Breaking Ground...Not!

So last weekend Kevin (brother-in-law and assistant brewer) and I headed up to the Golden Tap awards. It was a fantastic night, lots of hanging out with brewers, friends, and beer fanatics.

We did really well, too, which was awesome. A few more plaques to put up on the wall is awesome and humbling at the same time. After the ceremony a few of us went to C’est What for a last beer of the evening (thanks to Kevin for making sure we didn’t continue past C’est What).

While at C’est What I met a guy who seemed pretty unimpressed with the whole thing and came right out and said we might be ok for Ontario, but really hadn’t done anything groundbreaking.

Forgetting momentarily that the customer is always right, I got into a heated debate about how much ground a brewery could possibly break in a short three year time span. I held up our organic certification, our obscure beer styles (the only production-brewery making a Kolsch in this part of the world, the first to use bogmyrtle, a sticke, to name a few) and a bunch of other things; but it seemed to this guy that unless we were aging our beer inside live leprechauns and powering the brewery on the positive thoughts of benevolent magi, that we were pretty ho-hum.

During the conversation, many of the US ground breakers like DogFish Head and New Belgium Brewing came up over and over.

Which is part of the reason why it was so cool to get an email yesterday from Alex Jesse, purchasing agent for New Belgium. She was surfing the web and came across our brewery and I guess she liked what she saw. Alex offered some kind words and a VIP tour of New Belgium if we could make it up that way.

I guess if Beau’s can impress the companies that inspired us when we were getting started (and still do), we’re doing something right…groundbreaking or not.