Update from the BC Ale Trail
After launching in October 2016 with seven regions, we spent 2017 adding another eight. At this point most of the province is represented, and much of the remainder will be covered in 2018, including: Kamloops/Vernon/Shuswap; Richmond; and the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast/Northern BC. We will also be consolidating several different Vancouver Island Ale Trails into a single trail and updating several of the trails we previously launched to bring them up to date with new breweries and other details.
We are also pleased to announce a new partnership with BC’s Alliance of Beverage Licensees (ABLE BC) to add a database of craft beer-focused private liquor stores that are based in our ale trail regions. Final details of what that will look like are still being worked out, but we’re very excited about this expansion not only because it will provide an influx of funding for the project, but also because it will be a great resource for tourists to find places to buy craft beer from Guild members.
Another exciting addition in 2018 will be the launch of our Tasting Notes features, which are map-based photo essays written by guest writers hosted by regional destination marketing organizations. The first couple will feature the Sunshine Coast and Kootenay Rockies, with more planned for Nanaimo, Cowichan and Parksville Qualicum Beach, and Port Moody.
In 2017 we published more than 40 unique blog posts on the BC Ale Trail website. We also launched a podcast partnership with the Cascadian Beer Podcast (Aaron Johnson), who produced six excellent podcasts and will continue to produce monthly podcasts featuring different BC Ale Trail breweries each time. If you have any suggestions for a blog post or would like to be featured on Aaron’s podcast, please let us know.
Last year, we were able to work together with Port Moody to produce a print map for that ale trail, and we will be doing the same with Penticton, Vancouver’s North Shore, Kootenay Rockies East and West, Fraser Valley and Sunshine Coast in 2018.
We are also looking into opportunities to take the BC Ale Trail on the road to beer festivals and tourism conferences. We hope to be able to show off what BC’s breweries have to offer in places like Alberta, Oregon, California and beyond.
With a focus on data-driven insights, 2018 will also see the execution of a marketing impact study with Destination BC’s economic impact model. We plan to conduct visitor intercepts at select breweries across the province to determine the value and impact of the BC Ale Trail marketing campaign. Information collected will be two-fold, one to collect market intelligence of who these folks are/learn about their awareness of the campaign and two to collect spending information which will be used to feed into an economic impact model to determine how much money is being spent in BC as a result of visiting/participating in an Ale Trail.
2018 will see Monica Frost joining the BC Ale Trail team as the Social Media & Community Manager. Since her first sip of a cloudy Widmer Hefeweizen back in the late 90s Monica has been a craft beer enthusiast, and it became her mission to build a community around it. Her tool of choice – Social media. Monica has spent over eight years working in Communications and Social Media roles across a variety of industries with a focus primarily on the craft beer industry. She is returning for the 5th year as Communications Director of the prestigious annual BC Beer Awards. Other Social Media roles of note include CAMRA BC, What’s Brewing BC, Great Canadian Beer Festival, Vancouver Craft Beer Week, Vancouver Brewery Tours, and Vancouver Mural Festival to name a few. Monica has also recently starting working as Communications and Social Media Coordinator with the BC Craft Brewers Guild.
Lastly, you may have heard that the BC Ale Trail was a finalist for a Canadian Tourism Award for Best Marketing Campaign. In the end, we didn’t win, but we are pretty proud of being named one of the top three in Canada alongside the City of Toronto and the Calgary Stampede. It certainly brought a lot more awareness of our project to important people across Canada.
If you are looking for more information about any of these endeavours or would like to find out more about what the BC Ale Trail is doing to promote craft beer in BC on behalf of your brewery, feel free to contact us.
Melanie Ransome
Project Manager
info@bcaletrail.ca
Joe Wiebe
Director of Content
joe@bcaletrail.ca
Ken Beattie
Executive Director
ken@bccraftbeer.com