Rendering of the Prairie Dog Brewpub location concept design, looking southeast from the intersection at 58th Ave and Centre St.

Those of you that have followed our progress over the past year through this website may have noticed that we’ve been silent for a long time. We have been working on leasing a location since December 2016, but didn’t want to publicly announce anything about it until the City of Calgary approved our intended use as a brewery and restaurant — the final condition of our lease.We are pleased to announce that the City of Calgary has approved our development permit and change of use for our proposed brewpub location, 105 – 58^th Ave SE Calgary.

The exciting/terrifying moment of signing the lease for our location.

So many signatures and initials needed!

With this final condition being removed we were able to officially sign the lease. The map below gives a general sense of where the location is relative to major roads and the South LRT line/Chinook Station.

The Prairie Dog Brewing South-Calgary Brewpub will be located at 105 – 58th Ave SE, on the corner of 58th Avenue and Centre Street, near the Chinook LRT station and Macleod Trail.

People familiar with the area might remember that St. John’s Music used to occupy this location (they’ve moved here). It is their former space that we’re leasing, and we are thrilled about this spot for a lot of reasons, but here are some highlights:

• A South Calgary location – this area is extremely underserved by breweries, and especially by brewpubs
• We are only a few blocks from the Chinook LRT station (about as close as Chinook Centre Mall is to the station)
• We are very close to several major commuter roads – Macleod Trail, Glenmore Trail, and Blackfoot Trail, not to mention 58th and Centre St./Fairmount Drive, which are notable on their own
• Our proximity to the communities along both Fairmount Drive and Elbow Drive, like Fairview, Acadia, Kingsland and Haysboro, whose residents can easily take those roads direct to our location (via 58th for the Elbow Dr. communities) without being significantly affected by rush hour traffic
• We are a stone’s throw from The Vineyard homebrew shop, owned and operated by Papa Bam Bam, Neil Bamford, a staple of the Calgary homebrew scene and aficionado of both beer and smoked meats (a.k.a. external quality control)
• We like our landlord

About the Location

This is what our future brewpub location looks like today, as viewed from the intersection of 58th and Centre St.

This 12,000 square-foot building sits directly on the busy corner of 58th Ave and Centre Street, and features an impressive facade with high, curved parapets and cornices adorning its peaks. Directly beside our building are about 40 parking stalls accessible from either 58th or Centre St., with the majority being on the back (south) side. The building is attached on its east wall to a mall of commercial bays, which feature great local businesses like Canadian Woodworker and Bow Valley Kitchens. The remainder of the mall has an additional 50 parking stalls, which will make parking easier during busy evening/weekend periods (though we strongly encourage people to use the C-Train and services like taxis/Uber to travel to/from our establishment).

This panoramic view shows the interior of the leasehold before demolition. All interior walls and fixtures are to be removed during demolition.

The building has 18-foot clear ceilings throughout, and has the infrastructure in place for large, 14′ overhead doors in the rear, substantial water and gas lines, and the capability for 600 A of 3-phase electrical, which are major requirements for a brewery and kitchen of our planned scale. The building also has two large HVAC units that we will use to keep the dining room comfortable in spite of the heat from window exposure, brewing and kitchen activities. Currently there are no windows or doors on the north wall of the space, and very few on the west wall, which turns out to be the result of storefronts being closed in at some point in the past. We plan to open up these existing storefronts and reuse as many of them as possible, making the space bright and airy. As shown in the artist’s rendering at the top of this article, we hope to replace some of these storefronts with windowed rollup doors, allowing for a patio vibe during the warm months, budget permitting.

Location Concept Plan

The preliminary floor plan for the Prairie Dog Brewpub, north at left. Tables and games in this view are placeholders and are unlikely to reflect our final seating layout.

Restaurant Area

The brewpub will feature a games area and a mix of communal and standard tables.

Space will be split between the restaurant and brewing operations such that the restaurant is somewhat larger than the brewery. The restaurant is a focal point of our business and we wanted to make sure that guests are comfortable and don’t have long waits for tables. There are no bad seats in the house — seats have clear sight-lines into the kitchen, brewing operations, and bar. We will have a mixture of communal and traditional high- and low-top tables in the restaurant, with quite a number of seats surrounding the bar. The entire space will allow minors, and we will have high chairs and baby changing stations on site. Our floor plan allows for as many as 280 seats within our footprint, but to limit occupancy and ensure that parking isn’t overused, we plan on deploying pods of comfy couches, games, and a large merchandise area (we will have awesome merch), which will consume a lot of square footage and cut seating down to around 200. We will sprinkle USB charging outlets throughout the space to allow patrons to charge devices.

This 3D artist’s rendering of the Prairie Dog Brewpub bar shows the scale of the bar relative to the dining room. The kitchen is visible in the background.

The bar will be a focal point at the centre of the restaurant area, and will include about thirty comfortable seats spread over three sides, with a growler fill station on the corner nearest the entrance (YES, we will fill growlers!). The bar will feature about 16 beer faucets with a mix of rotating/seasonal beers and full-time staples, as well as up to four guest taps for things like ciders, meads, or other awesome beer that we want to share with the community. We will also offer a limited selection of locally produced spirits and wines to ensure that non beer-lovers still have options. We plan to include some televisions, which will be visible from the bar area, but strategically located to minimize distraction to patrons at the periphery of the dining room (we are aiming for a conversation-friendly atmosphere, and feel that too many TVs can detract from that).

Nine bathrooms will be located behind the kitchen at the east end of the dining room. All bathrooms will be unisex with insulated, fully-enclosed rooms, with two being handicapped-accessible.

Brewery Area

I’m excited about the possibilities that our restaurant and brewery scale afford me; I can design a beer without fear or compromise because I have confidence that we can sell 10 barrels of any high-quality beer offered in our restaurant. Gerad Coles, Founder/Brewmaster

View into the brewery wet area from the dining room, over the pony wall. Fermentation tanks on the left and brewhouse on the right.

We located the core brewing operations directly beside the restaurant seating area and plan to separate them with only a short pony wall, so that patrons will be able to see and interact with us while we are brewing, which we think will help remind customers that they are actually hanging out in an active brewery (like at Cold Garden). We have purchased a 10-barrel (2,400 half-litre pints) brewhouse made by Specific Mechanical out of Victoria, BC. Most of the brewpubs that inspired us to start this business got their start on a similar system, which offers a good compromise between frequency of brewing and ability to brew a lot of small/unique batches, with the brewpub bar being our major customer. As Brewmaster, I’m excited about the possibilities that our restaurant and brewery scale afford me; I can design a beer without fear or compromise because I have confidence that we can sell 10 barrels of any high-quality beer offered in our restaurant.

I’m excited to have the opportunity to set up our lab, which will be key to bringing high-quality, consistent beer to our customers. Sarah Goertzen, Founder/Director of Quality

We plan to start with a quality lab, which will be managed by our founder and Director of Quality, Sarah Goertzen, an analytical chemist and member of the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC). Quality labs are not common in small breweries in our fledgling market, but we believe that starting with a culture of quality will ensure consistency or continual improvement in our beer lineup and help build brand loyalty and longevity, particularly as the market becomes more crowded.

I’m excited about all the space we have at the old St John’s Music; it let us lay out the brewery just how I wanted – highly efficient, with room for growth, and with most brewery operations close to our guests, allowing them to see beer made up close, and giving me someone to talk to while brewing. Cheers! Tyler Potter, Founder/Head Brewer

Our brewery is designed with growth in mind — we plan to be able to add cellar capacity for quite a long time at this location. Our cellar will initially consist of four 20-barrel unitank fermenters, which will allow us to brew up to about 200 batches a year (about 2,400 hectolitres). We have planned to support one additional fermenter in our brewery wet area (with sloped, epoxy-coated floors and drainage), but are setting up the infrastructure to allow us to expand the wet area to the east, effectively doubling our fermentation capacity and/or allowing us to build a large visible cooperage of barrels. Instead of using glycol-cooled, jacketed brite tanks to chill and clarify our beer, we will have a large walk-in beer cooler that includes six 20-barrel serving tanks and keg storage. Beer faucets will be fed by a flexible arrangement directly from serving tanks and/or kegs like you would find at many great brewpubs worldwide. We plan on selling some of our beer to the wholesale market, so will have a large keg inventory to support that as well as our own uses in the pub.

Kitchen Area

Our kitchen will always be in co-operation mode with the brewery, communication and collaboration will be an essential part of how we operate. Our brewery and kitchen pass are directly across the hall and open to each other to encourage communication and help maintain close ties between our Chef and our Brewmaster.

So often when designing restaurants the kitchen is treated as an afterthought. It is designed as a workshop in which to efficiently pump out as many meals as possible while allowing more space in the dining room for more tables to turn over and increase profits. It’s often a place where you’re working elbow to elbow in tight spaces with your fellow cooks. We are starting with a clean slate at this location, which has enabled us to design a kitchen that allows us to focus our menu on some key areas of popularity. We will have space devoted specifically to our smoker for brisket, ribs and pulled pork as well as separate spaces for our pizza production and storage for pickles and other fermentables.

Jay Potter, our Executive Chef and founder, is particularly excited about the potential of our kitchen to serve the large lunch crowd surrounding the location of our brewpub:

There is an enormous volume of local businesses and offices in the area that are currently being under-serviced during lunch hour. I know we can fill that need to have guests in and out in 45 minutes. Jay Potter, Founder/Executive Chef

Timeline for Open

As you can see, this is a massive space which will require significant demolition and construction. We have hired Leading Edge Developments as our prime contractor for the project, and are currently working with them to finalize our construction plan and file building permits. The folks at Leading Edge have plenty of restaurant build experience, with projects like Hayden Block, Fergus and Bix, and the recent Brewsters renovations under their belt. How long the project takes depends partially on how much investment we continue to raise, because additional capital avoids the need for us founders to do some of the construction ourselves (are you interested in investing in a cool local brewpub unlike anything Calgary’s ever seen? Check out our invest page!). Either way, it is safe to assume that you won’t be able to visit our brewpub until at least December 2017.