Is there a patio shortage when it comes to Vancouver’s booming craft beer industry?
Posted April 19, 2016 6:53 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Patio season may have arrived, but good luck trying to find one attached to your favourite craft brewery in Vancouver.
It should come as no surprise that it’s so hard to find a craft beer and a sunny place to sip it, says Jeff Guignard with the Alliance of Beverage Licensees of BC (ABLE BC).
It all comes down to licenses and to a lesser extent, zoning.
“Craft breweries, they’re licensed as a manufacturer’s lounge and the little bar that they have is designed to be a lounge just so people can taste their products,” explains Guignard.
“Whereas if you own an actual pub or what’s called a ‘liquor primary,’ it’s a different kind of establishment. So you’re licensed to have a big lounge, to serve all kinds of products, and to have a patio. And then you have to get municipal approval for the number of seats on your patio.”
And that comes with a much more expensive license.
“It’s just that craft brewery licenses operate differently. They don’t have a patio automatically included. They don’t have to go through that same process exactly when they get that lounge. It’s kind of an extension of having a manufacturer’s license,” says Guignard.
He adds some craft breweries are in areas that aren’t zoned to allow those patios, but some are exploiting a bit of a municipal loophole.
“Actually, municipalities are kind of grappling with this a little bit because they’re seeing more and more manufacturing lounges, like craft breweries start to have little picnic areas in the back or something like that which kind of becomes an outdoor patio area, which is not really what they’re licensed to do.”
That doesn’t sit well with some long-standing pub owners.
“The problem for people who operate pubs is they have to pay a lot more money for those licenses, they have to go through different bylaws and public hearings. So they don’t want a brewery to suddenly be able to have a patio at the same time when they didn’t have to go through the same process,” says Guignard.
