The Capital of Craft: Victoria’s Brewers Find New Life in Whisky

What began as a beer town has evolved into a hub for experimental whisky.

When Graeme Macaloney was a kid growing up in Scotland, his father would go to the fish market and bring home seaweed crisps as a treat. As an adult living on Vancouver Island, he would get homesick for those salty sea treats.

He wondered if he could capture that flavour in a whisky, so he went down to the local beach and sampled the different seaweeds that washed ashore.

Bull kelp was savoury and not quite right, but sugar kelp had the right balance of sweet and savoury. Satisfied, Macaloney went to work harvesting sugar kelp, smoking it with peat from Washington using his proprietary peat-smoking process, which he designed himself, and turning his childhood memory into Macaloney's Peat Project™.

The resulting smoke profile is one of a kind — sweet and slightly salty, like a seaside bonfire — capturing the essence of a uniquely regional single malt whisky.

Macaloney is the owner of Macaloney’s Island Distillery and Twa Dogs Brewery. He’s part of the burgeoning scene of brewers-turned-distillers in Victoria and around Vancouver Island, BC, who have been developing unique craft whisky over the last decade. They've been waiting for the barrels to mature, and in the next few years, we can expect more premium Vancouver Island whisky hitting the market.

What makes these craft whiskies unique is what Macaloney calls the "merroir" of the island — the oceanic influence of the coast infused into locally grown and harvested ingredients.

"The beauty of now having our own in-distillery peat-smoking is that we can now explore 'terroir' and extend our island merroir by using different peat sources from Canada, Islay, Scotland, and the USA to explore how the soil changes the character of the whisky," said Macaloney.

Macaloney isn't the only one developing his own processes to bring more Vancouver Island flavour into the whisky. Matt Phillips, owner of Phillips Brewery, started roasting his own malts on-site 10 years ago, around the same time he began making whisky under the name Fermentorium.

Phillips has been releasing feature whiskies over the years, such as the Sanctuary Single Malt, but more recently, they’ve taken it further by developing a core product as a staple of the distillery.

“There's a lot of amazing whiskies coming from Vancouver Island right now, and the craft space is creating great competition and credibility,” said Robyn Skinner, Director of Marketing for Phillips and Fermentorium. “It's becoming known for its quality Canadian craft distilling, and we deserve to be there too.”

Momentum is building, but it’s still early days for the local whisky scene. Compared to the centuries-old whisky industry in Scotland and even the US, it’s still in its infancy, which means there’s room for experimentation and growth. The industry may not be bound by tradition; however, it is bound by the provincial craft distilling licence.

To be designated a craft distillery in British Columbia, distillers are limited to producing no more than 100,000 litres a year. They must also use 100 per cent BC-grown ingredients and be distilled at the distillery—some of the strictest rules in North America.

BC is famous for its tree fruit and blueberries, not grains, which has always made it difficult for distillers to access a steady supply of locally grown malted barley.

Clay Potter is co-owner of Brass Monkey Brewing Co. (formerly Moon Under Water) and started making whisky eight years ago. As a brewer, he had an advantage; he was already sourcing local malt from Field 5 Farms down the road in Saanichton.

The benefit of having a farm and malt house down the road is that distillers can work closely with them to develop the unique flavour profile they want for the whisky. However, farming grains in a humid climate has its challenges.

“We just released the Antifogmatic Bliss Single Cask ‘Peninsula Corn Whisky’ which is made in a bourbon-style. This involved bringing in bloody butcher corn from Kentucky. We planted five acres of it, went to harvest, and lost the whole crop to mould,” said Potter. “So the next year we planted again, harvested it early, dried it out, went to malt it, and it was covered in mould again. It's just a different climate here, and that takes some learning.”

The third year was the last attempt, and in the end, they yielded about a barrel's worth, but it was enough for Potter to make a bourbon-style whisky, which serendipitously was ready to drink when the talk of tariffs started to circulate.

As far as Vancouver Island whisky having a distinctive flavour based on its terroir, Potter believes time will tell.

“The whiskies, especially our whiskies, are very distinct on their own, but they vary year-to-year,” said Potter. “I don't think we've gotten a Vancouver Island terroir sort of established yet because everything's done in such small batches right now. I think it's going to be another five to 10 years before we know exactly what that terroir is, and we can optimize for it, but it is interesting to be in the industry’s first years.”