Chapter 4

     In anticipation of being offered the chance to open a brewpub in Regina I started preparations. I attended meetings of the Craft Brewers Association. The first was in Milwaukee. Less than 200 people attended, but it was there that I met Brad McQuhae, who at the time was the brewer at Spinnakers in Victoria and who continues to be an important contact for us in the industry. Attendance at craft brewing meetings now exceed 3000.

     I sought business advice on starting a brewpub from a Regina business consultant and met with him several times. When the Saskatchewan government did eventually start working on brewpub regulations, that same consultant was engaged to advise the provincial government with regard the creation of new brewpub regulations.

     I eagerly awaited the announcement of the regulations, while looking for opportunities to raise the financing. Reality descended and I learned that it would take a lot more money than I had hoped, and had available, to start up a serious business.

     Rumours circulated about the expected content of the new regulations. I was out of the province for two weeks attending scientific conferences. I returned and was told that the new regulations would contain a provision that would allow brewpubs to join with hotels in operating cold beer stores. At first I was delighted. Our brewpub would have a secondary source of income.

     Then I learned that the beer to be sold in these brewpub beer stores was conventional mass market beer, not the brewpub’s own beer. At first I didn’t believe it. It made no sense that a business dedicated to the sale and promotion of high quality serious beer would want to sully its image by being associated with “industrial beer”, as I came to label the mass-market North American product. It became clear that in my conversations with the consultant I had not adequately conveyed the idea that brewpub and microbreweries were popular because they offered an alternative to the blandness and sameness of industrial beer.

     In its first term the conservative government had promoted a number of business initiatives, contrary to conventional conservative ideas about the direct involvement of governments in business, and most of their initiatives had been failures. The newly elected government wanted to give brewpubs a “leg up” by cutting them a share of the cold-beer market. I tried to explain that giving a brewpub a license to sell industrial beer was the equivalent to giving an anti-abortion group a license to operate an abortion clinic to raise money for its lobby efforts. And anyway, North American industrial beer was an abortion to anyone who had become accustomed to drinking the more full-flavoured beers available in most of continental Europe.

     I made no headway.

     However, I suddenly started to receive phone calls from others with a new interest in the brewpub concept. Meetings were arranged. The conversations went something like:

Caller: “We’re interested in the new regulations that allow brewpubs in Saskatchewan and we hear that you know something about brewpubs.”
BR: “Yes”
Caller: “Okay, we could use some help. We want to set up the bar and the off-sale, and we would like for you to join us and help us set up the brewery.”
(To the person not from the prairie region of Canada or the northern tier states, “off-sale” is the local phrase for “retail beer store”, beer sold for consumption off premise.”)
BR: “And what do you have in mind for a brewery?”
Caller: “We’ve already agreed to purchase a malt extract system.”
BR: “But malt-extract systems produce poor quality beer and the ingredient cost is high. The industry has already established that full-mash breweries are much better investments.”
Caller: “That’s okay. We don’t intend to sell much beer. We see the off-sale as the source of profit!”

     I declined to participate.

     The hotels in Saskatchewan held the monopoly on the sale of cold beer, outside the monopoly of the government liquor stores for warm beer sales. The hotels would not give up their control without a fight. A fierce lobby against the whole concept of brewpubs was launched by the Saskatchewan Hotel Association. A compromise was reached. Only four-brewpub “endorsements” would be allowed, with two each in Regina and Saskatoon. Those who wanted those endorsements would compete for them.

     I joined the fray.

     I lost.

     In retrospect two things became obvious.
The first four brewpubs made token attempts to produce drinkable beer, but on average their brewers did not have the right backgrounds to be able to learn to make brewpub quality beer and they brewed beer that few drank. The owners used the brewpub regulations to operate lounges and beer stores. The alternative was to build a hotel to gain access to the same privileges and a small brewery was cheaper than hotel rooms. The hotels were justified in their opposition to the introduction of brewpub regulations.

     From our perspective, the ersatz brewpubs gave the whole concept of brewpub a bad reputation in Saskatchewan, and we’re still dealing with that bad reputation 20 years later.

     Secondly, if we had been given a brewpub “endorsement” then, we would have almost certainly failed. When we did get to proceed with the development of the Bushwakker five years later, we just made it through the first year. We were short on business knowledge and experience. Without what we learned in those five intervening years we would not have had enough knowledge to survive the first year.