Don’t expect to see either of Chatham-Kent’s craft breweries venture into the province’s buck-a-beer pricing.
The Doug Ford government is lowering the price floor on what a bottle of beer can be sold for in the province, to $1 from $1.25 on Aug. 27, but the majority of breweries of all sizes don’t appear to be interested.
Rick Nicholls, MPP for Chatham-Kent Leamington and a member of the Ford government, said a couple of craft breweries plan to sell their product for $1.
“It’s just to increase competition,” he said of the government decision to lower the price point. “It’s completely voluntary.”
Nicholls said the buck-a-beer initiative has no government money going into it.
“It’s purely up to the brewers.”
Nancy Cowan, one of the owners of Bayside Brewing Company, said she’s reviewed the government’s announcement, but said her company won’t take part.
“If they’re holding future tax increases, that would be helpful to the industry. We’ve been experiencing three cents per litre increases every March and every November for the past several years,” she said. “That’s more than keeping pace with inflation.”
Colin Chrysler, one of the founding members of Sons of Kent Brewing Company, said the $1 price point is of no interest to them.
“We’re a community driven brewery. We’re not trying to race to the bottom,” he said. “It was never our business model.”
“As a craft brewer, it doesn’t relate to us at all,” he added. “We focus on supporting local, and use high quality ingredients.”
Selecting ingredients for the local breweries leads to higher costs than large-scale brewers.
“We don’t have the same options buying our ingredients as the large corporations,” Cowan said.
Chrysler said Sons of Kent hunt out local ingredients whenever possible.
Cowan and Chrysler both pointed to the increase in tariffs on importing aluminum, which is used to can their beers, as a pricing concern.
“All of our cans went up by 10 per cent,” Cowan said.
Bayside has its own canning facility in Charing Cross.
“The aluminum tariffs aren’t helping anybody,” Chrysler added.
He doesn’t begrudge a brewery for selling its beer for $1, however.
“The previous low was $1.25 and no breweries were participating,” he said.
