City hall committee shows its spirits, gives downtown distillery a green light

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This article was published 10/10/2017 (3151 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

City hall has endorsed a proposal for a craft distillery and tasting room to open its doors in the Exchange District.

Brock Coutts, owner and operator of Patent 5 Distillery, said he hopes to be open for business by January or February, offering the public home-grown gin, vodka and whiskey.

“If you find one you like, you can buy a bottle and take it home,” Coutts told the Free Press.

Coutts was at city hall Tuesday for a re-zoning hearing. He plans to open his distillery in a historic building on Alexander Avenue — around the corner from Peg Beer Co. — but the location falls within the city’s “downtown living” sector, which doesn’t allow distilleries or breweries. The property has to be re-zoned to “character” sector, where distilleries are a conditional use.

Councillors on the property and development committee endorsed the re-zoning, which still must be considered by council before becoming official.

Coutt’s proposal was endorsed by Cindy Tugwell, executive director of Heritage Winnipeg, who told the committee the distillery will help reuse a historic building without requiring any public subsidies.

Tugwell said Coutts worked with Heritage Winnipeg all summer to develop a plan on how to restore the building, which was constructed in 1904, and use its history as a key component of the new business venture.

“We don’t see this as just a distillery,” she told the committee. “We see this as a great way to revitalize Alexander (avenue), to reuse a heritage building, which we all know is very important, and to bring people into the downtown.”

There was no opposition to the proposal, which was approved unanimously by the committee.

Coutts said he salvaged the oak panelling from the former St. Regis Hotel, which he will use to decorate the tasting room.

In addition to selling spirits, Coutts said he’ll be promoting the distillery to the city’s tourist trade, offering guides of the distillery operation and linking his new venture to the neighbourhood’s history.

“The tasting room will be a destination for anyone in the downtown area,” he told the committee. “We plan to work with Tourism Winnipeg to make it a destination location.”

He said a craft or micro-distillery is limited to producing a maximum of 50,000 litres of spirits annually but said he expects to produce only about 10,000 litres in his first year.

Coutts has 2,800 square feet of space in the Dominion Express building on Alexander, 2,200 of it set aside for the distillery operation and 600 for the tasting room, which he said is small, but added he can expand within the building if he finds he needs more space.

People will be able to buy shots of the various spirits and, if they like, buy a bottle.

Coutts said he expects to be selling vodkas and gins right off the start — “because they don’t have to be aged” — but it will take four to six months to produce a whiskey for sale to the public.

Coutts said he won’t be calling his product a “rye” whiskey because by law all Canadian Rye has to be aged in a barrel for three years but he’s confident he can produce a quality drink in six months.

Coutts said he expects to make a corn-based, bourbon-like whiskey and a barley-based scotch-tasting whiskey by the summer. Bottles will be sold in Liquor Marts as well at the distillery. He’ll also be selling some unique, small-batch whiskeys only from the distillery, along with the vodkas and gins.

An accountant by profession, Coutts said he discovered craft distilleries while visiting the U.S. about five years ago. There is another craft distillery in the city — Capital K on Dublin Avenue — but Patent 5 will be alone in the downtown area.

Coutts said the Patent 5 name came from the fifth patent issued by the Dominion of Canada in 1869 for a patent, or column, still method of producing spirits. Coutts said he’ll be using the same method but with modern equipment, including glass tubes that will allow distillery tours to see how the local whiskey is produced.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca