Vat's All Folks

So how was your Friday night? Mine was pretty eventful. A group of us had planned to camp out in Downtown Bike Hounds with beer in hand around 10pm to catch the giant Beer Vats going by, but the process turned into an all night affair.

Beer vats you ask? Well if you’re not from the Hamilton area you may not have heard of this, so let me explain. Molson/Coors bought 6 gigantic beer vats from Germany, big enough to hold 1.4 million bottles of beer each, and had them shipped here by freighter. Once they arrived in Hamilton, they had to take a 108 kilometer trip to the brewery. Simple, right?

Not quite. Moving these giant vats required a huge convoy of workers, and a team of guys from the power company to travel in front of the convoy and take down all the power cords along the streets they were traveling. The vats were supposed to start their journey through Hamilton at 9pm, moving at a walking pace, and stopping somewhere in Waterdown around 6am. Except by 10pm on Friday night, the vats had barely moved a few feet. We were in for a long night.

We ended up waiting for the vats in my apartment, where I had nothing to offer anyone except tequila. 3 hours and lots of tequila later, it was 1am and we decided that if the vats weren’t going to come to us, we may as well go to them.

Lucky for us we have a friend with a fantastic bike shop, full of old bikes to lend us. We all hoped on a bike and made our 9 person convoy down to the vats! And man, the vats did not disappoint!

Those things are huge, aren’t they? And no one was really preventing you from walking right up to them and taking a picture pretending to lift them up. As Kieran C. Dickson said, they were being “quite cavalier about our safety.”



After the luster of the giant vats wore off, we all road ourselves home, completely freezing and a little drunk and a lot sleepy. I didn’t think I would be so excited about some giant beer silos, but man am I ever glad I went.

Thanks to Gary Buttrum for capturing it all. Aren't his pictures lovely? Double thanks to Mike Jerome for coming up with vat-related puns all night.