Stanley Park Brewing Wins 5 World Beer Awards

Gold
Secret Cellar Bourbon Barrel Stout – Imperial Stout
Waypoint Hazy Pale Ale – American Style Pale Ale

Silver
Park Sesh Lager – International Lager

Bronze
Trail Hopper IPA – American Style Pale Ale
Passion Fruit Crush Sour – Flavoured Sour

We’re proud to announce that Stanley Park Brewing has won in 5 categories at the World Beer Awards. Our brewmaster behind the beers, Thom Riley, shares his thoughts about this year’s winners.

Secret Cellar Bourbon Barrel Stout

There was a lot of time, thought and consideration spent on this beer. We wanted people to have a next-level experience with it. When we first tasted it out of the barrel we realised there’s something special about it.

I’ve brewed a number of bourbon barrel stouts in the past and took a lot of lessons from people over the years. Making this beer, I put that knowledge into a recipe that I can call my own.

We double mashed it which is a pretty interesting process to go through to get you to the thicker consistency of the liquid. It made sense to me that this beer should take a long time to brew and take a long time to ferment as we know of the quality that we were trying to achieve.

With a beer like this, you’re trying to balance sweetness, bitterness and being strong in alcohol so you need a malt complexity to it. We used malt from Skagit Valley down in Washington which allowed the flavour from the bourbon barrels to come into the flavour of the beer.

We aged it outside, hidden in the Stanley Park Brewing cellar (AKA the secret cellar). There are so many risks to doing this with the change in temperatures and environment but we tested it out of the barrel along the way and the flavour evolved perfectly.

Waypoint Hazy Pale Ale

Waypoint won bronze in 2020 and won best in Canada for Pale Ale this year, it is reassuring as to what we’re doing to improve the beer. We know it’s one of the most preferred styles in British Columbia and speaks to how much people love this style here. In my mind, I still see room for improvement, we’re still tweaking it and I want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing to continue to make our beers better.

Park Sesh Lager

It’s amazing to win silver in its first year and appreciate the recognition but we can get it to gold next year. Stanley Park Brewing focused on continuous improvement and make this beer as good as it can be.

Trail Hopper IPA

Placing in the top 3 in the last couple of years is a testament to Trail Hopper. It is such an important beer to us, there’s so much love for it and we continue to pay close attention to it.

Passion Fruit Crush Sour

It’s a vote of confidence for Stanley Park Brewing as we haven’t focused as much on sours. We produced this as a one-off at our brewpub and we saw it fly off the taps. We’ve tightened our innovation process and it has become a lot more seamless, taking popular brews from the brewpub and scale them up while maintaining quality throughout. We have a packed pipeline of sours coming up so to have success and to be recognised, we’re excited to continue our ‘Crush’ series next year.

Looking ahead, what are you most excited to be working on in the coming months?
I’m excited to be working on new innovations with our super talented team, lending a hand in developing their recipes and seeing what else we can do at the brewpub with Bennie & Rachel.