We are Saskatchewan's first craft (or micro) brewery. These terms are used interchangeably by most people, but microbreweries typically produce less than 1.5 million litres of beer annually. Craft breweries might base that designation on the size of the brewery equipment. In this case a kettle size of 50 to 80 barrels is considered the largest system that still allows for a 'hands-on' quality control. Our kettle size is 10 barrels. We now have 14,000L of fermentation capacity.

Craft beer is typically unpasteurized and not micro-filtered. These are two techniques for extending the shelf-life of unrefrigerated beer. All large breweries do one or both of these treatments to their beer. Craft brewers want to offer beer in its purest form, not cooked in a pasteurization tunnel and not stripped of flavour and mouthfeel by microfilters. Please store our beer in a cool place, ideally under 4C, but please do not drink it that cold. Most of our beers will peak for flavour in the 8C to 10C range.

We also use premium oxygen barrier crown caps on our bottles. The caps may not look different, but regular crown caps bleed oxygen into the bottles (CO2 pressure inside the bottle does not stop this process), and studies have shown that normal caps will lead to oxygen damage of beer in 6 months. Our barrier caps provide protection for several years, but we hope that most of our beers will be consumed before that long. Our Imperial stouts and barley wines, however, which improve with 3 to 5 years of storage, will show the real power of these caps.

Shelf-life is a variable that we have no control over, once the beer leaves our brewery. We use the finest "double pre-evacuation" counter pressure bottle filing system, and oxygen barrier crowns, and dark amber glass to reduce ultraviolet light damage. But our craft is not pasteurized which means it is to some degree open to biological changes. The warmer the storage temperature, the more rapidly the beer may move away from what we had intended.

We do not declare a "best before" date as such a date needs to anticipate the storage conditions. Stores which offer cold storage for our product will have great shelf-life, but stores which hold our beer at rom temperature will have less. We mark our 6 pk boxes with a date of production stamp, and hope that you can assess the potential quality based on the store. We hope that our 5% beers will be fine for 3 months at room temperature, while they should be good for a year or more when stored below 4C. Our strong beers 7% and 8.5% are protected more by the alcohol and elevated hop levels and probably triple their shelf-life. But when storage temperatures rise, it does become hard to promise quality.