The Great Western Brewery celebrated 35 years in operation at the end of March, and it was a particularly special anniversary for the Great Western team.
“It’s made right here in Saskatoon and it’s owned by folks that live here in the province as well. So I think those are important factors that have helped our success over the last few years,” said Michael Brennan, president & CEO of Great Western Brewing Company.
The company has been producing beer across Saskatchewan and the rest of Canada since sixteen friends decided to purchase a brewery, which is how the company’s flagship product Original 16 got it name.
Greg Kitz was one of those 16 friends.
“This was our baby. So we were there at the conception, we were there at the birth, the growing up, the terrible twos. As it matured, it was a little rocky in the teens, then it turned 21 and Original 16 was launched,” Kitz said.
While Kitz is now retired, he still enjoys popping in and seeing the progress of his life’s work.
“It’s like saying goodbye to your kids. They’re off and doing things, and you don’t have much contact with them anymore. But we still have that emotional tie to this place. We think about it every day,” Kitz said.
Brennan has been at the helm for the past seven years, and he says the company has evolved quite a bit in that time.
“The biggest change you can actually see, just on the corner of Queen Street and Second Avenue, where we are currently building a new addition that will allow us to keep brewing in this province for the next hundred years,” Brennan said.
The brewery itself is nearly a century old. It was built in 1927 by the Hub City Brewing Company, and by 1932 it was operating as Drewry’s Limited.
A 1945 archival photo from the Saskatoon Public Library’s local history department reveals a glimpse of how the bottling line looked in the early days of the brewery. A curator’s note with the photo says the capacity at the time was 72 bottles per minute.
In 1956, the brewery was acquired and operated as O’Keefe Brewing until 1989, when a merger between Molson and Carling threatened to force a closure at the plant.
“This merger would mean the end of the brewery in Saskatoon and the loss of jobs for its 40 employees,” Great Western says in its retelling of the founding myth.
Instead, 16 of those employees pooled their money and bought the brewery, founding the Great Western Brewing Company. The rest, as they say, is history.
Brennan told CTV News the company considered other locations for its latest development, but decided it was best to expand the original downtown site.
“We felt it’s important that it stays in this location … right downtown Saskatoon, and continue to thrive here, where we started everything,” Brennan said.
This additional brewery is something Kitz is particularly excited to see come to fruition.
“I am super stoked and excited to be able to see it in operation and see what it can actually do. Just the numbers on it as to efficiency and how easy it would be to work,” Kitz said.
Kitz credited much of the company’s success to the adaptability of the Great Western team.
“We were very adaptable to change. And since then, there’s been a lot of change; new machinery. We brought in the first canning in Saskatchewan, back in 1990 and that’s changed as well. We no longer do any bottling, which is what was our lifeblood, 40 years ago,” Kitz said.
But some things never change. While the operations look quite different now than they did 35 years ago, the heart of the business has remained the same.
“We have the great benefit of one of the key ingredients in beer is barley. And we happened to be in the barley belt. So we produce some of the best barley in the world, and we get to use it in our beers,” Brennan said.
While the Great Western team is excited to celebrate the anniversary, they are holding off the festivities until their grand opening of the new brewery in October.
