernest Cross came west, decided Calgary needed a brewery, went east to learn how to build one, and came back and did it. The Calgary Brewing and Malting Company sold its first beer in 1893 — a year before Calgary was legally a city.
He built it on the flats where the Elbow meets the Bow, on ground that was known afterwards as Brewery Flats and is now part of Inglewood. The Cross family lived a few streets away.
In the summer of 1912, Cross and three other cattlemen — Pat Burns, George Lane and Archie McLean — each guaranteed $25,000 to finance a rodeo nobody was sure would work. The Big Four put up $100,000 between them. The first Calgary Stampede ran that September.
So the event that defines the city to the rest of the world was underwritten, in part, by the man who had already given it its first brewery. This route runs through the ground he chose.
The route
Three stops on the old ground
Start in Inglewood — the closest stop to Brewery Flats itself
Cold Garden Beverage Company
Inglewood, Calgary · Alberta
Eleven beers, an events programme, and dogs allowed inside rather than banished to the patio. The most deliberately unserious room on the route.
On the flatsInglewood is Brewery Flats. Cross's brewery stood on this ground from 1893, which makes this the oldest brewing address in the city and the newest thing on it.
A few minutes on
The Dandy Brewing Company
Calgary · Alberta
Founded 2014 — the first of Calgary's post-rule-change breweries on any of these three routes, and the oldest of the modern wave.
On the flatsA century and change separates Cross's brewery from this one. In between, Alberta banned beer outright in 1916 and did not licence a brewery this size again until 2013.
Finish downtown
Last Best Brewing & Distilling
Calgary · Alberta
Brewery and distillery in one licence — the closest thing on this route to what Cross was actually running, which was never only a brewery either.
On the flatsCalgary Brewing and Malting was a maltings as well as a brewery, and Cross bought Alberta barley to feed it. A single company doing several things at once is the older model, not the newer one.
What this page does not knowThe Cross history is sourced; the route is ours. Only the first stop is placed in Inglewood by its archive record — the other two are placed in Calgary and no closer, so treat the running order as a suggestion rather than a surveyed line. The original brewery site is not a stop: what stands there now is not a brewery, and this archive does not send people to buildings on the strength of what used to be in them.
Tally's Take
Why this one is really a history route
The Stampede is the most-photographed thing Calgary does, and almost nobody who attends it knows a brewer helped pay for the first one.
That is the whole argument for this route. Cross is not a footnote attached to beer history — he is in the founding story of the city's defining event, and the brewery came first. The 1893 brewery paid for the 1912 guarantee.
What he did with barley matters more than the rodeo, though it gets none of the attention. Calgary Brewing and Malting imported seed barley from Ontario, handed it to Alberta farmers, and guaranteed 25% over market price to get it planted. A brewery deliberately built the supply chain it needed and left the province a crop.
Then in 1916 Alberta went dry and the brewery had to become something else to survive. The ground you are driving has been through prohibition, a hundred years of consolidation and a licensing regime that made small brewing illegal — and it is brewing again.
This page is the story; the passport is the journey. Open the route there to track how much of it you have actually done.
Follow this route in your passport →Guided
Tours on this route
Nobody runs a guided version of this route yet, so it is self-drive.
If you run shuttles, guided tours or designated-driver trips in Calgary, this route is open. We list real, bookable tours here with your booking link — and never a placeholder for one that doesn't exist.
Run a tour on this route →Drink responsiblyIf you are tasting at every stop, take a shuttle, split the driving, or spread the route over two days.
The Big Four is open for anchor stops.
Breweries on the route get a full archive profile, a scannable code, and a place in the itinerary. Tourism boards get a packaged route with the traffic tracked end to end.