Cannery Brewing turns 20

Ian Dyck is just 30 years old. But when he gets to talking beer and all that's helped morph Penticton into one of Canada's brewing hotspots and Cannery Brewing into one of its strongest pillars, he spouts off names and places like a wise old historian.

Today, the brewery, founded by his mom Patt and dad Ron 20 years ago, cranks out approximately 450,000 liters of beer annually, scattered over some 30-plus styles and 500 retail locations throughout western Canada.

And the 12,000-plus square-foot Cannery HQ, with its delightfully quirky taproom, aircraft hangar-ish production facility, and dual patios -- including one of the city's biggest, unveiled in 2020 and justifiably named the "Backyard" -- is a big draw for both locals and visitors.

Yet Dyck seems equally interested in the people he's met along the way -- the people who share with him the love of a great craft beer.

"Everything is relationship-based," he says while kicking back momentarily in the Cannery brewhouse, framed by a mountain of empty beer cans. "Our stainless steel is an asset, but it depreciates every day. Our building is an asset, but it depreciates every day.

"But our biggest asset is our staff. Geoff Robertson here in the back was my parent's first employee when he was 16. And he's still here."

And that may be the biggest clue of all to the Cannery success story, a story that kicked off in the late 90s when Ron and Patt, who for a quarter-century ran Naramata's famed Country Squire restaurant, decided head chef Terry Schoffer was really onto something with his home-brewing hobby.

"Dad and Terry got into the homebrew thing in the basement at the Country Squire," says Dyck. "Naramata Nut Brown was the first recipe they ever had, and it's still one of our biggest sellers."

By 2000, the trio had bought up the gear of one of Penticton's very first "craft" brewers, the short-lived Wild Horse Brewing, and relocated it across town to an old Aylmer fruit and vegetable canning plant now called the Cannery Trade Centre.

And Cannery Brewing was born.

"We had to shut down Main Street and crane out the tanks," says Dyck, who was just a kid at the time. "But we loved the Cannery space. We loved the landlords."

In the beginning, the brewery, one of only three in Penticton -- it was preceded by Tin Whistle Brewing and the Barley Mill Brew Pub microbrewery -- and one of what Dyck figures was "maybe 15" independents in the entire province, produced just four varieties of beer. And dad hand-delivered every case sold to out-of-town customers in his Honda Odyssey minivan.

All of that would change over the course of the next decade and a half. Sales grew exponentially and fresh new beers materialized regularly. And in time, the Cannery gang needed more room.

But rather than dropping huge bucks on a full-blown relocation, they opted to make do at the Trade Centre. Overextending themselves, it would seem, was never part of the Cannery formula.

"We’d blown out two separate walls to make our main unit three times as big," says Dyck with a smile, "and we were renting out three additional units.

"We were running bottles through the (Walla Foods) bakery. Our bottles would be in a storage locker at one end of the building, our labels would be over here next to Claudio when he still had his (Valentini's Café) restaurant. The ladies' washroom and one of the peach-packing plants put together was our brewery."

But by the mid-2010s, it was clear something had to give. Cannery Brewing had fully established its name, its rep and its sales network, but had simply exhausted every possible permutation at the Trade Centre.

It was time to move.

"We looked at the (current) Bad Tattoo Brewing space," says Dyck. "We looked at a property in Summerland, and we looked here. It was mostly an empty dirt lot. The only thing on site, where our taproom is now, was a car shop called ANJ Automotive."

The edge-of-downtown location eventually won out and the renovations began. Today, elements of ANJ Automotive are still evident in the taproom, but the big adjacent production facility was a new build. And the Backyard Patio sits on a piece of land purchased more recently.

Along the way, Ian Dyck, practically born into the industry and clearly loving his position in life, took a four-year business management course and became Cannery's director of sales and unofficial spokesperson.

So we ask him to impart some of his knowledge. Back when we were young, we tell him like we're sitting in a rocking chair whittling wood, beer was beer. There were limited options and one pretty much tasted like the other. So what's with the recent craft beer explosion?

And he put on his historian's hat again, taking us all the way back to prohibition and explaining that it's really just a comeback.

"Prohibition changed the beer industry," he says. "Before prohibition, every town had a brewery and there was variety. But prohibition really put a kibosh on everything.

"So the big corporations ran with it and monopolized the industry. And the easiest way to do that was to brew easy-drinking, pedestrian-tasting beer. But now, making exciting, hard-to-brew lagers is coming back."

As for Cannery's 20th anniversary, which was officially marked on the 1st of April, Dyck's keenly aware that without his parents and all they've instilled into the business, the scenario could have been quite different.

And he offers up an example.

"Our new sales rep dropped by the Port Hardy liquor store a while ago," he says. "It's pretty remote up there. So he goes in there and the first thing he hears is, 'How's Ron doing? He's still my favourite sales rep. We used to do tastings in the parking lot."

But if relationship-building is the key, keeping perspective runs a close second.

"We never had goals of being some giant brewery," says Dyck as he tastes a recent batch. "We're just craft beer missionaries. We could never have visualized what the industry would eventually become."

Cannery Brewing is situated at 198 Ellis Street in downtown Penticton. Hit up the website for more info.