'It's been a real journey'

1 – HOW DOES IT FEEL CELEBRATING DAGERAAD’S SECOND ANNIVERSARY?

It feels like an incredibly short time, and it feels like an incredibly long time at the same time. It’s been a ton of work to get to where we are; it was a lot of work before we even opened. It’s been two years since we opened. It’s been a real journey, but at the same time I look back on it and it feels like it was yesterday we were getting going here.

2 – HAS IT BEEN EVERYTHING YOU EXPECTED?

Of course, everything came out differently than I thought it would. It’s been loads of fun; lots of work and loads of fun, but yeah, I mean, of course, you can’t really foresee how things are going to go, you just sort of take a leap of faith when you’re starting a business like this, and you just hope you’re going to work everything out.

People sometimes ask me, ‘How did you know how to open a brewery?’ And I tell them I didn’t. You don’t know when you start, you learn along the way and just have to have confidence in yourself that you’re going to be able to work out how to do it.

3 – ARE YOU MAKING A PROFIT?

What does a profit look like? All the money goes back into the brewery, I’ve barely seen a nickel, there’s always more expensive crap I can buy.

4 – ARE YOU HAPPY WITH YOUR LOCATION IN BURNABY?

Yeah, there’s some definite upsides. Honestly, the Vancouver market has gotten really crowded, and it’s getting more crowded because there’s more breweries opening up and honestly, where we are, rent is cheap – well, it’s relatively cheap.

It’s not cheap anywhere in Greater Vancouver – but it’s relatively cheap, which allows us to do a lot of the cool stuff that we do.

I mean, for a lot of breweries to think about bottle conditioning, to dedicate that kind of space to just have beer sitting around while it ferments, a lot of the breweries couldn’t even think about doing that, and we can.

Also, in the building that we’re in, it’s multi-base, so if we need more space we can just look around for another vacancy in the same building.

5 – WHAT’S NEXT?

We are putting out some new special releases, we did a really cool beer in collaboration with Brassneck Brewery. We’re just continuing to innovate and things like that. We’re getting another couple of fermentation tanks in the next couple of months – we have five, so we’re moving up to seven – so it’s going to be a 40 per cent increase in capacity, which makes us, instead of being incredibly tiny, it’s just really tiny. (We’re) still one of the smallest breweries around.

6 –  BONUS: WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE PART ABOUT RUNNING THE BIZ?

It’s really hard work, which is actually a reward in itself sometimes because it’s really nice to go home at the end of the day physically tired. But really, having that glass of beer that I made myself after work and sitting in my tasting room and watching other people enjoy my beer, those are some really rewarding things.