Certification Audit, Jazzfest fun, Oktoberfest planning, SAQ conversations, Canada Day, VCI Grad

We had our annual organic certification audit today. There is an annual audit and then random unnanounced inspections throughout the year. Today went pretty smoothly, we'd had a delegation from the EU and CFIA do a mock inspection a month earlier, so we were pretty prepared. Still makes for a stressful morning, but its a great feeling once the inspection is complete.

Last night we took our staff out to see the final night of Jazzfest as a group. It was a lot of fun and a really nice way to say thanks to everybody for putting in the extra hours over the summer. This is our 3rd time doing Jazzfest, and it was the first time we could get out as a group and take it in. And Sharon Jones was phenomenal.

We had a townhall meeting on Monday night to offer up opportunities for our town to benefit from our Oktoberfest celebration. We're encouraging the whole town to get in on the fun and make it really special for our guests, while letting them receive some benefit from all these tourists coming in. It was a good meeting with lots of interest, and I'm hoping we can get a number of satellite events happening this year.

We had a really interesting conversation on Tuesday with a Quebec beer importer. They had tried our beer at Mondail and would like to represent us in La Belle Province (mmm...steamies). It is a difficult process, so don't expect anything happening overnight, but I would really love to be able to sell into the Quebec area.

Canada Day was great. I spent the day with my family, took the girls to the L'orignal park for fun stuff there and then over to the Vankleek Hill celebration where my daughters danced up a storm and then watched the fireworks. (they had Beau's on tap there, too, so life was good).

On Saturday, Vankleek Hill's highschool had its final reunion before the old school is torn down. It made for a memorable night of visiting old friends - although, truth be told, I've kept in touch with many of my highschool friends, so there were only a few of those "Holy crap, I didn't recognize you, its been wayyyy too long" moments.

All in all, another busy, awesome week.

Happy Birthday to Beau's (oh yeah, and Canada, too!)

Hooray!

Beau's turns 4 years old today. Four years ago, Pete from the Black Tomato drove his tractor in from the country and parked it in front of his restaurant to help us celebrate as we passed out samples from our first ever batch of beer. The Manx was closed on Canada Day, so we couldn't go there until the next day, but we did make it out to both Clocktowers for more sampling.

We learned that day that Canada Day is more of a celebrate being Canadian day than a "listen to me tell you about this new beer" day, so ever since we've been pretty low key about celebrating, but a year later Ron Eade made us the feature in his annual Ode to Ale feature and it seems ever since the Citizen has helped us celebrate...I can't find the link to our first Ode to Ale on the Citizen page, but
see year 2

and this year

and this, too (this year's ode is actually about a new brewery in the area, but its nice to see us get a couple mentions, too).

So hooray and thanks to the Ottawa Citizen for once again helping us celebrate our birthday! I'm going to drink a LugTread now.