How to brew success
Award- winning Coal Harbour Brewing owner Kanwar ( Kenny) Boparai has a simple recipe: ‘ Most craft brewers are like chefs. They like to raise the bar.’
RAISING THE BAR: Coal Harbour Brewing owner Kanwar “Kenny” Boparai is thankful that beer doesn’t take long to mature. While loading his solely owned enterprise’s first batch of Powell IPA for a flight to Montreal last year, he figured it wasn’t quite ready. “But the connoisseurs said it was,” he related, referring to the Canadian Brewing Awards judges who gave it a gold medal.
There was more time for getting things right at the 2012 B. C. Beer Awards, where Coal Harbour’s third batch of Smoke & Mirrors also won gold. Boparai figures judges appreciated the taste peated malt imparts on that brew which, like the Powell IPA and Coal Harbour’s Triumph Rye Ale, is packaged in 650- ml glass bottles. Amusingly, they are all manually capped with the same handoperated press homebrew hobbyists have in their basements.
Otherwise, the equipment in Coal Harbour’s Triumph-off-Victoria Drive premises is thoroughly modern. Boparai spent $ 1.5 million on a barley-malt mill, an 1,800- litre mash tun, one 2,500- litre and five 10,000- litre fermentation vessels, four 10,000- litre aging and fining tanks, and a 10,000litre bright tank for carbonation and pre- packaging, all of them made of stainless steel. Most of the 550,000 litres of beer and ale Coal Harbour will produce this year will pass through an automatic canning machine.
There’s room to increase output by 30 per cent in an Aquilini Investment Groupowned 7,200- square- foot facility for which Boparai pays $ 6,600 monthly. However, $ 200,000- worth of distilling equipment for vodka and gin will be installed there by June, and father- of- two Boparai is re- incorporating his seven- staff firm as Coal Harbour Brewers and Distillers.
Many are getting into the craft- distilling game, of course, not least Mark James who pioneered on- site beer making at his Yaletown Brewing Company bar- restaurant. It’s a far cry from the 1970s, when an illegal still owned by buckskinapparel maker Melvin Read Burritt, a. k. a. Silas Huckleback, set his North Vancouver woodshed afire and he was able to hide only 60 litres or so of homemade white lightnin’ before firefighters and police arrived.
Boparai’s booze- making began in 2006, five years after he and father Kulbir, who owns Gastown’s Sitar restaurant, jointly took over downtown Main Street’s Pacific Pub ( now London Pub). Wanting to produce more than draft beer for solely on- premises consumption, the younger Boparai set up Coal Harbour in 2009, determined to better the Pacific Western Brewing T. N. T. malt liquor he first tasted at age 16. Seventy per cent of his product now is 311 lager, so named because the first batch, scheduled for Nov. 11, 2011, was designated 11/ 11/ 11 internally. “Most craft brewers are like chefs,” Boparai said of his industry. “They like to raise the bar. We have done that with our brands.”
CARRY ON NURSE: Since its 1973 founding in a single loaned room, the United Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society ( SUCCESS) has become an international outfit with 400 paid staff speaking 20 languages and an annual turnover of $ 34,234,487. Now, after four decades of steady doctoring, the multi- service organization is in the hands of a nurse. She’s former Alberta health services executive director Queenie Choo, 56, who was chosen to succeed CEO Thomas Tam by the Odgers Bernstein recruitment firm. She settled into SUCCESS’s Pender- off- Carrall office after three months of grilling in June, 2012.
Hong Kong native Choo — Queenie is a variant of her birth name, Kwan Ling — had been headhunted before. That was in 1980, when Alberta health authorities pried the newly qualified registered nurse from Epsom, England, the home of health- restorative Epsom salts. Choo, whose early expertise was in mental subnormality and related matters, steadily ascended Alberta’s medical administration ladder while retaining the rigour embedded at nursing school.
At SUCCESS, the non- musical Choo likens herself to “an orchestral conductor who ensures the music is played in a harmonious manner.” More practically, that means: “You can’t provide a holistic approach to a ( SUCCESS client) when you don’t have health as a social support.” That is very much a part of the Integrated Service Model program Choo spearheads and that blends classical nursing practice and efficient business conduct. It begins, partly at SUCCESS’s Taiwan and South Korea offices, by giving Canada- bound emigrants pre- landing orientation. Once here, they receive ELSA ( English Language Services) training and instruction in health care, schools, banking, career and skills development, employment assistance and suchlike. “We have to ensure that we have value,” said Choo, whose predecessors include former TD Bank VP Tung Chan. “There’s no point in giving service that people don’t need.”
What they sometimes do need is help in adapting professional qualifications to Canadian requirements. Nurse Choo undertook that herself three decades ago, but SUCCESS now provides low- interest loans up to $ 12,000 for certain candidates today.
UP AND AT ’ EM: Greater Vancouver home prices may be falling, but residential towers still rise. They include the two whose 611 units will kick off Wall Financial’s $ 400- million, 1,048- condo Wall Centre Central Park Development. To be built off Kingsway between Ormidale Street and Boundary Road, the project will just squeeze in a city address. Priced from $ 224,900 to $ 405,900, units will go on sale April 27, with 6,000 potential buyers reportedly registered online.
Project marketer Bob Rennie claims that Greater Vancouver residents aged 55 to 74 own $ 88- billion- worth of clear- title real estate, compared to $ 66 billion in 2006. As they move to less costly and more easily maintained homes, he said, many may help fund their children’s’ first- time condo purchases.
As usual, Wall Financial head Peter Wall claimed the Central Park project “leaves something on the table so ( buyers) can go on the market having bought at a discount.” Supporting that claim, he said of those who bought 35 suites at 1265 Barclay late last year: “Everybody is up $ 20,000.” Then, grinning: “When everybody has money, everybody has fun.”
An overt funster himself, Wall has spent plenty supporting Christy Clark’s provincial Liberal leadership bid and the May 14 election. That may require at least as much optimism as investing close to a half- billion dollars in a supposedly soft housing market, especially in a riding — Vancouver Kingsway — whose MLA is NDP leader Adrian Dix.
DISCLAIMER: Wall and Rennie will stage a gala exhibition of my photographs June 21, with every penny raised benefiting the Sun’s Raise- A-Reader and Adopt- A- School programs. Coincidentally, Wall Centre Central Park is located kitty- corner to a stadium named for former Sun managing editor Erwin Swangard.