Your globetrotting liquor reporter visited the thriving metropolis of Saskatoon last week, and made sure to check out the local grog while I was there.
Yes gentle reader, it is true that Saskatoon does not have beer culture to rival Portland or Dublin, but our flatland friends one province over do enjoy a thriving beer scene that puts the major cities of Alberta to shame!
As is common with many mid-size Canadian cities, there is a historical regional brewery, and Saskatoon is no exception.
The regional brewery in this case opened in 1927 as Hub City Brewing, then changed its name a few times over the next five years. Flash forward a few decades, and the brewery was acquired by O’Keefe in 1956. Faithful readers may recall that the old decommissioned Calgary Brewery in in Inglewood / Ramsay was also acquired by O’Keefe, later known as Carling O’Keefe.
The O’Keefe Brewery in Saskatoon was a powerful regional brewery for decades, but was acquired by Molson in 1989.
As is common with acquisitions in the booze industry, Molson really just wanted O’Keefe for their market share, and already had plenty of free capacity in their existing breweries, so the O’Keefe brewery was quickly slated for closure.
However, in a story that will almost certainly one day become an award-winning movie of the week, a plucky group of 16 employees at the brewery pooled their resources to purchase the entire operation from Molson. It was at this point that Great Western Brewing was born, and has continued to operate as a strong regional brewer since that day, and has even grown to distribute across the prairie provinces.
As would be expected from a large commercial brewery, the beer production is industrial-scale, so will be appealing to those who normally drink the macrobrews that beer snobs like your humble narrator peers down his nose at.
The Brewhouse and Great Western Brands dominate the drinking establishments of Saskatchewan, but here in Alberta, the most recognizable brand is Co-op Gold, the store-brand beer sold at the Co-op Liquor Stores.
Co-op Gold Lager is an unremarkable megabrew lager, made in same vein as a Labatt Blue or Budweiser. However, it is cheap like borscht, so remains popular with the price-conscious boozers.
Moving on to the craftier beer choices in Saskatoon, we cannot help but to think of Paddock Wood, which was Saskatchewan’s first microbrewery.
Paddock Wood actually started business in 1995 as a mail-order supplier of ingredient kits for home brewers, but branched out into operating their own microbrewery in 2004, and has been going strong ever since.
With distribution across several Canadian provinces, Paddock Wood can be easily found at your local booze merchant. My personal favourite has long been the Czech Mate, a punnily-named faithful example of the original Pilsener style of beer, which was invented in 1872 in the Czech town of Pilsen.
Dark beer lovers will not be able to resist Paddock Wood’s Bête Noire (Black Beast to you anglos), made in the style of an Oatmeal Stout. With plenty of bitter chocolate and toasted wood flavours from the roasted malt, this beer is truly a meal in a glass!
Saskatoon also has a few newcomers in an increasingly crowded market, not the least of which is Prairie Sun Brewing, which opened back in August 2013.
Using locally grown hops and barley, Prairie Sun is brewing a red wheat ale, a particularly tasty farmhouse ale, and a standard lager so as not to scare off the macrobrew drinkers.
I won’t go into much detail yet, as their beer is only available inside the Saskatoon city limits at the moment, but let’s hope they grow large enough to distribute to Alberta soon!
With a population of under a quarter million, Saskatoon is only one-fourth the size of Calgary, but has pretty much the same number of breweries.
If, like your humble narrator, you measure the worth of a city by the number of breweries per capita, we have some catching up to do here in Alberta, because Saskatoon is beating Calgary in the brewery department by 4 to 1.
Luckily for those of us here in Alberta, our provincial government has recently abolished some of the red tape that made it hard to open a small brewery, which will hopefully encourage a thousand craft breweries to bloom like the beautiful flowers of a hop vine. Maybe we can even catch up to Saskatoon!
