Cold Garden Beverage Company

Located in the heart of Inglewood, Cold Garden Beverage Company is a microbrewery and tasting room that specializes in malt-centric craft beers, brewed on-site at Cold Garden’s 5,000-square-foot operation. The company was founded by Dan Allard and brewer Blake Belding, who met at university and later reconnected to launch their operation. “Blake and I met at University – the University of Calgary – and he started home-brewing as a function of trying to drink cheaper. And then that eventually got a little more expensive because the ingredients got a bit better,” Dan says. “[In 2015] he asked if I wanted to do a microbrewery and get a bit more serious about his home-brewing craft.”

The duo decided to lay their roots in Inglewood, a character neighbourhood with a rich history of brew culture, and the site of the old Calgary Brewing and Malting site. “We just wanted to make good beer for cheap in a neighbourhood that we wanted to live in,” says Dan, who actually wound up moving to Inglewood, while Blake moved right across the street from him and later relocated nearby to Ramsay.

Cold Garden set up shop in the location of a former welding shop, located just off 11th Avenue and 11th Street S.E. Using a do-it-yourself approach and a shoestring budget, Dan and Blake built their operation from the ground up. They tore everything in the building down, re-did the concrete and then built the facility back up. “I was doing a lot of the framing and the build out work, while Blake was honing in on his recipes on the bigger system,” Dan says. “We bootstrapped most of this project and we didn’t have the dollars and cents for a big general contractor. So it was a function of doing it cheap, because that’s the budget we had.”