Barley Mowat 

UPDATE: Heard from a brewer, who checked my bullshit hectolitre numbers and concluded they were, indeed, bullshit. He also kindly gave me some guidance and, as such, I have update the hL column to try and be a little more accurate. It’s still all guesswork, though.

Every year I dig through the dumpsters outside the BC LDB’s corporate offices for a few days, then spend a couple of months painstakingly taping their shredded financial reports back together to bring you my Annual BC Brewing Financial Report. It’s a long, boring job, but someone has to do it.

Okay, fine. As a public company, they post it here, and I develop a series of scripts to parse out the data and do all the math for me. It takes, like, 30 minutes tops. Happy now?

So here’s the juice, folks. Read away. Fun tidbits: some breweries had banner years, Bomber chief amoung them. Dead Frog, on the other hand, might be doing poorly… (or they might be contracting excess brewing capacity out more and more). Also, there are a LOT of new breweries. For any brewery that hadn’t been open 12 months as of March 2015 their numbers will be lower than one might expect since they didn’t sell 12 months of beer when this report was written. Basically, be carefully before reading too much into this folks.

Disclaimer about hectolitres calculations from last year:
Below I’ve tabulated the 2014 2015 financials for each brewery that I can identify in the report, along with their 2014 numbers, and an approximate guess for beer production in hectolitres. I’m using a soft divisor to get from raw income to production stats, based on my knowledge of the brewery and their market. For instance, an all-draft company will have a lower income per hL because kegs sell for less per hL than bottles.

Lastly, note that these are sales to the LDB which only concerns itself with liquor sales in British Columbia. Companies like Parallel 49 or Central City, who ship a lot of product across the border, will produce a lot more beer than is reported here.

The degree to which these hectolitre calculations should be trusted is reflected by how easily I just changed them out: don’t trust them. These are very approximate numbers only, and should only be used for rough relative comparisons.

All columns are sortable. Just click.

Disclaimers (repeated from 2013, 2014):

• Because of the craziness of shadow brands and contract brewing, it’s hard to split out some of these numbers. OK Spring, in particular, also produces Sleeman locally, and those sales are blended in.
• Some breweries are missing, including Coal Harbour and others. I have no idea why. They are likely running under either a numbered company or a name I don’t recognize.
• I have excluded Labatt’s (Kokanee) simply because it would be impossible to separate out beer produced in-province from imports.
• Likewise, I have skipped Mark Anthony Group (Turning Point/Stanley Park) because most of their money comes from wine (Mission Hill)