Regular followers of this website will know that I was and am again the CBC Edmonton RadioActive beer columnist. Following my hiatus I picked my columns back up in early June.

Why am I telling you almost two months later? Well because my good friends at CBC are notoriously slow and uneven about posting my columns online. I am not criticizing them. They have very busy and demanding jobs and posting my little bi-weekly column is hardly on the top of their to-do list. However they do get them up when they can.

All this is to say the first couple recently went up.

I started with a two-part series looking at the breweries in the Edmonton area that opened while I was on my 18-month hiatus. Edmonton has been slower than Calgary in the craft beer boom, but it is slowly picking up steam. Seven breweries opened in the time I was gone.

In the first part I told the stories of Analog Brewing, Omen Brewing, and Sea Change Brewing. For each brewery I briefly highlight their story and try to summarize their business plan and approach to beer. We cap it with an on-air tasting of Sea Change’s The Wolf Pale Ale. You can find part one here.

The second part scooped up the remaining breweries in the area, including SYC Brewing, Endeavour Brewing, Rural Routes Brewing and Odd Company Brewing (at the time the youngest brewery). You can listen to part two here. Again, I walk through their story and describe the beer. In this column we taste Endeavour’s Express ESB.

My overall observation of the new breweries is how eclectic the business models are, ranging from a full-scale restaurant with a brewery attached to a tap room-only offering. The beer ranged from experimental and boundary pushing to classic and accessible. The process has led me to start thinking about brewery business models and what that says about the industry. I hope to write up something more extensive in the coming weeks on that.

In the meantime, enjoy listening to a couple of my CBC columns that actually made it online!