Cochrane's own Half Hitch Brewery recently snagged a 'gold' for the Canadian Cereal Ale at the Alberta Beer Awards.

Chris Heier, President of Half Hitch Brewing Company, shares the new category was created with the background of determining what could be considered the Canadian style beer. "It was a brand new category style brought forward for this competition with the expectation to take the particular style guideline and make it part of an internationally known official style."

The Canadian Cereal Ale has nothing to do with a brew in the morning. "It had to make use of all the primary cereal grains that we grow in our country. A requirement for creating a Canadian ale is that you had to have not just barley, water, hops and yeast, but grainwise you had to have barley, wheat, rye and oat. So your beer had to contain all those cereal grains and had to be anywhere from 5.5-6.5% alcohol and be very malt-forward as well."

The development style guideline took input from a number of brewers including Half Hitch, Cold Garden, Grizzly Paw, Toolshed, Wildrose, Village and others to create the concept of what a Canadian style beer should be defined as. "It is the first time that beer style has been judged and we are the first brewery to actually be given a gold medal award against that beer style, so it gives us a distinct opportunity if we play our cards right to actually be the benchmark for that style with the Papa Bear Prairie Ale."

There were roughly 20 categories, 50 other breweries, and over 300 different beers represented at the Alberta Beer Awards, with Half Hitch competing in four. While only reserving one gold medal win, Heier shares the competition among great Alberta beers is pretty tough. "While we believe we're producing some great beer we are up against some absolutely awesome beers as well."

Half Hitch will continue to promote other Alberta craft beers as being world class and doesn't consider the influx of breweries a threat at all. "Right now there is a lot of market opportunity in the more the merrier approach. 

A recent announcement at the Alberta Small Brewers Annual General meeting shared that Northlands in Edmonton will most likely not renew their contract with Labatts which is a big win for Alberta producers. "So the first time ever for K-Days they are only going to have Alberta made craft beer available during that festival, they are not going to have Labatts or Budweiser. It will all be 100% Alberta produced craft beer, things like that would have never been able to happen without the critical mass of Alberta craft brewers banding together."

Heier would love to see all large-scale events and festivals province-wide support Alberta produced beer and feels it may just be a matter of time. "The hope is to see that change and I think when we see a lot more small brewers pop up that is going to happen. When we look at the States side, for instance, they have over 6000 breweries  and what we're starting to see is your top ten regional producing breweries are starting to shrink but everyone outside of that is still growing."

With the explosion of the Alberta beer market, Heier feels our province could soon be looked at as the new beer mecca. "There is a lot of potential in the market, we foresee that Alberta could be the next Oregon or Colorado."

This was the first time the Alberta Brew Awards have been hosted as part of the second annual Alberta Small Brewers Conference. Besides being able to enjoy a pint of Papa Bear Prairie Ale at Half Hitch you will soon find it on the shelves at your favourite liquor store as well.