A couple weeks ago I sat down (virtually) with Dalen Landis of Grain Bin Brewing in Grande Prairie. During the COVID crisis, he has been doing a series of informal conversations with various local personalities (including the Mayor!), people with whom he has collaborated on projects and a melange of beer people. Appropriately titled Cheers From Afar, they are relaxed and wide-ranging conversations.

The anchor of our conversation was, of course, beer. We each sampled a bottle of Grain Bin’s Welcome, a sour stout brewed with haskap berries. Welcome won gold in the Wild/Natural Fermentation Beer with Fruit category at the Alberta Beer Awards a few weeks back.

Dalen and I had an enjoyably meandering conversation, ranging from my origins as a beer guy, homebrewing, beer that have inspired us and even hard seltzer (which Dalen produces). Naturally, we also spend a fair bit of time discussing the state of the Alberta beer industry, what it takes for a brewery to succeed today, and what I think some emerging trends might be. We even offer a bit of a scoop (I think) about next year’s Alberta Beer Awards.

You can see all the nine episodes of Cheers From Afar on Grain Bin’s website, but for ease of reference I also embed the video here.

Who knows how many people will be interested in our conversation but I can say I had a fun time doing. It is a funny thing in this COVID world that a couple of guys talking via Zoom about things that would normally be topics for the pub might actually be something people want to watch.

I want to thank Dalen for inviting me to chat. It was a good way to talk about some of the things going on in my brain but which there are few outlets for communicating them these days.