Newcomers to Calgary may not know that there has been beer brewed at Last Best’s location for over 20 years. While Last Best Brewing & Distilling may have only arrived in 2015, the long-departed Brew Brother’s opened as one of Alberta’s first brewpubs in 1994 in this same Beltline building. The company now known as Albeerta Provisions took a pair of adjoining buildings with the existing brewing system in the lower level to create this new establishment that has a host of delightful nooks and crannies.
As a brewpub, it has a full food menu with appetizers, pizzas, burgers, mains, and more. There are four core beers; There Will Be Porter, Show Pony Ale, Dirty Bird Black Lager, Last Best IPA, and usually about eight of their other beers, plus guest taps. You may wonder how such a small brewing system can produce so many beers…alas, there is no wizardry here. Last Best is part of a family of four breweries in Alberta (Banff, Jasper, and Ft. McMurray being the others), so they import some of those beers to here. Also, as the Distillery part of their name hints, cocktails are important here too.
When you first climb up the few steps to enter Last Best, it looks like you are in a standard restaurant/brewpub with tables and booths in front of you, a large bar straight ahead, and brewing tanks of to your left. Upon further investigation, you notice there is more space, and that the bar is actually centrally located. By the time you move towards the back, you see another separate room of tables and then, surprise, the inner courtyard, which is really a fully enclosed outdoor patio with room for about 75 people. But there is more. If you go around the corner, there are stairs to the lower level which not only has its own private room with its own bar called the Beer Shop, but a barbershop as well. Of course, you are now at the base of the brewing and distillery systems too. All these spaces have their own atmosphere, so several separate events can be going on here at the same time.
Last Best is open Monday-Thursday 11:30 a.m.-12:00 a.m. and Friday-Saturday 11:30 a.m.-2:00 a.m., Sunday 10:00 a.m.-12:00 a.m. Brunch is available until 2:00 p.m. on the weekend. Tasters, flights, sleeves, and growler fills are all available.
605 11 Ave. S.W., T2R 0E1