Welcome to another edition of Hops Among Friends — a series celebrating the people behind the craft beer scene on the BC Ale Trail.
In this 24th instalment, I chat with Josh Vanderheide (aka JV), founder of Field House Brewing in East Abbotsford and downtown Chilliwack.
Josh was chosen by my last guest, Gary Brucker from Barn Owl Brewing, as the next interviewee in this ongoing “tag-you’re-it” style series. Although this was our first time connecting, our conversation via Google Meet felt like we were sharing a beer in person. We covered everything from Field House’s beginnings in 2015 to Josh’s thoughts on the future of BC craft beer.
It’s a longer read, but full of insight — so grab a pint and enjoy.
And if you’ve missed any previous interviews, you can catch up on them here.
Kim: I always find it interesting to hear how people got started in the industry. Josh, how did you get started in craft beer?
Josh: Yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of different pathways to craft beer. Mine started not in brewing but on the marketing side of things. My career was in marketing. It’s what I went to school for, and then I moved into graphic design, then branding, and brand strategy. I had a boutique design studio called Also Known As in Gastown with my business partner Jesse Bannister. We worked with hospitality businesses, and we ended up specializing in consumer products, including wineries, distilleries, and breweries. Early on, we did the branding for Yellow Dog and Twin Sails. We did a rebrand for Fernie. We did some work for Russell and Steel & Oak. We also helped Small Gods with their branding. I suppose I made my way around the industry in this way early on, before I decided to take the leap and start my own brewery.
We were watching this industry evolve, and we were like, man, this looks like fun. One day, we were on a road trip to the Great Canadian Beer Festival in Victoria because our clients were there. On that trip, Jesse asked if there were any breweries in Abbotsford, and when I realized there weren’t any, he suggested that we open one. By this time, I had moved from the city back to Abbotsford with my family, and thought, yes, let’s do this.
So that was really the first conversation about the possibility of opening a brewery. That was in September. I wrote the business plan in November and December, and then my wife, Gina, and I launched the business. Within a year, we found the building, raised the funds, completely renovated an old car garage, and opened Field House.
With my background, I knew what we needed to do to get open and get all of the permits, and I had some great industry connections to help get through the process. At that time, there was a reason there wasn’t a brewery in Abbotsford. It related to an older bylaw that you could have a brewery, but you couldn’t have a tasting room. But then City Council modernized the bylaw, and three of us opened up within about a year. Field House, Ravens Brewing, and Old Abbey Ales.
For me, coming from the brand and marketing side, of course, we needed a great brewer. So, my first hire was Parker, our head brewer, and he’s still with us 10 years later. He’s been an awesome partner and collaborator for a long time now.
What we went through back then is a bit different than what breweries have to go through today to open a new brewery. I feel like everything has gotten a lot more complicated and much more expensive. At the time, we could open a brewery for $600-700K. Now, new breweries are looking at more like $1.5-2 million to open.
Kim: I understand you built your brewery with crowdsourced funding. Tell me more about this.
Josh: We were running a lean budget. We were putting our money into the business, along with money from whoever we could find that would come along with our crazy idea. With my marketing background, we decided to do a Kickstarter to find more people who would be willing to support us. It was really fun. It’s still online and it features my wife’s ‘Dutch Oma’. She’s the main character in the video, and she’s quite a fun person. We intentionally made it look low-budget to actually make it look like we needed the money. The reality is that we didn’t have lots of money, so it was easy to make it look that way.
You can watch the video by clicking here, or click on the graphic below.
If you watch the video, it actually came right after one of our lowest points. We were in the middle of renovating, and we had ripped off the roof. We had this small window to do the repairs and re-roof it. But in that window, it started pouring rain. And we ended up with a foot of rain in our office area the day before we were going to film inside. I knew we couldn’t show this. No one would believe that we could open the brewery because it was so bad.
Kim: So, is crowdsourced funding a model that you would recommend to other breweries? Was it worth it in the end for the investment of time you put into it?
Josh: I do. Our goal was to raise $20K, and we ended up raising almost $30K. We really needed those funds. Other breweries like Firehall, Persephone, and Container have also gone with a crowdfunding model.
We’re actually looking at another one as we expand our business. We’re looking to go back to crowdfunding again to raise capital, but in a different way. I think if you look at the economy right now and the state of the industry, it’s really hard to convince people to invest in a brewery today.
So, yes, I would encourage it. But you need to know that it’s going to take some work and time, but you can reap the rewards of that work and be a bit more efficient from an equity perspective. We did a Kickstarter campaign, which is great for a small crowdfunding project in the $30-50K range. There are other good crowdfunding platforms out there, too. I’d say there’s also been an evolution of crowdfunding. It’s actually a mix of your crowdsourcing campaign, investment from your friends and fans, and also people who are actually real investors that are writing significant cheques.
Kim: Your brewery has been around since 2015. What makes Field House so special?
Josh: Well. Good question. How do I say these things in the most humble way? I’m not the brewer, but I do think our beer program stands out in the industry. We still release one, two, three, or six new beers on a regular basis. We released nine new beers in a week for our anniversary.
Apart from that, every week we have a new beer or two. It might seem exhausting, and I don’t know that there’s anybody else who can keep up with the pace of innovation that our team can.
And again, I say this humbly, but I really feel like with all of those beer releases, none of those beers are ever a miss for me. There’s very rarely a beer that we try and think it is not up to our standards. That’s because the beers all build on each other. We’ve developed expertise in sours and IPAs, and we have good technical expertise with these styles. We are still trying new things and innovating with techniques and ingredients – pushing the limits on flavour and innovation. I’m super proud of the team and how they can continue to innovate at such a rapid pace, while also maintaining quality. I’d say that’s probably why I think we’ve been successful over the last 10 years.
I think what we do is quite unique in the market. I’d say Backcountry is probably similar to us. We probably make about the same amount of beer, give or take. And we probably have about the same amount of new releases, and we make some awesome beers, and kill it on the marketing side of things as well.
In addition, another thing I think makes us special is that we have another whole area of our business. We’re expanding right now and building out our portfolio. We just acquired NiceLife Cocktail Company through a merger last year, and so now we’re doing the same thing with cocktails. We’re releasing innovative, high-quality craft ready-to-drink cocktails under the NiceLife brand. We’ve launched four new brands in the last three months since that acquisition. We have a new tequila RTD line called The Sunrise Hotel. We have a new cider line called Rest & Recreation Cider. We have a new full Gin & Juice line-up with multiple products.
Now we’re building out our non-alcoholic portfolio, which is up next, and we’re really excited about it. We’re a bit late to the party, but we have been testing a lot of things, and we just released our first product.
While we continue to innovate on the beer side, we are pushing the portfolio wider, and in each of those portfolios, we are going deep as well.
Kim: Wow. That is absolutely incredible. Being in the industry myself, I know what it takes to keep releasing new products, and you guys are doing it every week. Are all your new releases packaged, or are some of them draft only?
Josh: There’s the occasional beer that we release from our Chilliwack location, which is our R&D brewery, that we do draft releases only, but it’s usually on top of another packaging release. Otherwise, all the releases are packaged. The team really pushes the envelope of what can be done at that pace and frequency. It’s been cool to watch it and just try to keep up with it. Honestly, I don’t even drink every beer that we release. I can’t even track them all down.
We used to have a really fun program when we had our smaller test system. We called it “crew beers,” and anybody could propose a concept for a beer. Then that crew member would work with one of the brewers to refine the idea and make the beer, so we always had a new crew beer as well, which was really fun. Then, when we released it, we’d have a party, and the crew would invite their friends and family down. It was a really cool program. Unfortunately, it just became inefficient to keep using this smaller test system.
Kim: Not only do you have multiple brands, but you have multiple locations. How do you manage two separate locations?
Josh: Abbotsford is our main production brewery. Our Chilliwack location is more of a smaller brew pub, and this is where we do our R&D brewing. We also have a brewery at our farm. We have a 5-acre farm, 10 minutes from Abbotsford, where we have our barrel room and all of our wild stuff. We also have fruit and various ingredients on the farm, which we use in our beers. Plus, we have wine grapes, which we’ll be using for a new product we are launching this fall. And we also have the NiceLife site in Port Coquitlam. So yes, I guess you could say we have a lot on the go.
Kim: What else are you working on?
Josh: We are creating a new warehouse distribution hub. We’re going to be running a new direct-to-customer online store so people can buy all of our products online and have them shipped direct. It’s sort of a decentralized model, which means we can produce small batches of different products. This gives us a lot of flexibility to run the innovative beer program that we have. We can produce a lot of beer, but it’s not a lot of one beer, and I think this will help us maneuver and be more innovative.
Kim: You talk about being ‘purveyors of the good life’. What does a good life mean to you?
Josh: The good life concept has been part of our concept since day one. Our original tagline was ‘good beers + good times’. We expanded that when we started our food program to ‘good beers + good eats + good times’. And then that became what we referred to as ‘the good life’, so when we combined beer and cocktails and now these new brands, we needed an umbrella name, hence the Good Life Brand Collective – which is how we refer to the portfolio now.
The Good Life brand sits as the umbrella over Field House, NiceLife, Rest and Recreation, Sunrise Hotel, and the new brands that are coming.
Conceptually, the good life for us is the coming together of the simple, but good things in life. If you just need a win during the week and that looks like grabbing a pizza and a beer, hanging out with friends or your kids and family… or bringing your dog down to hang out with, that can be a win … that’s the Good Life. To enjoy simple moments with high-quality products. I feel like it’s really important to create those wins for our community.
Kim: Amazing. So now I want to dig into JV here. So, how do you define a good life for you, personally?
Josh: Well, that’s a good question. I think I’ve had to learn that life is not about silos. If you’d love your work to be here, and your friends to be here, and your family to be there, and you could just focus on those things, that’s one thing. But I’ve learned that life is more like an integrated concept where you flow in and out of things. You can enjoy that thing, but move to the next thing and enjoy that. So, I think that’s how I’ve had to learn to ebb and flow in my life. And I think the good life is being able to do all those things.
For example, I was just at my daughter’s track meet during ‘work hours’, and I was able to work in between her races. I love that my work allows me the flexibility to do that. Sometimes my team needs me, and I say to my family, I know it’s Saturday, but they need some help down at the brewery. So, I think it’s the ability to do the things that are important and move through those things as effortlessly as possible. It’s not always perfect, and sometimes it’s a little bit of a hot mess. Having said that, I’m super grateful for all of those buckets of my life, and how they work together.
Kim: How important is it for you to work with local ingredients and ingredients that you grow yourself?
Josh: Well, we bought a farm in the valley, and we’re in an agricultural and food community. When we built the food program specifically, we realized it wasn’t just about buying local and saying local. We realized we had to understand what that actually means.
Farming is not an easy job, and agriculture is not easy. The original Field House name referred to the house next to the field where you work in the day, then you go back to the house after work. Here you have a meal or a beer, and it tastes so much better because you earned it after a hard day of work.
Our commitment to the farm and understanding what local farms do, and the challenges they face, has really helped us embrace working with other partners and other local suppliers. Because we’ve walked a mile in the same shoes as them, we can tell an authentic story. We can take you to the farm and show you where this stuff comes from, and you can meet the farmer who grows it. It feels really good to go to that level.
We know we’re not going to change farming. We’re not going to change agriculture. We can’t do that. But we believe we can act as a megaphone for why it’s important. I’ll give credit to Josh from 33 Acres. He said something I remember reading years ago, and it stuck with me. He said that beer is part of the conversation, but it’s not the whole conversation. And the conversation’s about community. It’s about food. It’s about culture. It’s about building great businesses that can contribute positively. And beer plays a huge role in that. And if you follow us on Instagram, you’ll see that it’s not just beer. It’s a lot of different storylines around our people, around our community, around our food, around our farm, and around all the things we do.
Being 100% local is not really that sustainable from a business perspective, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. We need to have a balance between running a healthy business and being sustainable, and we want to land somewhere in between.
Kim: Gary mentioned how collaborative you are and how much you are willing to help other breweries. Why do you think the craft brewing industry is so collaborative?
Josh: Yes, it is unique. I think we’ve realized that when you’re not fighting each other, it’s in your best interest to help each other to establish the industry. The other reason is recognizing that the craft beer drinker is not truly a loyal drinker. They don’t just drink one flavour of beer or one brand of beer. So we don’t have to say drink ours and not theirs, and instead we can say you should drink ours and theirs. I think we’re really lucky to be in an industry that allows us to say that, right?
We’re in the collaboration over competition era, which is a healthy model. Craft beer has proven that it works. We wish other people would pay attention to that.
Kim: So, tell me about what’s next for the Good Life Brands?
Josh: We have a lot to say about what’s next. We are coming into our 10-year anniversary, and we had to do a gut check. We had to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, What have we done? What can we be proud of? We had a conversation with our team and said we should high-five ourselves, but not just rest on our laurels. We can’t assume that whatever we did for the last 10 years is going to work for the next 10.
We looked at the shifts in drinking habits and behaviours, and we looked at where the market’s going, and we realized we needed to expand our perspective. So that’s when we got into discussions with NiceLife. This is where we go back to the Jesse Bannister story. Jesse was one of our original investors in Field House. He went on to found NiceLife Cocktails and was doing something great there. Like us, they were focused on innovation and quality. Everything that NiceLife did really aligned with what Field House was doing, so we decided to merge under the same umbrella. But we weren’t doing this to stay static; we did this to grow and create new opportunities.
Very quickly, we integrated the team and then launched these new brands. Jesse is now our Director of Growth and Business Development, and he works with Parker, our original employee number one, who is now our Director of R&D. They work together on all the R&D projects. So, it’s nice having a team that is actively working on what’s next, while we’re working on solving today’s problems.
Originally, our goal was to offer one of the best craft beer experiences in BC. And we worked really hard to hopefully earn our spot there. With the merger, we had to reset, and we asked, “What is our next big goal?”
So, our next big goal is to develop a leading portfolio of brands and beverages across Canada. Over the next 5 to 10 years, we are trying to broaden our portfolio of craft beverage brands, all with a focus on innovation and quality, and then bring those to as many communities across Canada as possible.
While this is a big goal, we know we grow from being in those uncomfortable spots. When we looked at why we should grow, it was because we wanted to take care of our people and their families, give them great jobs, give them a chance to stay in this industry, make a good living, and work for a good company. So, we have to grow to do that. And we’re trying to do it in the most authentic way possible.
The next portfolio for us is non-alcoholic beverages, and we’re definitely behind in that. But we’ve been maxed at production capacity for about 18 months, so we haven’t had any tank space to put out non-alcoholic beers. We’re starting to explore more brewery partnerships to brew liquid in different spaces.
We already brew in a few different contract brewing situations. We realized that we’re not going to be able to make it in-house, so we’ve got to create some good partnerships.
Kim: You talked a lot about what’s happened over the last 10 years. Where do you think the industry is going in the next 5 to 10 years?
Josh: Craft beer has established a foothold, and I don’t think it’s going away. Having said that, I don’t think we’ll have as many independent breweries as we do right now. I think that number will go down because we’ll see some mergers and acquisitions, and there will probably be some fallouts, and the frequency with which people are opening new breweries will go down. With that, I think that the number of craft breweries will normalize to a proper number. You see this in the US as well.
On the beverage side, I think we’ll continue to see innovations. But I’m really curious about what the next big jumps look like. Where does the industry make fundamental shifts, and what are some examples of that? Hazy IPA is a great example. When we started our businesses, Hazy IPA wasn’t the IPA, but it is the IPA now, from a sales volume perspective.
There are lots of theories around what the biggest trends will be. But I think one of the insights I learned about a year ago at the craft beer conference was that we used to think of people as non-drinkers, cocktail drinkers, or beer drinkers, but the actual data is saying that beer drinkers drink cocktails, and cocktail drinkers drink beer, and beer people sometimes choose non-alcoholic drinks. It’s a weird, interesting mishmash, and I really love that.
I think the biggest trend will probably be cannabis-based beverages. If you look down south, there are THC and CBD lifestyle beverages. In BC, those drinks come with a lot of large warning labels. While it’s not my drink of choice, I can see why people are going to it from a health benefits perspective.
I think there will be some notable changes in hospitality as well. It’s been kind of the same for a long time. But we’re seeing a lot of really cool, experiential concepts coming out of the States right now that just haven’t hit Canada yet. I would say a leader in hospitality concepts in BC is BNA Brewing. They’ve been providing really unique experiences in hospitality, and I think we’ll see more concepts like that.
Human beings always want to gather somewhere, and we moved from gathering at bars and lounges to gathering at craft breweries. But I think there will be a new version of gathering. It’ll look different, but the purpose will be the same – for humans to gather. And I think it’s really important in a very digital world that we still gather as human beings, not digitally gather together.
So, I don’t know the answer. If I had it, I’d be building it right now. But I have a notebook of random theories, and maybe one of them is right.
Kim: Tell me about your favourite beer.
Josh: It’s cliche, but I will order an IPA, or a hazy IPA is really my preference. I will usually drink the IPA that’s on tap wherever we are. That’s my go-to. A stand-out for me is Superflux. They have a good reputation for a reason. I also like Small Gods on the Island. Chris has been in the industry forever, and Johnny, who came from Deep Cove, they are so good at what they do, and their products are honestly so good. They had this California IPA that I loved. I think Small Gods is making some of the best beers in BC. They’ve got some great accolades right out of the box, and it’s really fun to see them succeed.
Kim: And when you’re not drinking beer, what are you drinking?
Josh: I love cheap white wine. I don’t like sweet white wines, but if it’s cold and dry and if it’s cheap, I’ll drink it. There are also some adaptogenic soda waters with some interesting flavours and ingredients that I’m interested in.
Kim: What are your thoughts on the non-alcoholic trend?
Josh: I’ll go out on a limb, and it’s okay if I’m wrong, but I think this is more of a trend than a permanent thing. I like to anchor back to things that have been around for decades and decades. Alcohol is one of those things. I think it is somewhat trendy to be sober-curious. But I do think it’s brought about some good alternatives and healthy products. And I think it’s leading to more mindful drinking.
In the non-alcoholic space, we just made our first non-alcoholic Salted Mexican Lime Lager. One of the insights we learned is not to try to make these taste exactly like beers, but rather to make them taste like really good drinks that give you the feeling of drinking a beer. On the craft side, I think it’s really important to look at non-alc, and ask if it’s a good beverage, not if it’s a good beer.
Kim: What do you love about the craft beer scene where you live?
Josh: If you look at Field House and our fellow breweries out here, Farmhouse Brewing and Old Yale, we all have these big open spaces. Whether it’s an indoor play area or a backyard space, the breweries out here give people open spaces to hang out and chill. And I think it’s very reminiscent of having wide open agricultural fields and land, so it kind of fits with that.
Kim: If we step outside the craft beer scene, what do you love about the area that you live in?
Josh: The shift that happened in the last 10 years is that we were moving from these rural areas that were well-designed for families and livability, but they didn’t have any cool businesses. We had the mall, the big box stores, and the strip malls, but we didn’t have cool, trendy things that you would see in Gastown in Vancouver. But now, 10 years later, we have really cool coffee shops, cool breweries, new wine bars, and cool boutiques. We have all the things that Vancouver had. In Vancouver, they have all those things, but they’re not very connected because Vancouver is so big. What’s really unique about the business community we have is that we’re all independent craft businesses, and we’re all very aware of what everybody’s doing. We support each other, tell stories, and recommend each other.
So now we have all the cool businesses, but all those cool businesses are kind of your friends, which is kind of cool.
Kim: And what do you enjoy doing with your family that’s not work-related?
Josh: We definitely have an outdoor playground out here. Chilliwack has this amazing offering of trails, rivers, and mountains. So, in 10 minutes, you can be at a trail head, or you can go to a lake or ride your bike.
I think we can have a really complete community because we are family-friendly, but we also have these outdoor things to do. And now we have these creative businesses that you can go to after a hike for a beer or a great meal.
Kim: Is there anything else you want to share?
Josh: I think it’s important to talk about the fact that it’s been hard for small and medium-sized businesses. I don’t want to be whiny, but it’s been a long haul. It’s been over 5 years since the good old days of 2019. And I think everybody’s tuned out to the support local messaging, which is kind of sad. We’ve all heard it over and over again. But at the same time, if you want to have coffee shops and breweries in your community, a portion of your money has to be spent in these businesses.
The economy has been tough. People are going out less and spending less money, and there are just not enough visits to go around for all the restaurants and the coffee shops that we have. We need to ask ourselves if these businesses build the communities and the culture that we want. That doesn’t just magically happen. If you look at all the businesses closing, there’s only one reason that they’re closing, and it’s because they don’t have enough customers.
It doesn’t really take a lot to be a customer in our industry. A beer is still an affordable luxury.
I don’t want people to feel guilty about shopping at Costco or Amazon, but just make sure that you’re also spending a portion of your dollars locally as well. If we can do that, we’ll be able to save a few more local businesses. So, I think it’s important that people are really mindful of this.
Kim: Anything else you want to put out there?
Josh: We are excited to really start sharing the story about the Good Life Brand Collective in the next six months. Everybody kind of knows Field House and NiceLife, but we’re going to take people on this journey with us. Going back to your earlier question, we started with crowdfunding as a way to take people along on the journey of building a brewery. And we’re planning to do that again with the Good Life Brand. We’re going to use a crowdfunding model and hopefully get people to come along on this next crazy journey with us.
Kim: I would normally end this interview by giving Josh a chance to pick who I will interview next. But this time I’m planning to do something different. Josh is my 24th Hops Among Friends interview since 2017. The next one is the big 25, and I’m going to do something different. A bit of a retrospective. So, the person Josh recommends will be number 26. You’ll have to wait to hear who Josh picks for me to interview once the 25th blog is live.
Stay tuned for the 25th instalment of the Hops Among Friends blog series. Until then, cheers!
