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“We’re an ingredients restaurant – we use what is around and in season to decide what we’re going to make,” Chynna Galay, Candy’s daughter, says. The restaurant works with the Montana First Nation to source all its dill and lettuce from a hydro- ponic garden. Customers have dropped
off their excess sorrel, beet and cabbage harvests, and when the restaurant put out a call for beet leaves on social media, “this man phoned and said he had a trunk full. We didn’t know he meant a literal trunk full of beet leaves. It took three of us to car- ry them into the restaurant in a king-size sheet!” Candy laughs.
The business had to pivot for COVID-19 shutdowns one month in. “We didn’t even have a sign,” Chynna says, “and then we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to feed people who aren’t allowed to come to our just-opened restaurant.” When things got really rocky in the pandemic, Candy came up with the idea to hold a “Help Us Pay Our Rent” event. The post received thousands of views on Facebook and helped the busi- ness through. “People lined up two metres apart across the parking lot and stood for hours,” she describes with tears in her eyes. “We were so grateful for the community who showed up to support us.”
— LAUREN KALINOWSKI
PHOTOGRAPHY ASPEN ZETTEL
Coming to
America
The Fort Distillery takes its ready- to-drink cocktails across the border
The stats tell the bitter truth. We’re drinking less beer, less wine and less alcohol overall. But, despite these numbers, interest in cocktails and high-quality spirits continues to surge. That’s because, though we’re all drinking less, when we do decide to imbibe, we’re sipping the good stuff.
The ready-to-drink cocktail market is growing, going against the tide of lower liquor volumes. And The Fort Distillery is expanding its Tumbler & Rocks brand further into the United States.
“The U.S. has much better regu- lations for alcohol, so that’s where we focused on our expansion,” says Founder Nathan Flim.
Flim opened The Fort Distillery in 2018, located in an industrial area
in Fort Saskatchewan. While The Fort has definitely carved a niche for itself with its Mountain Pass Whisky, Two Bean Brew coffee liqueur and Canadian Boreal Gin, the largest growth is in its Tumbler & Rocks line of ready-made cocktails, avail- able in 750 ml or 100 ml personal serving size bottles.
A year and a half ago, the company
struck a deal to make the cocktails available on Porter Airlines flights.
But, expanding into other areas of Canada is difficult. Right now, Tum- bler & Rocks ready-made cocktails are being sent to British Columbia but the shipments have to be small.
Foreign distillers are allowed
to place their products in British Columbia. But Canadian producers from outside the province are not. So, an Alberta distiller has to pre-sell its stock (once there are enough orders to make shipping worth it) in order to get it across to B.C., which makes it exceptionally difficult to get on liquor-store shelves in Vancouver, Victoria or Kelowna.
But, to get into the (majority of the) American market, a distiller only needs to reach an agreement with a distributor, whose job it is to get the bottles into liquor stores. Fort sends products to B.C. — without any real profit margin, and isn’t available in provinces east of Alberta, unless you’re on a Porter flight.
So, for Flim, expanding south makes a lot more sense than going east. This past summer, the Tumbler & Rocks brand was introduced to
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