Customer Spotlight: Dark Woods Brewing & Coffee Roasting

Our next customer spotlight is on Dark Woods Brewing & Coffee Roasting! Based in Innisfail, Alberta, Dark Woods Brewing is a taproom that offers freshly roasted coffee, small-batch craft beer, and food sourced from local ingredients. We caught up with co-founder, Nick Bell, to chat about the growth they’ve experienced over the last two years.

1) Tell me a little about Dark Woods Brewing and what you stand for.

My twin brother, Scott, and I started brewing beer in our garage almost six years ago. We were able to get into a commercial brewery after two years (into a very, very small space), which allowed us to get positive feedback from the community, friends, family, and customers. From there, we decided to go all in to set up our own space, with a new building and new equipment. At the same time, we got into coffee roasting, which we thought complimented the brewery side and broadened our market. Since then, we’ve been able to get into different coffee locations, extended our hours (we’re open from 7 am-10 pm on some days), and even launched a menu four months ago to become a café / dine-in taproom!

We put a lot of work into creating a particular atmosphere and building a company we’re proud of. Our vision was to grow into a community-based business, support the industries that supported us, and generally build our community up.

2) What are you most proud of as a company?

I'm proud of how far we’ve come already. We started in a garage just six years ago with a little pilot brewing system; we had no idea that this was going to become an actual business. It was just my brother and I having a little fun and making a bit of beer.

We used to get generic labels for our coffee and beer as we didn’t have the capital to buy different labels for all of our flavours, and we didn’t always know what we were going to be making. Actually, our grandma would spend hours and hours writing the beer type and percentage on each label by hand! Now, we can get a bit more creative and come up with different designs for each of our different SKUs.

3) How has Dark Woods Brewing managed through the pandemic?

We opened our doors for the first time on January 1st, 2020, and then we were shut down in March. The first three weeks were really tough, and then we came up with a “Pay It Forward” initiative. We dropped four beers off at ten random houses with a note that said someone bought beer for you, so now it’s your chance to pay it forward and buy beer for someone else. It blew up, and we ended up doing this for about two months, getting up to around eighty deliveries a day! We just had so much inventory that we didn’t know what to do with, and this ended up being our biggest saviour. It got our name out there and helped connect the community a bit.

With the pandemic now, we just take it day-by-day - that's all you can do!

4) How would you describe your relationship with ALP?

We've been working with Jordan even at his previous company, and he’s printed many labels and helped us with artwork changes, too. For us, customer service is the most important thing, more than turnaround or anything else. Jordan has been phenomenal and helped us out countless times, whether it’s getting something going quicker or with our design. He always gets back to me within a few hours, so I know my request is always being taken care of.