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Firehall Brewery’s Sid Ruhland from joins the team at Bad Tattoo on Wednesday to make the Backdraft Blonde.
Comradeship isn’t lacking among breweries throughout the South Okanagan, with a full display of local businesses supporting each other.
Bad Tattoo Brewing in Penticton helped Firehall Brewery get a few more tanks of beer going on Wednesday, making sure the team would have plenty of cold ones to pop open this summer.
“We have a good relationship with them. All of the breweries in Penticton that have been around for a while have an established friendship even though we are competition,” Sid Ruhland, the owner and brewmaster for Firehall, said.
“Contract brewing is relatively common in the industry, especially for a small brewery that has its demands exceed its ability to keep up.”
Firehall is a small Oliver-based brewery that sometimes needs a bit of help making its beer, since its capacity is a lot smaller than what demand asks.
“I’d say we’d always have problems keeping up. We would run out of beer sometime in the middle of the summer, and that usually makes liquor stores and restaurants pretty upset because of our beers on their printed menu.”
A few years ago, the brewery decided to see if other breweries that had bigger capacity wouldn’t mind having them bring all the ingredients to their brewery and work with their brewmaster to scale up the recipe and do one of our beers there using their equipment.
“Generally speaking, when we opened and first got into the industry ten years ago, we were very touched that whenever we’d go to another brewery … they’d welcome us in.”
Bad Tattoo is one of the breweries that’s helped them out before and stepped up again this year.
“It helped us get through the summer without running out,” Ruhland added. “We do pay and the brewery will work out rates just to make sure everybody’s costs get covered.”
This last year was the first time that Firehall had not contract-brewed in a while.
“It had everything to do with COVID. That being said, it was still a busy summer and we did run pretty low a couple of times, so with this year having a spring to sell beer in, unlike last year, we’ll just have a lot less going into the summer if we just rely only on our own production.”
Ruhland added that the team at Firehall is very thankful to Bad Tattoo for lending them their space and helping them get stocked up for the summer.
“We have a unique industry that has a lot of comradery, a lot of info sharing, and very open source.”
However, this may be the last year Bad Tattoo can help out Firehall, with plenty of production needs themselves equally out to where they don’t have the extra capacity.
“We’re going to have to keep looking for the next place to brew or figure out how to make more beer here.”
Keep an eye out for Backdraft Blonde back in cans this summer, with tallboys available on the beverage carts at Nk’Mip Canyon Desert Golf Course and Fairview Mountain Golf Club, as well as Desert Country Liquor Store and, of course, at Firehall Brewery on Main Street in Oliver.
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