When you are an established brewery one of the things you have to get used to is your highly skilled brewers leaving you to go start their own project. That is something Village Brewing is dealing with these days as they watch Andrew Bullied, their brewer of 4 years, kickstart his own operation.

He calls it Annex Ale Project (their Twitter handle is @annexales – now that I do that!). And he is one of an increasing number of new breweries on the cusp of opening in Calgary in the coming months. And, despite the name, he has no intentions of being an afterthought add-on to the Calgary craft beer scene.

Annex is the brainchild of Bullied and his partner Erica O’Gorman, who is Head Chef at Village Ice Cream, an artisanal craft ice cream producer (no connection with Village Brewing). Bullied and O’Gorman are excited by what they see going on in Calgary’s beer scene. They thought the time was right to launch their own take on a brewery in Alberta’s largest city.

“We are seeing a lot of new breweries open up in Calgary using the same model,” says Bullied. “A larger production facility making more approachable beer. It is a great model for Calgary”. While Bullied is excited for all the new breweries and wishes them well he wants to distinguish his project a little bit. “We haven’t seen people push the model that much further. What we are trying to do is help mature the market a little.”

He plans on going a little smaller scale, but not so small as to be a nano. He is building a 10HL system with three 20HL fermenters and two 10HL fermenters – a mix of volume and flexibility. He wants to do what he calls the “Pacific Northweat Butcher Shop Model”, which is small, locally-focussed, emphasizing quality and on-site sales to locals.

“We will have a rotating tap list. Not many core brands, but we want to turnover six beer all the time” says Bullied. In fact, he plans only two mainstays and everything else will be seasonals, rotationals and one-offs. “We plan on releasing a new beer every month. People can come and get their growler fills. We will do 750ml bottles of our core brands plus keg sales”.

At the moment the two core brands will be and Extra Pale Ale (XPA) and a North American Bitter. He sees the XPA as being a deviation from North American Pale ales. “It will be a North American Style English bitter. It will have all the nuttiness, caramel you expect with the  English bitter balance, but with a big North American nose to compliment malt profile”. He sees is as taking off from Nova Scotia’s Propeller Bitter, of which he is a huge fan.

As for the Bitter, “it will light malt profile, west coast character, but not a huge bitterness. Instead it will have a gigantic hop aroma. It will be approachable and appealing to hop heads. I want something stylistically we haven’t seen before”. [Edited to correct style – Bullied indicates he is not brewing an IPA.]

In addition to beer, they also plan on producing a craft, non-alcoholic root beer – a first for Calgary. For Bullied it seemed a natural link between the partners occupations. “It is an odd way to start a brewery,” he says, but he feels local, artisanal root beer has potential.

The root beer is actually due out any day. It was produced a few weeks ago (at Banded Peak) and the plan is to release it in early July. Bullied was surprised how hard designing an authentic root beer recipe was. “What is interesting is I have been workig on doing it from scratch. It was far more difficult to figure out than any beer I have ever brewed”.

With the release of the root beer, Bullied hopes they will enter the next phase of the project. They are close to securing a lease on a space not very far from Banded Peak in the southwest Manchester Industrial Park, which is surprisingly close to downtown. After that they will order their equipment and get building. Bullied is hopeful they can have the brewery ready in November with beer on the market before Christmas. “I am Building a brewery I can run on my own, and when the time comes to bring guys in I can do that”.

You won’t find tony houses like this near Calgary’s Annex. Leave them for Toronto.

Bullied’s plan is to stay relatively small and local. “We want to stick to the Calgary area and focus on the tap room. We want people to get the beer as fresh as possible”. He knows the challenges with broader distribution. “As soon as the beer leaves the door you lose all control over what happens to the beer, which is scary. You run the risk of having your beer not be as good as you want it to be. I like the idea of having that control”. He concedes he may ship the 750ml bottles of the core brands to other places in the province at some point in the future, but “I won’t go too big into that”.

And what about the name. Bullied credits O’Gorman for it. “The annex is the central meeting point on a university campus. We like that idea. The name stands for urban centrality. Toronto has an Annex.It allows us to focus on making someting very city-oriented”. Bullied notes even their logo is based upon “urban planning concepts, and colours off of a topographical map”.

“We wanted branding that wasn’t necessarily tied to geography, but gives a sense of urban”.

So why jump from Village and take a stab now? “The opportunity just made sense” Bullied observes. “The law change, the city is responding. It is a good time for it. We have been working on it for eight months now. If we waited, there are more and more breweries coming out all the time.”

But despite the quickly crowding market, Bullied feels he is positioned well. “We are coming out at same time as many different breweries, we need to differentiate our selves with our product and I believe people will want to come out.”

Unlike Toronto, Calgary may not have a district called The Annex but soon, very soon, they will have a brewery called the Annex. Beat that T.O.!