The second annual Langley Craft Beverage Week wrapped up on Sunday, May 19 at Fort Langley Park with a flash sale by more than 20 vendors offering samples, including all of the “Langley Loop.”
Featuring drink tastings and live music, it was the first-ever Spirits in the Park event to be hosted by the Loop, a network of local breweries, cideries and distilleries.
Lies Reimer, general manager for Red Door events, the organizer of the park tastings, described it as a “picnic in the park” where people could go around with glasses provided by the event and sample beers and whiskey.
Among the Loop members present was the newest Langley-based craft brewery, the Brookswood Brewing Company, which opened its doors in September of 2022, as well as the farm-based Aldergrove-based Locality Brewing, which became Langley’s eighth brewery in 2021.
Brookswood Brewing Co. co-founder Kris Johnson said he and partners Jeff Hurkett and John Collins set up their tasting room in Brookswood, at 4061 200th Street, because there aren’t any craft breweries to speak of in South Langley.
“There was nothing out here in Brookswood and now there is a community hub for people to come and hang out and have a beer, have a conversation,” Johnson commented.
At Spirits in Park, Johnson reported the most popular Brookswood beer was one he personally designed.
“Hands down, it was our caramel cream,” Johnson told the Langley Advance Times.
“I went to a beer festival 20 years ago over on Vancouver Island and I tried it from a different brewery. This was before craft brewing here in B.C. was even really a thing. We started brewing it last year around this time and it’s been one of our most popular beers.”
It’s called “Tastes like another,” because Johnson used to say that all the time when he was asked ‘how does your beer taste?’
“I’m like, well, ‘it tastes like another beer’, which means it tastes good, and now we’ve got a beer with that name on it.”
At the Locality Brewing table, co-owner Andrew Hamer was explaining how he and his wife Melanie MacInnes turned her Aldergrove family farm into a “field to glass” brewery that grows its own ingredients.
“We’re operating on a 96-acre farm,” Hamer told a visitor.
“My wife Melanie runs the brewery. We started growing ingredients in 2016. We grow our rye, barley, wheat hops [and more]. A lot of those ingredients goes into our beer because we have the only malt house in the lower mainland.
Offering picnic areas and hiking trails, the Locality farm brewery is slightly off the beaten track at 7111 252 Street, but Hamer said it was easy to find using GPS
“We’re a great summertime destination. If you come, you can a reconnect with the land. That’s what kind of what we’re about.”
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For the 10-day long beverage week, the Loop brewed what was described as a “special collaboration beer” with partial proceeds going to the Langley Food Bank – a blend of five berries from across the Fraser Valley called a “Valley Berry Sour.”
Other members of the Langley Loop include the Barley Merchant, Camp Beer Co., Dead Frog Brewery, Farm Country Brewing, Five Roads Brewing, Fraser Valley Cider Company,, Trading Post Brewing, Smugglers Trail and the Roots & Wings Distillery.
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