Golden Lion Brewing will celebrate 40 years this Canada Day

Golden Lion Brewing will celebrate 40 years this Canada Day

Sherbrooke Record · 3 days ago
by Matthew Mccully · News


Many reasons it could’ve failed, good reasons it’s still here

Michael Keegan
The Record – LJI

By rights, they shouldn’t even have the pub.

Well, they shouldn’t have had it for more than five years, anyway.

There certainly shouldn’t be a brewery.

But they’ve had their pub for over 52 years now, and on July 1, they’ll have been running the brewery they started for 40 years.
The Golden Lion Brewing Company, an outgrowth of Lennoxville’s popular Golden Lion Pub, will be celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It was the very first microbrewery in Quebec, and opened on Canada Day, 1986.

The Record sat down with Stan Groves (Jr.) on the morning of Jan. 21, in the pub next to the brewery. Groves is the namesake Stanley Groves, one of three Bishop’s University professors who founded the pub, the others being David Seale and Robert Barnett. The latter two cashed out of the business not too long thereafter, and the pub and brewery have been Groves family businesses ever since. Stan Groves (Jr.) co-owns the brewery with his brother Kevin.

So how did you start a microbrewery in 1986?

It helped if you had a pub first. You had a client base. You knew how much beer you can sell.

Then you brewed what was popular: Blonde beers, like the big beer companies – Molson, Labatt’s, O’Keefe – sold. Right?

Well, not if you were the Groves family. The elder Stan had travelled widely, including to England. And Barnett had grown up there. And they loved British beer. So, the partners decided they wanted to push back against what they thought were the big breweries bland blondes with English ales.

“Choosing the British styled brown beer was probably the worst idea,” admitted Groves the younger. “Because back then, everything was a blonde beer. Even the SAQ was not importing a lot of British beer. You could get Bass, you could get Newcastle Brown Ale. Guinness, of course, […] but nobody was drinking that stuff. It wasn’t in cans or in bottles in the stores. You had to go to the SAQ Liquor Commission to get it. There was no brown beer on the market, really, outside of those important ones.”

Groves, meanwhile, had virtually grown up in the pub, which had been fun, but he wanted to do more, so he headed west to Edmonton for a couple of years.

While he was there, the first microbrewery in Canada, Troller, opened in Horseshoe Bay, B.C., in 1982. That meant it could be done: You could start a craft beer company — or microbrewery — and go up against the big boys.

Meanwhile, the founders of the pub had been renting, and eventually bought, an abandoned Texaco station next door and its parking lot, for the pub.

They’d been using it as a storage shed for the pub. And they’d rented the rest of the space out to various businesses. It had served, variously, as a paint shop, a tanning salon, a bakery, and an ice cream shop, as Groves recalled.

So when the decision came to found the microbrewery, they had the building. The next thing a British-style brewery needed was someone who knew how to brew beer, any beer. So Groves went to England to learn.

He paid for an internship at the very successful Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire, spending seven days a week there, climbing into and cleaning out the mash tun and learning the craft of making beer from their highly acclaimed master brewer, Peter Austin. Austin’s “second-in-command” as Groves put it, was a young man about his age named Alan Pugsley. Pugsley would eventually get hired by the D.L. Geary brewery in Portland, Maine, one of the first microbreweries on the East Coast, and one of a slew of successful ones Pugsley would help establish.

Why was this important?

Besides becoming a life-long friend of Groves’, Pugsley would eventually commission – or oversee the first brew of – the Golden Lion Brewing Company.



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