Winnipeg Hunting

I typically find the Grant Park Liquor Mart to be the best. You can search and lookup stock online for all Manitoba Liquor Marts (government run). Half Pints brewery does off sales. Pretty sure the new breweries do as well. If you like Belgian beers they tend to be quite cheap like $5 for Rochefort 10

 

Best of luck to you.

Pretty much anything you'll find will be stuff that you can't generally find in the US, but that doesn't mean it'll be any good. Your best bet is the Quality Inn Beer Store on Pembina + Grant, it's the closest thing to an independent liquor store that we have. They can't carry any items that our government owned liquor stores don't carry as well, but they at least have enough pride in their craft to not leave stale IPAs out on the shelves. Went to the Grant Park liquor mart the other day, 8 month old Fat Tug and Red Racer on the shelves. Awful.

Depending on when you're going, here's what I'd recommend doing if you want to get your hands on some unique stuff.

-- Test Batch Tuesday at Half Pints, they do a small batch of a one-off that will generally last a day or two. Lately it's been a lot of really good NE IPA efforts by their guy Miguel who pumps out some really good stuff.

-- Quality Inn Beer Store and if you're looking for something really unique, they'll generally have exclusively Winnipeg beers on the growler fill station.

-- Barn Hammer really picking their game up lately, they've started dropping bottle releases on-site as well so I would follow them on social media to keep current with that.

What I WOULD NOT do:

-- Visit Barley Brothers on Pembina, unless you like being able to choose from 94 different stale beers. Their business model is a disaster ... the selection seems great on the surface until you realize our craft beer scene is not active enough to prevent old kegs. They also don't put much work into cleaning their lines. I rarely enjoy a beer I order there.

-- Shop at a Liquor Mart. But if you have to, the Northdale location on Henderson (if you're for some reason out in my neck of the woods) or the Portage + Burnell location tend to be where I have the most luck with fresh product.

Let me know if you have any other questions. Cheers!

 

Good point about shelf IPA. Coming from BC, I pretty much never even look at IPAs at the liquor marts.

 

Going to Winnipeg next week. Ill follow this advice. Anything available now in the Liquor Marts worth looking for that I can't get here in Montreal? Did I read right - you can get growlers of Surly there?

 

You'll be able to find Furious for sure for growler fills as of right now. Last time I stopped in the liquor mart, they also had a few cans - I remember seeing Furious and Overrated in cans.

Take a look that the Liquor Mart website - It lists what's available for growler fills, as well as what bottles and cans are available, and how much of what is at any given location.

 

The cans were only the leftovers from Flatlanders and sold out almost instantly. They're gone now until August.

 

See you in August!

 

I'll just chime in my 2 cents and mention to check out Half Pints and Barn Hammer.

It's a place with a government run liquor monopoly, so the stores are what they are, meaning they often all carry the same thing depending. Their imports are lacking compared to most places in the US, so if you stick to Canada and local items you might find some unique things with some caveats (ie. what's already been mentioned, out of date beer, but also employees who have worked there forever and don't care about anything and know next to nothing about the products they are selling).

 

I'll be in Winnipeg on the 27th and 28th of this month. Anything else worth noting? Also might have a beer or two to trade if someone is keen.

 

Torque's 1 year anniversary is the 26th, might be some stuff left over from that - their one year beer is going to be a barrel aged saison, not sure of many other details but they'll have bottles you can purchase.

The local game is very hit or miss right now. Tough to say what will be going on.

 

Their website is just a merch store. Are they even open?

 

Not surprising... It seems like they come out with more new merch than beers. That being said, they are definitely open.

As mentioned, looks like they have two barrel aged Saisons (Black and white label). If I recall, the black label is aged in red wine barrels, and I assume the white label will be white wine.

I think they mentioned having a few thousand bottles; probably a good chance they'll still be around a couple of days after the event.

 

Had no idea they were even different beers. Makes sense, but they never said anything to support that. Not surprised they wouldn't mention it though.

 

Just wanted to touch on this reply... What I said was complete conjecture based off the two labels, and on this picture they posted:

Upon looking at the image again (I originally saw it when it was posted over a week ago), i don't think it supports my supposition that much . That being said, given there are different labels and we know one is red wine, its possible the other is regular oak, white wine, or indeed just a second label and it's all the red wine barrels and there's just two labels.

 

Hi all.

I just got back from Winnipeg and have to say, I was pretty impressed with some of the things I found there beer wise.

I assume @Naaberle has already come and gone judging by the timing of this thread in March, but there is certainly alot more there to choose from then when I was there several years ago.

Made it to Barn Hammer, PEG Beer Co. , Torque, One Great City, and had a few other pints from other breweries. Strangely I didn't have any Half Pints!

There's a lot more going on, and I really dug the PEG's stuff, but the other places have some real enjoyable brews as well.


Little Brown Jug - 1919 by imbibehour, on Flickr

Barn Hammer Brewing - Madder Red by imbibehour, on Flickr

One Great City - Mad Scientist IPA by imbibehour, on Flickr

Barn Hammer Brewing - Saturday Night Lumberjack by imbibehour, on Flickr

Torque Brewing - Diesel Fitter by imbibehour, on Flickr

Torque Brewing - Comet Smash by imbibehour, on Flickr


Very pleased to see good things beer wise going on in the city. Hopefully it will continue.

 

FYI for anyone interested, The Grove is tapping a keg of ‘16 Darkness today at 18:00.