Building a Brand: From Regional Beginnings to National Recognition

Our very first batch of beer won the award for best beer at the festival at the 2006 golden cap awards in Toronto which kind of gave us a little bit of a pedigree right out of the gate and we just started selling to one customer at a time we started off with 7 restaurants that carried our beer and my friend Jamie and my brother Phil were our 2 sales reps at the time and it pretty much seemed that every week they'd come back with 1 new restaurant and you know week by week and month by month we kind of built that up eventually we sold enough beer that we were able to get some very modest bottling equipment and that got us selling into the LCBO and from there we grew and started selling them into the beer store and now we're pretty much right across the province of Ontario we've expanded pretty dramatically into Quebec and we've sold a little bit of beer now into the rest of the country and have expanded a little bit South into the United States as well. We've won well over 100 awards for our beer we won numerous awards for our business practices and our ethics and a whole pile of awards for marketing and design as well we're a certified B Corp so we're a company that exists not purely for the profit of shareholders, but we treat the environment and our community as legitimate stakeholders of our business and we're having a lot of fun and making a lot of really fun interesting beers too.