Friends share a brew
Albertans put cash, faith in Ribstone beer
Ribstone Creek doesn’t have a typical business model, or typical business owners.
EDGERTON — Don Paré and Alvin Gordon know less about beer than the average Albertan brewery owner. Heck, they might know less than the average consumer.
“We don’t know nothing about beer — this is like sticking your hand in a dark hole and hoping nothing bites you,” says Paré, president of Ribstone Creek Brewery, the newest and, so far at least, only craft brewery in the village of Edgerton (population: 317), located 250 kilometres southeast of Edmonton. “The first 60 years of our lives were too boring, so we decided to do something insane.”
An unusual attitude, certainly, but Ribstone is an unusual brewery. Visitors to the tasting room don’t sit on stools but on old riding saddles. Gordon wears a cowboy hat to trade shows. Most significantly, Ribstone eschews the heavily flavoured and highly alcoholic ales favoured by craft beer enthusiasts for a light, crisp lager that competes directly with the workhorse products of the world’s biggest beer companies.
So far, there seems to be method to their madness. Six months into its beer odyssey, Ribstone sells into about 80 accounts in Alberta, turns away new investment with a certain poignant satisfaction, and is waiting on delivery of fermentation tanks to boost its production capacity. When those are installed in the brewery, which Paré, Gordon and the company’s three other directors built for just over $1 million, they will bump the company’s books into the black, and its monthly brewing volume above the current 6,000-litre maximum.
While that’s probably more than the average beer enthusiast in Alberta drinks, it amounts to less than six per cent of the monthly production of Wild Rose, another craft brewer based in Calgary. Labatt, which brews Budweiser, Kokanee, Labatt Blue and several other beers similar to the Ribstone’s lager, makes 14,000 times more beer than Ribstone. Molson, the beer industry’s other giant, makes Canadian, Coors Light and Rickard’s Red in even greater quantities.
David versus Goliath positively understates it. Paré, Gordon and their partners know all this. They just don’t care.
“Experienced people are telling us that we can’t go head-to-head with the big boys and win,” says Paré. “But you have no choice — what do people drink?”
The choice to compete directly with the titans of Canadian brewing dates back to the brewery’s origins in 2009. Gordon and Paré, along with fellow Edgerton natives Cal Hawkes and Chris Fraser, were trying to figure out a use for an old farm equipment store that Gordon owned.
Fraser, now a lawyer in Kelowna, suggested they look into a brewery. The group commissioned a professional survey of consumer beer preferences in eastern Alberta, and learned that the ranchers, rodeo riders and rig hands in the area loved lager.
Convinced this was the way to bring some sparkle back to their hometown, they started looking into the specifics of starting a brewery, handicapped only by their ignorance of the world of beer. Eventually, one prospective supplier noticed they seemed a bit green, and recommended they get in touch with a man named David Beardsell.
He is a graduate of brewing science programs in Munich and London, England, and is a household name in the world of Canadian craft beer. The former CEO of Bear Brewing, current proprietor of the Noble Pig brew pub in Kamloops, and mind behind the Rhino Ale of Earls Restaurants, Beardsell knows the mechanics of producing beer in Western Canada inside and out. He guided the group through construction of a modern brewery and became the company’s fifth director.
Beardsell’s inclusion changed the mind of one of Alberta’s savviest suds scholars about Ribstone’s prospects.
“I met them about a year ago when they were getting up and running, and thought, ‘Wow, you guys don’t know anything about beer,’ ” says Jason Foster, whose blog, onbeer. org, is a respected voice on the topic in Alberta. “Then they made one move that I think can make the difference for them: They brought in David Beardsell as a partner.”
Ribstone’s lager, Foster points out, tastes just as good as Molson Canadian or Bud Light, if not better, and small-town pride could open up a lot of accounts in eastern Alberta. The real test will come when the brewery attracts the attention of Molson and Labatt.
“Right now, they’re a tiny, insignificant speck,” Foster says. “The day the sales guys from Molson and Labatt turn their heads, that’s when the challenge will come. That will all depend on how solidly they’ve built their business, how deep of a connection they’ve made with people.”
In the meantime, there are other challenges. Ribstone faces the least-favourable regulatory environment in the country. Jim Pettinger, ersatz spokesperson for the Alberta Small Brewers Association, an industry group of 11 of the province’s tiniest beer makers, points out that Alberta’s privatized liquor market is unique among Canada’s four most populous provinces, and has far fewer breweries than Quebec, Ontario or B.C.
As a result, brewers outside Alberta can export their beer here easily, which boosts competition for space in retail stores and bars. But because market access in every other province is controlled by a provincial liquor board, a brewer in Alberta hankering to ship beer outside the border faces a bevy of challenges. These are both bureaucratic and logistical, since many provincial liquor boards require any supplier be able to reach the entire province. Ribstone, located minutes from the Saskatchewan border, can’t sell beer in Saskatoon until they can also ship it to Regina, Yorkton and Prince Albert — and convince Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority to carry their lager.
Pettinger and the Brewers Association would like to see the rest of Canada break down beer barriers and open up their borders. For now, they’re pushing for the provincial government to reform brewery taxation. The Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission, for its part, has no plans to restrict liquor imports. “We’ve chosen to have an open market,” says AGLC spokesperson Angelle Sasseville. “We’re making an environment where businesses can do what they want.”
Paré, Gordon and company will indeed keep doing what they want, when and where they want. The Ribstone directors raised well over the $1 million needed for the brewery, and that stockpile could help finance expansion.
“There was a ton of work, but we haven’t found any big obstacles that we didn’t anticipate,” Gordon says. “The beer’s been selling itself.
“If we knew it was going to be this easy, we’d have done it earlier.”