When Jake Saunders, the co-owner of Trailway Brewing Co. in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, spoke with Spotlight on Business from his family-operated brewery on Main Street in late August, he admitted to me that he was currently out of his element. “You’d think that it’d be fairly easy to name a new beer, David,” he laughed as I could hear him walk past the new on-site canning line I’d just seen at Facebook.com/trailwaybrewing. “We take a lot of time naming our beers. We do a lot of one-off beers and when a name sticks to those, we go with it; but this is a new core beer we’ve just brewed that we’re going to be premiering this winter. We’re going to be running this beer all winter long and we want to make sure that the name fits the brand and that kind of creative process isn’t my strong suit.” I quickly found out that this once amateur home brewer in this Maine-side Canadian province specializes in hoppy, hazy, aromatic, flavourful American-style ales where the ingredients largely inform the name. “Hu Jon Hops American IPA, Dunder Aussie Hop Pale Ale, Luster Session Ale, Rype Rye Pale Ale – those are our four core beers that do twelve months out of the year. We also have two summer brews and then at the end of September, the beginning of October, we’ll rotate into the two winter brews. The idea is that we always have six on the go plus one weekly special – but like I said, they take a lot of time to name.”
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • SEPTEMBER 2017
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