By John Allaire I t all started back in high school,” Landis recalls. “I found home brewing to be a fun hobby. It was a little bit of science, a little bit of art… and you got alcohol at the end!” These early brewing experiences started with store- bought kits. “The beer was terrible,” Landis admits. But the inspiration took root and, fast-forward 10 years, with a young family and less time on his hands, Landis joined forces with a number of likeminded friends and bought some home brewing equipment. Sharing expenses and the workload on the labour-intensive brew days worked best for the group. “We decided to start up at a size where we didn’t have to go to a bank and get a loan.” The story shifts to the Alberta government’s decision to eliminate the ‘minimum mandatory volume’ regulation for brewers, allowing people to start up a small brewery without having to commit to large volumes of product right out of the gate. “We thought that if we could start up a small hobby brewery that was able to pay for itself, why not take the plunge. So, we decided to start up at a size where we didn’t have to go to a bank and get a loan.” The partners incorporated their small business in July of 2015 and, after ploughing through the mountain of paper- work associated with producing alcohol for sale, they moved into a brewing space that October. And on Christmas Eve of that year, with the snow gently falling on Grande Prairie, the Grain Bin Brewing Company brewed their first batch of beer for sale. Being a low-volume brewery has a number of advantages, mainly in the headache-avoidance department. But a huge benefit is it allows Grain Bin to experiment and produce consumer- driven concoctions like their aforementioned DEMOCRACY! series of small-batch beers. Landis explains, “We have a lot of flexibility and freedom. When we started, we were just brewing the beers that we like to drink. We didn’t have to do the safe, commercially-viable options.” Enter the beer of the people! Landis depicts the idea as being about handing some of the controls over to the people, so to speak, rather than making all the decisions themselves. “It’s like that guy on a road trip, he’s picking all the music. Maybe some of the music is good but it’d be nice if he let the others in the car operate the iPod once in
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JANUARY 2018 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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