THECowboy Carburetor Crawl

A brewery is a wet, heavy, badly-behaved tenant. It needs a floor that can take several tonnes of liquid, a drain that can take the rest, power for the glycol, a ceiling tall enough for a fermenter and a door wide enough to get one through.

There is a building type that already meets that list exactly, and it was never meant for beer. Light-industrial bays — the units that hold mechanics, fabricators, parts wholesalers and freight — are the cheapest square footage in any city that answers every one of those requirements at once.

So when Alberta deleted its half-million-litre production floor in 2013 and small brewing became legal, the new breweries did not open on high streets. They opened in garages, because a garage is a brewery with the wrong tenant in it.

The Barley Belt was the first cluster to prove the model. These four are what happened next — the same idea, spread out across the city rather than concentrated in four blocks.

The name is a joke about where these places are, and the joke is load-bearing.

Beer tourism sells itself on heritage — the old brewery, the copper, the family name over the door. Calgary's modern brewing scene has almost none of that, because it is barely a decade old and it grew up in rented industrial units with the previous tenant's paint still on the walls.

That is not a lesser story. It is a more honest one. A brewery in a garage is a business that put its money into tanks instead of frontage, and the taproom you are standing in is a converted loading bay because the alternative was not opening at all.

The heritage will come. Every old brewery was a new one, in a cheap building, run by someone who could not afford better. This route is what that looks like while it is still happening.