The Hub of Okotoks is officially opening for business over the Labour Day long weekend.
Hub Town Brewing Co., at 41 Elizabeth Street, will be officially open for the public on Monday, Sept. 2, from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m., with a soft opening on Sunday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. for those with VIP Founders chips.
Founders Lisa and Mark Watts announced the opening through the Hub Town Facebook page on Aug. 28.
“Opening is crazy exciting, the kind of exciting I can’t even express,” said Lisa. “Scared to death, can’t wait for it to happen, not sure how it’s going to turn out. I’m sure it will be interesting.”
Lisa clarified that the soft opening is intended for people who have VIP chips from contributing to their crowd funder and friends and family, but they won’t have a closed-door policy.
“If somebody shows up and they don’t have a VIP chip, we’re not going to say go away,” she said.
The soft opening is simultaneously a way to give thanks to their early supporters and trouble shoot the system.
“Everything will be brand new and we’re probably going to fumble and that first day is intended to do that in front of all the people that love us anyway,” she said.
The brewery has been a much-anticipated addition to the downtown core since the process began in 2015, with excitement in the community mounting over the last year.
The announcement answers one of the community’s biggest questions: When is Hub Town opening?
“We get calls and emails and texts, everything, it never stops,” said Lisa. “They ask all of our family, they ask all of our friends, everybody who’s ever had contact with us is being asked.”
On offer right out the gate will be the 1882 Okotoks Golden Ale, the Prodigal Hon-ey Brown Ale made with Chinook Honey Farm honey, the Hazed & Confused IPA, and the Mr. Pink Radler.
Hub Town Brewing will offer families a place to sit and enjoy local craft beers, including the Olde Towne Butter Beer for the under-18s.
Originally sold for the 2018 Enchanted Okotoks the butter beer was kept on tap—with special mini-sized pints glasses—to give children (or adults) the authentic tap house experience.
Hub Town will be open seven days a week, with hours of operation from: 11 a.m. to 12 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday; and from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays for the remainder of the nice weather.
While snacks will be available, guests are encouraged to order from local restaurants with the menus available at the tables, as well as bringing their own food.
“If you want to get a potluck together and bring your whole family in for Christmas dinner, feel free,” said Lisa. “We’re not going to provide the food, but we’ll provide the beer.”
The Watts originally weren’t much in the way of beer drinkers. While Mark enjoyed commercial beers, Lisa was generally unenthused by the beers she had tried before.
While on vacation in Montana in 2014 without their children, they decided to take in a couple craft brewery tours as something to do. Their life path was forever changed.
“I was like ‘what is going on? This is not beer,’” said Lisa of tasting craft beer for the first time. “Normally I need clamato juice to drown out the flavour.
“We didn’t know that there was more to (beer).”
After discovering their passion for craft beer, they decided to start brewing their own beer at home as a back up plan for their careers in oil and gas, owing to the declining oil and gas sector in 2014.
“This was supposed to be the back up plan when we got laid off,” said Lisa. “We’ve just had two jobs for four years instead.”
Starting off with one-gallon home brews in 2015, they originally sold their beer under the name Strange Brew—an homage to Bob and Doug McKenzie—at small shows in the area.
They knew they needed to increase their production when they began receiving requests for brewing their beer for large events.
“We kind of got the gist that people were saying ‘yes we like this novelty thing, but we really want more,’” said Lisa. “So we said okay, this is maybe where we shift gears and take this a little further and we talked about opening a brewery.”
After pitching the idea to the Town and getting an enthusiastic “yes,” the Watts began the process of opening their brewery and trademarking the name in 2016.
Unfortunately, “Strange Brew” was trademarked a month before they put in their application, meaning they were back to the drawing board for a name for the brewery, said Mark.
“We’d always had that idea that we wanted to be like Cheers—another old reference—so you know, it was a place to come hang out and everybody was having a good time,” he said. “And we were having a meeting with the Town and somebody said something about it being the hub of the downtown, and we were like ‘Hub Town, okay!’’
Getting the name and go-ahead from the Town were the easiest parts of the process, they said, and everything since—such as safety codes—has been a steep learning curve.
“It was a quick lesson that we learned, that we weren’t going to do it on our own,” said Lisa. “It wasn’t going to be a piece of paper that says: here’s what we want to do.”
Support from the local craft beer community has been a key player in their journey to opening, they said.
Hub Town’s investors include two of the founders of Village Brewing Co. in Calgary, who helped the Watts choose and install their equipment.
Additional support came from Calgary’s Prairie Dog Brewing and Turner Valley’s Brauerei Fahr.
“Collaborative is an understatement,” said Lisa of the craft beer community. “If you’ve ever wondered why, if you look at the beer industry, (craft beer) is only 13 per cent of the beer market. The big guys, like Budweiser and Molson, they’re the rest of the market.
“We’re the underdog pushing to get their share of the beer market so we work together to bring craft out to everybody so we can all get into that share.”
