Chorney-Booth: Ol’ Beautiful pumps up the volume with its new OB Sound Room concept​on February 13, 2025 at 1:30 pm

Food and beverage professionals constantly stun me with their unbelievable capacity for creativity. The best restaurateurs and bar owners are often masters of problem-solving, finding new opportunities in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. This past summer, the team at Ol’ Beautiful Brewing Company took on one of the most impossible challenges any business owner could face when their Ramsay taproom burned to the ground, leaving the beer brand without a home in which to serve its (outstandingly delicious) brews.

If I can say Ol’ Beautiful was lucky in any way after that devastating fire, it’s only because the company has a separate brewing facility at a different location, allowing them to continue production to get their beer into liquor stores and taps at other bars and restaurants. But Ol’ Beautiful, like so many of Calgary’s best craft breweries, is a social beast and its ownership felt the need to have a physical space to represent their product. The result is a new venue called the OB Sound Room, a small Japanese-style “listening room” nestled below Calcutta Cricket Club in the space that formerly hosted the Tea House.

First things first: this is not a replacement for the destroyed taproom. That community hub will rise again, though it’s a complicated process and will take some time and patience. The Ol’ Beautiful team intentionally kept the brewery’s full name out of the new bar, which is substantially smaller and more subdued than the classic taproom.

“Some people have asked ‘Where is the patio?’ Or where are the slushies, the dogs and the strollers they saw at the taproom,” says Chris Carroll, one of Ol’ Beautiful’s co-owners. “That’s why we branded it very differently. It’s not called the Ol’ Beautiful taproom. It’s the Sound Room. It’s a new bar.”

The Sound Room isn’t just unlike the old Ol’ Beautiful taproom, it’s unlike any other bar in Calgary. While selling beer is a priority, the main draw is the room itself, an acoustically superior 60-seat lounge filled with cozy couch seating and low tables, shelves of vinyl records and tastefully retro decor, all designed by the local masters of this kind of thing, Way of Normal. The walls are covered with acoustic panelling and the ceilings with foam to ensure the bar’s high-end speakers and state-of-the-art turntable get their due without inhibiting conversation among guests. This is a vinyl-only situation — Carroll and his colleagues populated the shelf behind the bar with a selection of records, with an emphasis on jazz, electronic and soul music.