For Powell Brewery's David Bowkett, the transition from "hobby brewery” to full-scale operation was a sudden one.
“For the first year-and-a-half, [wife Nicole Stefanopoulos] and I were basically running it on our own,” he recalls. “We'd submitted beers to the Canadian Brewing Awards, but we'd sent them in mostly just to get some feedback. Then our Old Jalopy won Beer of the Year, and suddenly, we couldn't make enough beer.”
In a relatively short span of time, the East Vancouver brewery, which opened its doors back in December of 2012, went from making a paltry 150 hectoliters per year to more than 3,500, expanding into more spacious digs, employing more than a dozen people, and in the process becoming, in David's words, one of the “grandfathers” of the city's craft beer renaissance.
“We're one of the older breweries of that second wave,” he notes. “I mean Storm, Granville Island, R&B, they've all been around for 20 years. But out of the second wave, we were the third new brewery to open up. It was Parallel 49, Coal Harbour and then us.”
