VANKLEEK HILL, ON – Following several years of being one of the most popular out-of-province breweries at the influential Mondial de la Bière festival, Beau’s All Natural Brewing has confirmed that it will be expanding into the Quebec retail market in early 2015.
In an interview with the Montreal Gazette, Beau’s co-founder Steve Beauchesne explains that the brewery has been eyeing this expansion for several years, but scrapped earlier plans to work with a third party importer as it would have limited the sales of Beau’s brands to the government-owned SAQ retail chain. This led to a different approach, as the paper reports:
He discarded the notion of using an importer and buckled down, hiring a consultant friend to help the brewery’s owners do the importing themselves. It certainly wasn’t cheap — Beauchesne expects the consultant fees to ring up to about $30,000 for the Quebec project and other unrelated ones. The process involves incorporating in Quebec, brokering a deal with Recyc-Québec, building a distribution warehouse in the province and then at least six months of waiting.
Assuming all of these steps go smoothly, Beau’s expects to start selling its beer in Quebec starting in February 2015.