For more than a decade, the National Westhills has been my go-to neighbourhood pub—even if it is located in a large southwest Calgary mall. It’s a bright, large but comfortable space for meeting friends and family, with an energetic staff contributing to the good-times vibe.
While lacking the intimacy of a brewpub, this beer “market” allows you to order draft pints from dozens of largely local breweries. It’s where I was introduced to Last Best’s fabulous Tokyo Drift double IPA, one of my favourite beers on tap.
While prices, as everywhere, have gone up, the happy-hour menu for drink and food remains extensive. Even at full price, my crispy chicken sandwich ($21 with fries) is a massive piece of breast meat barely contained by the potato bun.
A fabulous, meaty chicken sandwich
National Westhills 180 Stewart Green SW, Calgary Opens daily at 11 am, happy hour weekdays 2-5 pm 403-685-6801
There are many classic culinary pairings: bacon and eggs, burgers and fries, mac and cheese, peanut butter and jam. To this mix we can add beer and pizza, a longtime partnership that’s only getting stronger in Calgary as more craft breweries add gourmet pizzas to their pub food menus. So much so that you can go for the beer but stay for the pie.
Here’s a half dozen brewpubs that meet this high dual standard, sometimes baking their own pizzas and other times forging partnerships with existing pie companies.
Two House Brewing 1901 10 Avenue SW Sunday to Thursday 11 am-10 pm, Friday-Saturday 11 am-11 pm 403-287-0215
A couple of Two House pints
Tucked out of the way in Sunalta, Two House Brewing is the place to be on a sunny summer afternoon, with two spacious patios and big sliding glass doors. The eight types of pizzas keep flying out of the oven and go well with a flight of up to six beers. Prices are reasonable, with specials every day.
…and a couple of pies
Last Best Brewing & Distilling 607 11 Avenue SW and one other Calgary location Happy hour Monday to Saturday 3 pm-6 pm and late, Sunday all day 587-353-7390
Dirty Bird chicken pizza at Last Best Brewing
Talk about happy hour. Last Best offers at least five such hours every day—from $15 full-size pizzas to $5.50 16-ounce pints of beer to $10 martinis featuring house-made gin. I can sit by the pizza oven and watch my excellent Dirty Bird chicken pie bake or snag a seat on the sunny patio and sip a hazy double IPA Tokyo Drift, my favourite on-tap beer in Calgary.
Last Best pizza oven
Eighty-Eight Brewing 1070, 2600 Portland Street SE Opens daily, except Monday, at noon 403-452-5880
Replacing onetime in-house Noble Pies, 88 partner Portland Street Pizza features a unique, puffy focaccia crust and crispy squares. The beer, named in honour of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, remains excellent. Enjoy a pint of hazy Hi-Fi IPA with a spicy Magnum P.I. pizza in the tropical, funky taproom.
Eighty-Eight Brewing’s funky taproom
’The Mash 50 Greenbriar Drive NW and four other Calgary locations Opens at 3 pm Monday and Tuesday and at 11:30 am Wednesday to Sunday
The Mash’s brewpub
Here’s something different: craft pizza made from craft beer. At The Mash—just outside Calgary Farmers’ Market West—the beer on tap is from Cochrane’s Half Hitch Brewing. The spent grain, from the beer-making process, is folded into the pizza dough.
The spent beer mash goes into the pizza crust
The result is uniquely flavourful pizza, such as a 10-inch wild mushroom ($20.50), paired with a Papa Bear Prairie Ale. No doubt worthy of a monster mash.
This is a partnership between Tailgunner’s Czech-heavy beers anda dozen Acme Pizza Co. 12-inch pies. Grab a seat on the shaded Sunalta patio and try an Ajax dark lager and a Saporita pizza. The brewery’s name honours local World War II tail gunner Lint Stephenson, who survived being shot down and spending two years in an internment camp.
Tailgunner beer and pizza
Trolley 5 728 17 Avenue SW Weekdays 11:30 am to late, weekends 10 am to late 403-454-3731
Trolley 5 is at the top of the Calgary brewpub food heap for its burgers, wings and brisket sandwiches. So it’s no surprise its 10-inch pizzas rank up there, too. Try the Silvio Dante—featuring house-made San Marzano tomato sauce and smoked andouille sausage—along with a Cloudy Daze hazy pale ale.
Okay, this retro 17th Avenue spot doesn’t actually make beer, but with a name like Cold Beer & Pizza, it’s hard to exclude it from this list. They do make plenty of flavourful pizza, ranging from a slice to pie sold by the metre. How about a Dirk Diggler quarter-metre “shorty” and a $5 happy-hour pint?
You can’t beat Citizen Brewing’s happy-hour burger and beer
Pretty much any Calgary taproom worth its salt has at least one burger on its food menu. Here are four of the best pairings.
This one’s a slam dunk. Annex Ales(4323 1 Street SE) is arguably the most adventurous craft brewery in Calgary. The attached Lil’ Empireserves some of the city’s finest burgers. Try a small-batch, seasonal brew and an Empire regular burger with cheese ($12).
Annnex Ales has arguably the most innovative craft beer in Calgary
Trolley 5 (728 17 Avenue SW) is the city’s liveliest brewpub, especially on Flames’ game nights. Its full kitchen churns out the best, most diverse pub food in Calgary (dim sum anyone?). Grab a bar seat and watch the fast-moving beertenders while you savour a Turntable lager and a hefty prime-rib burger ($19 with fries) that rivals the best in Calgary. Bonus points for a brioche bun that doesn’t fall apart. The wings and smoked brisket sandwich are damn good, too.
Trolley 5 is the liveliest brewpub in Calgary
Citizen Brewing Company (227 35 Avenue NE)—between the communities of Tuxedo and Highland Park—may have the best brewpub happy-hour deal in Calgary. From 2-5 pm Monday to Thursday, select 20-ounce pints, like the Hijacked IPA, are only $6 and ground-chuck burgers and hot fries $14. Best enjoyed on an expansive, dapple-lit patio that includes a hop and vegetable garden.
Citizen’s patio is the perfect place to savour a beer and burger
Is it wrong to pair a juicy burger with a knock-you-on your-ass Imperial iPA? Not when the delightfully namedBitter Sisters(510 Heritage Drive SW) is pouring a 16-ounce pint of Triple Haze (8.5%), a full-flavoured New England IPA featuring experimental hops and hop oil. While we’re bending norms, how about a custom-blend beef burger with jalapenos ($20)? Enjoy it all on the sun-splashed patio.
Fresh-baked pitas are just the start of the excellent shawarmas at Beirut Street Food
A new year, a new project. Inspired by this resolution: Schedule more spontaneous acts into my day.
The project is to discover and celebrate the best eats and drinks in Calgary. The best burgers, the best croissants, the best coffee roasteries, the best brewpubs, the best Lebanese poutine. It’s a long list.
Sought X Found is arguably Calgary’s best combo roastery and coffee shop
The rules: Calgary-based, independent places, serving up excellent fare. (small, regional chains are okay). Bonus points for interesting, even quirky spaces; hello Cold Garden Brewery! I’ll try to stick to one “best of” pick per category, though there will be instances of runners up and “also recommended”.
Cold Garden is certainly Calgary’s quirkiest, dog friendly brewpub.
Prices. I’ve pledged to banish “cheap eats” from my vocabulary, since they scarcely exist anymore. “Affordable” isn’t much better; affordable for who? I try to steer clear of high-end places but am no doubt fighting a losing battle against $20 breakfasts and $25 burgers and fries.
Subjective as hell? Maybe. I favour IPA beers and darker-roast coffees, which may prejudice some picks. The good news is you can comment here on my choices and offer superior alternatives and maybe gems I’ve never heard of.
There’s enough potential best-of categories to make a weekly pick last a year or two. I’ll try to restrict my posts to a paragraph or two. So let’s dig in.
The world’s best carrots beckon
Every couple of weeks, for the past 15-plus years, I’ve made a pilgrimage to the Calgary Farmers Market to pick up a 10-pound bag of Beck carrots. Yes, I’m seriously addicted to this Innisfail-based (central Alberta) grower’s super sweet Nantes carrots.
Ten pounds of the world’s best carrots
Indeed, I defy you to just eat one. Once you’ve been introduced to Becks, you’ll never go back to grocery store imposters that taste like wood. You can thank me later.
Beck Farms Available at Calgary Farmers’ Market south (Thursday to Sunday) and west (Wednesday to Sunday) locations, opening at 9 am
It’s not often that me drinking beer is good for the world. Most of the time, I’m not even sure if I’m drinking to forget or forgetting to drink.
It’s an infinitesimally small step, but every time I sip a Fire Bloom lager from Calgary’s Best of Kin brewery, a portion of the sale goes to help regenerate wildfire-ravaged landscapes like the recent mountains around Jasper. Indeed, flowers from colourful fireweed that emerges from wildfire ashes were used to produce the honey that goes into the seasonal Fire Bloom beer.
Of course, this unique lager tastes pretty damn good, too. We enjoyed a couple of pints, along with a Big Hat hazy IPA, at Best of Kin’s taproom in the close-to-downtown neighbourhood of Sunalta.
It’s liquid honey, not fiery, going down the hatch
Unbeknownst to us, the Best of Kin owners (featuring brothers Ryan and Collin), staff and friends were celebrating the brewery’s second birthday when we visited. It was also happy hour, so a couple of tasty snacks—triple-cooked Kennebec fries and spicy parmesan popcorn—didn’t add much to our already reasonable tab.
The Fire Bloom pairs nicely with triple-cooked Kennebec potato fries
In all, a rather festive way to help the planet.
Best of Kin 1059 14 Street SW, Calgary Tuesday to Sunday, most days 11:30 am to 11 pm 825-413-4233
Can you go to a craft brewery taproom just for the food? You can if you’re trying to spend less than $10. And you can if said taproom is serving some of the best smoked meat in the city.
Of course, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to sample some fine brews. But my primary motivation for visiting Tool Shed Brewing, in an industrial section of northeast Calgary, was to check out the house-smoked barbecue.
It turns out co-owner Graham Sherman is a world-class competition BBQer from many forays to the shrine of Memphis. And he’s brought that experience to the Tool Shed taproom and an outside food truck operating under the name Notorious P.I.G.
But it also makes great, Memphis-style BBQ
In honour of my cheap-eats series, I ordered a pulled-pork sandwich ($10), a lovely, three-napkin mess of slow-cooked meat, coleslaw and stinging Memphis red barbecue sauce. Other full-flavour menu items include BBQ pork tostados ($10), smoked pork belly banh mi sandwiches ($11) and side ribs ($12, hickory smoked for six hours). They await future visits.
A pulled pork sandwich for only $10
Fortunately, I was able to sample a flight of four fine beers, including a Belgian IPA and a kveik ale.
The beers are pretty darn good, too
To celebrate the lifting of restaurant restrictions in Alberta, I’m accelerating my under-$15 Calgary lunch series to twice a week. Besides, I’ve got a lot of great places to cover. And you can help me by suggesting your own cheap-eats discoveries through the “reply” button on the upper left.
Tool Shed Brewing 801 30 Street NE Tuesday to Saturday 11 am-9 pm, Sunday noon-5 pm 403-775-1749
Marathon Mouth 