Corporate Supporter Spotlight: Coal Harbour Brewing

This week, we continue our new series of interviews with organizations who support CAMRA and the craft beer heroes behind them.

Head Brewer at Coal Harbour Brewing Ethan Allured chats to CAMRA Vancouver about their little brewery with big plans.

“The Little Brewery That Could”. There were many hurdles with permitting that delayed opening by way too long. Our space has ceilings too low to properly fit conical vessels of the size we need, so we make do with dish bottoms. We are small and privately owned, so we have to do most repairs ourselves and cobble together equipment sometimes. Despite that we are able to turn out consistent, flavorful beer.

 Our first brew was November 11, 2011. This date is the namesake for our flagship 311 Helles Lager. I joined the company in February of this year, taking over for the outgoing Kevin Emms, now of Deep Cove Brewers + Distillers. I knew Kevin through Clay Potter, who now owns The Moon brewpub in Victoria and the timing worked out perfectly for Kevin and I.

I brewed at Mark Anthony Group’s Turning Point Brewery previous to Coal Harbour. It is a larger operation than Coal Harbour with a good mix of automation and manual systems and was a great learning environment for my current position.

With so many commonly recognized styles and many more beers fitting somewhere in between them, it would be impossible to nail down a favorite, which is why I love brewing so much. I will say that I learn toward the hop- and yeast-dominant styles. Aroma is a huge part of what sells me on a beer. I love the classic American hops as well as the new varieties being put out in the PNW as well as by Aussies/Kiwis. There is so much variety of flavors in Belgian beers even though most of them have very simple grain bills using small amounts of noble hops. Most lager and English-origin ale yeasts are pretty tolerant in variations of pitch rate, fermenter geometry, temperature, etc. still producing similar beer, but POF+ (phenolic off-flavor) yeasts respond so much to those variables that you can drastically affect the beer flavor by tweaking just one.

 

We are currently in the works of setting up all of that but aren’t yet. For now, I’d encourage anyone who is interested in seeing our operations to stop by because we love having visitors and will definitely give you an informal tour as long as one of us has some free time.

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Look for our new witbier debuting at GCBF and in stores and draft soon after that. Our popular Smoke & Mirrors will return for the winter as well as another big and bold release.