Located in the heart of Calgary’s colorful Beltline district, Inner City Brewing recently celebrated two years of bringing great brews and good times to Calgary’s downtown!  

Originally founded by 5 friends in 2018 with just 8 beers on tap, it has been a busy two years of innovation and expansion for Inner City. The brewery now features a combination of 20 core and rotating taps available year round, and has brewed over 60 beers in total – an unprecedented number in such a short amount of time. The taproom also includes a full service kitchen with a high-quality comfort food menu (check out the nacho in a bag!). 

Inner City Brewing celebrates the life of the city through the creation of brews that are as unique and exciting as the city itself. “We love the vibrancy and the connections,” says Doug Hamilton, co-founder and CEO of Inner City Brewing, “it’s all the weird and wonderful interactions that make the inner city.” 

Each Inner City can is dedicated to a specific destination around the world, using artistic map renderings to highlight the area of inspiration for each beer and style. “No map or intersection is exactly alike,” says Doug, “and neither are our beers.” The colorful artistry of Inner City products makes them easy to spot on the liquor store shelf lineup, with unique designs such as “Bridgelandia”, a core beer featuring a map of Calgary, and “Brickworks”, an English Dark Mild Ale that features the map of Manchester, UK. 

Located in a restored 1940’s building on 11 Ave’s 800 block, Inner City’s clean industrial taproom is built of concrete and steel, with massive bay windows that flood the space with Alberta sunshine all year round. 

Visitors can watch the hustle of 11th from the patio or peer into the massive on-site brewery adjacent to the taproom, where Inner City Head Brewer Eli Horne is constantly working on the next best thing. With 20 taps featuring everything from crisp lagers to oatmeal stouts, Inner City shares their love of craft beer with the community by brewing something for everyone. “Beer is much more versatile in flavor and variety than people realize,” says Doug, “especially with our main brewery and pilot brewery systems, the sky’s the limit.”  

The Inner City taproom is home to two custom-built infusion towers that produce unique small-batch brews for fun, one-night-only features. As the only build of their kind in Canada, the infusion taps let the Inner City imagination run wild – exploring coffee, cocoa, fruit and tea infusions, and brewing everything from bacon to bubblegum beers as one-off specialties. “It’s awesome,” laughs Doug, “we just like to push our creativity and have fun with it.” 

The taproom keeps the fun going by pairing their unique beers with live music events like the Big Winter Classic, brewery tours, trivia nights, brewery yoga, and so much more. As an active member of the Beltline community, Inner City is always keeping up with community events, most recently participating in the YYC BUMP fest in celebration and support of local and Canadian artists. With these weekly events, their rotating taps and their infusers producing one-night-only brews, “No experience in the tap room is quite the same as the last,” says Doug, “we encourage people to come down regularly to see and experience what our team has been up to.” 

For more information about Inner City Brewing, visit https://www.innercitybrewing.ca.

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