John Mitchell, owner of The Troller in Horseshoe Bay, had been left without any beer to sell following a strike at Carling O’Keefe. He’d had enough. Not only did he want to make his own small-batch, wood-keg beer, he wanted to sell it.
Handout photo of John Mitchell and John Ohler on a craft brewing road trip around B.C. in 2018. John Mitchell and Frank Appleton opened the first microbrewery in Canada, Horseshoe Bay Brewery, in 1982.: “During a meeting in 1981, B.C.’s Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs Peter Hyndman told the CEOs of Canada’s big three breweries that he was going to approve John’s plan for a “cottage brewery.” The brewing executives replied that Mitchell was a fool, and he would never “make a go of it.
In 1984, after pushing officials even harder, Mitchell coined the term “brewpub” and convinced officials to allow brewing and quaffing beer to happen on the same site. He co-founded Spinnakers in Victoria, the first brewpub in the country.Article content Mitchell knew that the wood keg process couldn’t be done in large breweries — he dreamed of 100-per-cent barley mash, he believed in using whole cone hops, not hop pellets, said Ohler.
most off Canadas so-called beer is fizzy larger