LOCALLY GROWN BEVERAGE ALERT
November 19, 2013
Calgary’s first Community Involved Ale set to grace shelves
From Bridgeland to the bottle – local ingredients flavour latest Village Brewery concoction
CALGARY, AB – Our first Village Gardener Community Involved Ale is being introduced to Calgary’s community engaged beer lovers this Wednesday at the Brewery. This batch includes locally sourced malted barley and hops grown in the backyards of Calgarians with only 1,200 bottles made available for sale.
What, pray tell, is a Community Involved Ale you may wonder aloud. The concept harkens, well, really far back and has carried through to present day community gardeners and cleverly-clad hipsters. The Village Gardener Community Involved Ale is many things:
> a celebration of the community gardener who waters, weeds and nurtures
> sustainability in a bottle, replete with the refreshing taste of social consciousness
> our effort to build the connection between the food and drink we are passionate about and the people who passionately grow the ingredients
For our first Community Involved Ale we started by:
> growing some hops on Tim’s farm
> then we reached out to our social media Village to get more ideas
> some friends who grow hops in Bridgeland came on board
> in exchange for their hops we’re giving them some of the beer
> which they’re going to use in an event to raise funds for the Calgary Horticultural Society
and hopefully inspire more closet gardeners to embrace urban farming
Join us, try it for yourself and even meet a couple of the local gardeners.
Where: Village Brewery – 5000 12A St SE
When: November 20, 2013 from 2 to 4 p.m.
Why: Because when you grow local, brew local and enjoy local the world is a better place
Village’s Community Involved Ale will be available in a new one litre package size. Half the size of the growler some have taken to calling it the “meowler”. We’re not sure what to make of that. Regardless it will be available in select liquor stores for a limited time (umm, ‘till they run out).
In a first for the Village Brewery pantheon of press releases, we’re telling you that it’s ok to get excited about this story, but you should really be more excited about where this could go. In the New Year we will be bringing together some super smart people to consider an ambitious Urban Hops Project – maybe we try strawberries, thyme, dandelion, rose hips or rhubarb. The potential is tremendous. This is just the first step, or sip if you will. And we are sure the idea will grow. Ok, we’ll turn the pun machine off. For now. Sorry.