First, just a note to say we are all thinking of the people being affected by the floods in Gatineau and Ottawa. It’s an incredible thing, this Mother Nature, where you can put in 120 per cent in effort and still feel defenseless. In beer making, I would argue that water is the most essential ingredient – without it, there is no product. And we are seeing recent pictures and videos just how powerful water truly is. For us, our brewery is just on the other side of the highway from Petrie Island, which has completely disappeared under the Ottawa River, so we are largely unaffected. But many friends are affected, from Rockland to Constance Bay, so if you hear...

We’ve been meaning to do a post about the brewery, but even with three of us holding down our full-time gigs AND trying to start a new business, it’s amazing how quickly time gets away from you. The idea was to document our journey in a blog-type format, in part to keep a journal of sorts so that we can look back in several years’ time and laugh over pints at the struggle, the nonsense, red tape, jumping hoops and a lot of learning on the fly. The other reason was to give up-and-coming would-be breweries a glimpse of how we got started and help them avoid some of the issues and pitfalls we encountered, and possibly give them a...