Steam flows from a generous pot where one of R&B Brewing Company's three brewers heats a test batch of coffee beer.

Five men dressed in black R&B T-shirts move swiftly about monitoring temperatures and machines as a sound system plays punk, ska and new wave beats.

A compressor for the glycol system keeps brews cool in the fermenters. A vacuum pump sucks oxygen out of freshly bottled beer, while a fan whirs in the nondescript building on East Fourth Avenue at Quebec.

Andrew Tape, 24, the most senior of three brewers, points out the two giant galvanized steel silos that hold 10 tonnes of barley, piled sacks of various malts and the gigantic vat, or mash tun, that holds the barley, water and malt porridge-like substance. Rick Dellow, the R in R&B, finishes bottling G-Beer for the Gyoza King group, a beer named for ji-biru, the Japanese name for local, handcrafted beer.

Job done, Dellow, a youthful but balding 54-year-old with dark eyebrows and a salt and pepper beard, leans on stacked boxes of empty bottles to chat about the difference between craft and mainstream beer, the local brewmasters who've developed the scene, and R&B's path since the Vancouver company started in 1997.

In the beginning, Dellow and Barry Benson, the B in R&B, did everything themselves, building on their relationship working with each other selling and installing brewing equipment for an Abbotsford company. Now R&B employs eight staff and the company doubled its workspace from 3,500 square feet last year.

Microbrewing in B.C. has never been easy, but the makers of craft beer are enjoying a growing thirst for their product. And not just beer nerds are sampling craft and cask beers at places like the Alibi Room. Most of the events at the first Vancouver Craft Beer Week this spring sold out, as did last year's Hopscotch whisky, scotch and beer festival in Vancouver. Fifty-five hundred people attended Nando's Canada Cup of Beer at the University of B.C. over two days in July where, organizers say, half the vendors were microbreweries. And craft beer enthusiasts reportedly snapped up tickets to last weekend's Great Canadian Beer Festival in Victoria in 10 minutes.

Dellow and Benson learned from the mistakes of others when they travelled the world designing and buildings breweries to customers' specifications.

That's why they started small.

"What we learned is that microbrewing means micro profits," Dellow says.

Their startup followed Granville Island Brewing's launch in 1984 and Storm Brewing, which started on Commercial Drive in 1995.

R&B started with two beers distributed only in Vancouver. Now it produces six styles of beer, including its popular Hoppelganger IPA and Raven Cream Ale, a couple of seasonal ales, the special beer for Gyoza King, and a few beers for Steamworks. R&B sells its beers from Victoria to Chilliwack, White Rock to Squamish. Ninety-five per cent of its profits come from selling draft beer and five per cent from bottled.

Dellow grew up near Manchester, U.K., which nurtured his appreciation of microbrewed beer.

"My friends and I figured out once that we could drink beer from a different brewery every day for a whole month without travelling more than a few miles," says the man, who moved to Canada in 1988.

Barley, malt, water, hops, yeast and clarifying agents comprise beer. Most beer is filtered, pumped with carbon dioxide, transferred to kegs, stored in a cold room until it rolls out to restaurants, bars and liquor stores.

"The way we brew, whatever raw material we use is there because we want the flavours that it brings to the beer. What the big brewers tend to do, is they've gone down a road of, dare I say, removing flavour from the beer," says Dellow. "They add things like rice and maize to give them the sugar that provides the alcohol without adding flavour. If you listen to their ads, they tell you that their beer tastes cold. They say the beer tastes crisp. They don't say it tastes malty or hoppy or you taste the fruitiness from the yeast, all that kind of thing."

He credits local brewpubs, Yaletown Brewing, Steamworks and the defunct Dix BBQ & Brewery, with turning Vancouver drinkers on to flavourful craft beer.

Tony Dewald, formerly the brewmaster at Dix, was the first to regularly tap a cask, according to Dellow, and Dix hosted Caskivals, organized with the local Campaign for Real Ale group, CAMRA Vancouver.

He says talented brewmasters including Dave Varga of Taylor's Crossing Restaurant & Brewery in North Vancouver, Tariq Khan of Big Ridge Brewing Company in Surrey, Iain Hill, head brewer for the Mark James Group, and James Walton of Storm brew interesting beers that have hooked drinkers on craft ales.

And Dellow has seen increased interest in cask-conditioned ales in the last six months.

For serious beer aficionados, traditional cask-conditioned beer is the ultimate choice. It's naturally carbonated during secondary fermentation instead of being force carbonated like keg beer. Unfiltered fermented beer is put into a cask and priming sugar is added.

The yeast feeds on the priming sugar, creating carbon dioxide. Cask-conditioned ales are less carbonated and served warmer than other beers and offer richer flavours and aromas.

Keg beer is forced from the bottom of the barrel by CO2. With a cask, a peg is hammered into the shive at the top side of the cask to let the beer breathe for at least a few hours before serving. A tap is hammered through the bung on the front of the cask. The beer can either flow out with gravity or be sucked out through lines by a hand pump or beer engine.

R&B started supplying The Whip with a weekly cask from R&B and other microbreweries three years ago.

St. Augustine's, with 40 taps on Commercial Drive, taps a cask on Mondays. The Railway Club does the same on Tuesdays, the Cascade Room on Wednesdays, the Yaletown Brewery on Thursdays and The Whip on Sundays.

Dellow says The Irish Heather was the first to put on a permanent cask--they can be a pain because they need time for the yeast to settle after being moved and the beer can spray out and make a mess when they're tapped. Nigel Springthorpe at the Alibi Room did the same and other restaurateurs have since followed suit.

Over a lunch of chowder and hoppy Brick & Beam IPA at the Yaletown Brewing Company, 81-year-old John Mitchell agrees that he's considered the grandfather of microbrewing in Canada, if not North America.

Born in Singapore, raised in Britain and trained as a chef, Mitchell worked in high-end hotels and ran the pub at the Sylvia Hotel for 15 years and started North America's first modern microbrewery with brewer and writer Frank Appleton in 1982.

Mitchell and two partners started running the Troller Pub in Horseshoe Bay in 1979. During a six-week beer strike at the end of that year, they sold cider and eventually imported beer from Washington State. Mitchell read an article in London Illustrated News about the resurgence of craft beer in the U.K. and became determined to set up his own brewpub.

First he had to get the provincial government to allow him to have both a brewery and a licensed drinking establishment.

With used dairy equipment, the first modern craft brewery opened in a one-room space a block from the pub. Horseshoe Bay Brewery produced only one beer, a pale ale.

The brewery didn't last long after Mitchell left. But he was soon invited to set up Spinnakers in Victoria.

Canadian brewing magnate E.P. Taylor was buying up breweries in the U.K., poised to make Britain a land of bland beer, according to Mitchell, when four fed up citizens dreamt up the Campaign for the Revitalization of Ale in 1971, now the Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA.

"It went all over Britain," Mitchell says. "It was one of the biggest consumer uprisings. They changed the face of British brewing."

In 1981, Mitchell became a member of CAMRA U.K. so he could get his hands on the organization's newsletter. He learned about brewing equipment, travelled to England to examine it in person and shipped it to Spinnakers, the first brewpub in North America, which opened in 1984.

Spinnakers was the first neighbourhood pub in Victoria, the balding and bespectacled Mitchell says from his perch on a banquette at the Yaletown Brewery. The rest were hotel beer parlours where you drank up and got out. At Spinnakers, Mitchell focused on superb food and ales.

Federal legislation that said a brewery couldn't be connected to a pub that served food, like in England, had to be changed. "Everybody thought I was completely 'round the bend," Mitchell says over strains of Aerosmith's "Dream On."

"They thought this is an absolute idiot. But when it became a success, then all hell broke lose."

General managers of liquor boards across the country travelled to Victoria to tour Spinnakers and returned to their provinces and changed legislation to allow brewpubs of their own.

After starting Spinnakers, where Mitchell's ESB beer is named after him, Mitchell entered semi-retirement, emerging in the 1990s to help establish the Howe Sound Brewery in Squamish, which opened in 1996.

Mitchell is amazed by the microbrewing scene in Portland, Oregon, and by the attitude among bureaucrats. When he considered opening a brewpub in Seattle, instead of erecting roadblocks, representatives of the liquor control board in the state were quick to ask how they could help.

He says beer in B.C. has come a long way since the '80s, but it's still overly carbonated and served too cold for his taste.

"It's ingrained in the culture of Canada and America that a cold, gassy beer is a beer," he says. "Well it isn't a beer, really."

Nigel Springthorpe didn't know so many beer enthusiasts would come out of the woodwork when he introduced microbrewed beers at the Alibi Room. The Englishman transplant with dark, cropped hair and spot of grey hair on his chin, rubs his knuckles against a wooden table when he considers his experiment's success.

Springthorpe, who'd worked at the Alibi since 1998, had always felt something was missing. So when he and Raya Audet took over the restaurant in 2006, he introduced craft beers.

As the craft draft drew a greater customer base, Springthorpe added more taps, much to the chagrin of Audet and his line installation guy, and his own passion for microbrewed beer grew. Springthorpe, dressed in a frayed grey T-shirt and long jean cutoffs, has just returned from his monthly pilgrimage to Vancouver Island, in mid August, to collect kegs and casks of microbrewed beer.

Brews from Swans Buckerfields, Spinnakers and Canoe in Victoria, and Longwood Brewpub in Nanaimo fill the bed of his pickup truck. His trip to Craig Street Brew Pub in Duncan was wasted because the brewer wasn't there.

The Alibi Room has 25 rotating microbrewed beers from locales including Naramata, Oregon and Surrey on tap and three casks going at all times. Springthorpe compiles a new list of what's on offer every few days. When he reached his hundredth list, the 33-year-old painstakingly compiled "The Beer Geek's Guide to the Alibi's 100th Beer List," composing his ode to the brewers of the province on a typewriter.

"If I was a Warhammer playing, fu-manchu sportin', dragon-slaying over-the-top beer geek, I might refer to Gary Lohin as 'Gothack,' Norwegian demigod, Lord and Master of ALL Things Hop," he wrote about Surrey's Central City brewpub and Red Racer brewmaster.

Springthorpe was on the phone to Driftwood Brewery in Victoria before it officially opened its doors and he's even had a cellar constructed where he can age beer.

The self-professed beer geek, who confesses to watching beer documentaries while drinking beer, says revamping his bottled beer selection to compliment his draft beers didn't always fly.

"It was kind of a big step when I took Stella off the shelf," he says. "People were pissed off, man. At first it was kind of like, 'What do you mean I can't get that?'"

He's seen an expansion in microbrewed beer choices at Vancouver restaurants in the last year. "It used to be that you'd go to a really nice restaurant and the wine selection is amazing, cocktails are fantastic, and then you've got two crappy beers to choose from," he says.

Springthorpe believes with the burgeoning brewing talent in the province, the craft beer scene in B.C. could explode.

He says the first small, pioneering local breweries focused on drawing business away from major producers. Now microbreweries are getting creative. "Brands like Red Racer, Driftwood, who are totally thinking outside of the box... they're the next wave," he says. "All liquor distribution, liquor control issues aside, I think there's something festering that's about to totally happen in this province as far as brewing. I think we'll see at least a handful of new breweries happen, real small, that'll be really innovative and great."

Instead of producing an IPA, a stout, a pale ale and a lager, he notes that Driftwood Brewery's four mainstays are an ale, a Belgian farmhouse wheat ale that includes coriander and black pepper, a Belgian white beer that includes orange peel and coriander and a distinct Dusseldorf-style beer made strictly with German malts. "They're sort of the first in what I think is going to be a new wave of breweries," Springthorpe says.

Now that R&B has established itself with its "bread and butter" beers, it's concocting more interesting brews, says Dellow. It's about to launch Spirit Chaser Sumatra Coffee Porter in conjunction with Salt Spring Coffee next month. A beer made with red rice, a Belgian witbier brewed with barley and wheat, maybe coriander and bitter orange peel, and organic beer could be on R&B's horizon.

"We are a truly local, truly small, truly craft brewery and we get lots of competition from people who pretend to be that way," Dellow said. "Granville Island, they have that tiny little brewery on Granville Island and [brewmaster] Vern [Lambourne] does a great job brewing some really neat beers down there, but not many people know that they're owned by Molson [Coors]. And Okanagan Spring is part of the Sleeman group, which is part of the Sapporo group. It's the whole thing of big corporations pretending they're green and it's hard for the consumer to tell who actually is small and local and a mom and pop operation, and who pretends to be that way."

crossi@vancourier.com

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CAMRA Vancouver's OktoBEERfest happens Sept. 24 at Heritage Hall. Just Here for the Beer's Oktoberfest happens Oct. 1 and 2 at the Edgewater Casino. CAMRA Vancouver's first HarvestFest of primarily pumpkin beers happens Oct. 16 at The Railway Club.

Hopscotch happens at the Rocky Mountaineer Station Nov. 15 to 21. CAMRA Vancouver's Winterfest happens at St. Augustine's Dec. 4.