Humble beer truck worthy of a toast
Vintage haulers continue to fuel Canada’s liquid love affair with suds
“The thing we like about vans is that we can pour beer out of the side of them.” Now there’s a feature we could all use.
Never mind the dratted blindspot monitoring and touch- screen infotainment, let’s install some tap handles on this thing and go hit up a music festival. You’d never be more popular.
“They put people in a better mood,” says Greg Taylor of Torontobased Steam Whistle Brewing’s fleet of vintage suds- haulers. Brightly painted and bubbling with character, the 11 vehicles see use across the country. Every one of them is a workhorse; every one’s a one- truck parade.
The first was a 1949 International Stake Truck that is still in regular use. Taylor spotted the truck passing on a trip home to see his parents — “Oh yeah, that thing belongs to Diesel Joe” — and incorporated the vintage machine into his idea for a brewery. They call this one Lumpy.
“It fits into the whole overbuilt quality, golden- age idea of what we’re brewing,” Taylor says.
His son Ben drives the Steam Machine, a 1967 Ford Econoline HD, around Vancouver — that one’s got the taps out the side. If you’d like, you can get your own Steam Machine in the form of a van- shaped cardboard beer carrier. Pop open the little rear doors and let the good times flow.
Beer is wonderful stuff, ain’t it? Enjoy in moderation, of course, and not while operating heavy machinery, a motor vehicle or a keyboard hooked up to the Internet. But oh, there was nothing sweeter than the pints the nation hoisted when Sidney Crosby put the goldmedal winner in the back of the net in 2010. Or when our women’s soccer team came out on the field and showed the kind of clean and gutsy play that made you proud to have the Maple Leaf on your passport.
We quaff a hell of a lot of the stuff up here, because being a Canadian is thirsty work. Remember when the Germans showed up to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver with what they thought was a reasonable volume of precision-made Pilsner? We drained those kegs dry in a week, and they had to send back to the fatherland for airfreighted emergency supplies. Well, what do you expect, with the likes of skeleton winner Jon Montgomery draining off a pitcher as a toast to his golden fortune?
Getting all this hoppy goodness around our vast country isn’t easy. Beer is best served fresh, without that chemical- preservative nonsense. Sometimes, though, the humble delivery truck isn’t good enough.
Enter Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky, a Ukrainian- born industrial designer famous for his work on early streamlined affairs from Cord and Packard. In the post- Great Depression, post- Prohibition era, the advertising of beer in Eastern Canada was strictly regulated. South of the border, streamlined trucks hauling everything from Texaco fuel to Miller High Life were all the rage. Labatt Breweries was looking for a hook — and found it.
In 1935, Labatt hired Sakhnoffsky to produce a vehicle that could both move quantities of beer around and get the word out. Taking a standard White single- axle tractor and 20- foot Fruehauf trailer, the Count crafted a gorgeous aluminum- skinned body stretched over a wooden frame.
His first efforts were confined to the trailer alone, but the second series of 12 rigs featured streamlining for the tractor as well. They would become an enduring icon of Canadiana — even featured on a commemorative stamp — with the single surviving vehicle restored and displayed at Expo 86.
Wait, that’s not the only example. I found perhaps the last- ever- built 1937 Labatt Streamliner in California, in the possession of Jeff Glenzer. He has been collecting parts for the past few years, and declares he has “pretty much everything I need to start on it — except the loads of cash.” Glenzer’s restoration plans begin ( hopefully) next year.
Out in craft brew- crazed Vancouver, Red Truck Beer’s new space features a pub called the Truck Stop. Inside, shining vats reach to the sky in a Willy Wonka jumble of piping. Look up and you’ll see a vintage Dodge Power Wagon hanging from the rafters. So who got hammered and hoisted it up there?
Red Truck took its name from Old Weird Harold, a 1946 Dodge that’s still in use. It was the first machine to haul the nascent brewery’s wares around the Lower Mainland, and gave rise to a current fleet that includes Old, Young and Big Frankenstein — the original was cobbled together out of the parts of multiple vans.
Instead of a groundbreaking ceremony for this place, the Red Truck crew got hold of a 1980s F- 150, removed the glass and drained the fluids, and then hauled it with a crane some 80 feet into the air. Then they it let go.
The wreckage is buried in the foundations of the building, with a battered hood mounted on the wall and a mural to mark the occasion. A small team of fire- engine red modern F- 150s handle day- today duties, and there’s a monster of an International Harvester MXT that often shows up at festivals; they call the big beast a “beer garden on wheels.”
On a smaller scale, micro and nano breweries tend to snap up the new, smaller breed of delivery vans. Powell Street Brewing, Vancouver- based makers of the award- winning Old Jalopy pale ale, use a diminutive ProMaster City to get their bombers and kegs around town.
And, at the local end of the scale, there’s my own neighbourhood brewery, Bridge Brewing. They have a delivery van, too, but it’s the logo- emblazoned family Ford Escape that stops occasionally in the driveway to drop off a bomber of something newly brewed.
Vintage, streamlined, burly or everyday, we’d all be parched without ‘ em. A raised glass, then, to the humble beer truck. “He was a wise man who invented beer,” so sayeth Plato. If true, then whoever thought to get it to us faster was pretty darn clever as well.