A micro-brewery known for its feline sass in producing some of the best, and most imaginative, beers in town.
Edmonton is well-known as the “City of Festivals”, but what good is a festival without a beverage of choice in your hand. If beer is your chosen festival supping-partner, then a visit to the Alley Kat Brewery in south Edmonton is on the cards. This micro-brewery is one of the main suppliers of beer to Edmonton's festivities.
The Alley Kat Brewery may not be that old (having started in 1994), but they have already made a solid reputation for themselves for the diversity of their brews. As a micro-brewery, they are able to brew beer in small batches, and so can make beers to suit the season. So they brew fruit-tinged beers for the summer – sour raspberry or refreshing grapefruit – and then move onto darker ales for Edmonton's long winter months. In between, they manage to experiment with wheat beers, lagers, barley beers and pale ales. They even do mead. But perhaps their best-known beverage is the Aprikat, a traditional, German-style wheat ale infused with apricots.
If you want to take peek behind the curtain to see this veritable “beer universe” in the act of creation, the premises are open for guided tours. You'll get to see the mashing tubs being loaded, check on the brewing batches bubbling away in the kilns and see how the Alley Kat “ready-for-supping” beers are siphoned off into kegs.
Better still, the Alley Kat Brewery likes to take a natural approach to their beer-making, without the use of artificial chemicals, like preservatives or stabilisers. By not pasteurising their ales and lagers, they reckon that they taste fresher, with none of that subtle flavour lost. So if, on your travels around town, you see a Full Moon, Aprikat, Charlie Flint or Raspberry Mead, you might want to treat yourself to a bottle – all in the interests of reviving the local craft beer industry, of course.
