Local breweries and distilleries in Cochrane are latching on to a new brewery and spirits tour that hopes to boost local tourism and the economy.
Both Half Hitch Brewing Company and the Whispering Dutchman Distillery have become a part of Brewz ‘N’ Booze’s tours, an opportunity co-owner of Half Hitch Chris Heier said is more than welcome during a time of economic hardship for his business and others.
“It’s been brutal, in one word, honestly,” Heier said. "We’ve seen a significant revenue drop, given that a lot of our clients are also restaurants, as soon as restaurants close so does a lot of our wholesale.”
Heier said the brewery has suffered wholesale revenue drops of 30 to 40 per cent over the past 19 months.
“On top of that, we have to deal with our own restaurants,” he said. “We’re limiting capacity and we essentially ended up becoming the whipping boys in our industry with the lockdowns, shutdowns, and restrictions. Our industry has been hit really hard, and it’s pretty well sucked over the last year and a bit.”
The concept for Brewz 'N' Booze is a day-long bus tour that takes participants to sample from a variety of craft breweries and distilleries in either the Cochrane, Canmore and Bow Valley area, or the Foothills municipalities of Turner Valley and Black Diamond.
The company currently offers two guided tours, each starting at $199 per person. Both tours have round-trip transportation beginning in Cochrane that come with a meal at Half Hitch, as well as tours and tastings at other breweries and distilleries in places like Canmore, Turner Valley and Black Diamond.
The next tours are happening the weekend of Nov. 13 and 14, followed by the weekend of Nov. 27 and 28.
Joining the new local brewery tour was an opportunity they could not pass up, Heier said.
“Anytime we can work with a firm that’s expanding some of their resources for marketing and product development, it becomes a no-brainer for us to be able to kind of latch on to that,” he said. “It’s guaranteed revenue.”
When he is not busy brewing beer, Heier dedicates some of his time to the Cochrane Tourism Association (CTA) as a board member. He said he believes the tour has the potential to create a ripple effect where more people want to visit the community by word-of-mouth from previous tour-goers.
“The thing I like about [this] is it’s a Cochrane product, essentially, and not just because the people that are running it live in Cochrane,” Heier said. “With my personal involvement being on the board of directors for the CTA, I’m always game to have any type of tour or platform that can feature us and also bring more awareness to what’s going on in the town.”
Heier said that Half Hitch has many eggs in the restaurant industry’s basket, running their own restaurant out of the brewery and recently opening a handful of new craft beer and pizza restaurants around the region, called The Mash.
The premise behind the new restaurants is to capitalize on margins from wholesale and retail. It’s another location to sell their product while also using the spent grains from the brewing process to create pizza dough.
It has come at a heavy price, Heier explained, despite low square footage and operating expenses across the new restaurants.
“When you look at what we had to do…we’ve had to garner additional investment to be able to pull this off,” he said. “But when it comes to individual restaurant performances, they’re all being equally hit. Every time there’s some sort of announcement, especially with requiring a proof of vaccination, it leads to less customers coming through the door at all of our locations.”
