Vancouver brewery allowed to keep distinctive mural after social media storm over city bylaw

Ale's well that ends well when it comes to an "iconic" mural painted outside a Vancouver brewery that will live to see another day, after city council stepped in to stop it from being painted over.

Management at Storm Brewing said last week that the city had informed them the mural that covers one of their exterior walls violated signage and mural bylaws.

Vancouver city council voted Tuesday night to grandfather the mural into the bylaws and allow the mural to stay up.

The motion, put forward by Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung, also asks staff to look at ways the signage and mural bylaws can be modernized.

"This is an effort, obviously, to save Storm Brewing's mural, but I think it illuminated a larger opportunity — which is to modernize these bylaws to enable more fun and creative expression," Kirby-Yung told her fellow councillors.

"I think our bylaws were intended to create a level playing field for people — sign bylaws typically deal with advertising, mural bylaws typically deal with art — but they should be supporting local business in our city and they shouldn't be stifling public art and murals."

Kirby-Yung's motion says that the bylaws should allow for businesses to create artful murals that depict their offerings and services on their own premises.

She also said it was ironic that the issue came to light during a routine inspection of the brewery's pop-up patio — which was only allowed in recent years after the city looked for ways to revitalize local businesses during the pandemic.

Beer and branding

Storm Brewing said they were told the issue was with the depictions of branded materials on the mural, which pushed it into advertising territory rather than art.

"At the end of May, we received a letter from our building manager [telling us] that we required mural permits for the murals we had outside. We didn't really think anything of it. I thought it would just be doing some paperwork and giving them some money, and then it would go away," general manager Mike Crozier told CBC News last week.

"Unfortunately, when I started to figure out what permits we needed, we were told that we had to paint over our mural because it had beer and branding … So because it had those two aspects in it, it didn't follow the guidelines [for the city] murals."

The brewery posted to social media, informing patrons that it may have to paint over the well-loved mural — and unleashed a veritable storm of support from social media users.

"It's weird, because a lot of the [customers, we] haven't seen them for a few years. And they're like, 'Oh, that's been there for years — do you want us to sign a petition?'" brewery owner James Walton told CBC's On the Coast on Wednesday.

Walton said the news from council was a load off his shoulders in the busiest time of the year.

Now that he knows he doesn't have to paint it over in white, he said maybe it's time the mural — adorned with rats to represent Storm Brewing's branded mascot — got a refresh.

"It is a bit rough-looking, it's nine years old," Walton said.

"The original artist actually got a hold of me [recently]. So he said he could fix it up, so it doesn't look so ratty, as it were."