Last week Big Rock announced (and reported on Canadian Beer News over the weekend) that Ed McNally has stepped down as CEO of the company he founded in 1985. I suspect that “stepping  down” in this case is a euphemism for “retiring”, as Mr. McNally is getting up in years.

I wanted to briefly comment on this news, as I believe it is significant. I think this week we should all raise a pint glass to Mr. McNally, for beer drinkers in western Canada owe him a great debt. He was the prairies first craft brewing pioneer, following quickly after Granville Island. And there can be no denying that he turned the Alberta beer world upside down. Not only was his beer not a lager, it was brown, for goodness sakes! What kind of craziness was that.

It is easy for us today, awash in great local craft beer and among the best import selection anywhere, to dismiss the profound significance of what McNally and Big Rock did in the 1980s. Sure, he got remarkably lucky with Calgary hosting the winter Olympics and the city witnessed a influx of tourists from much more beer-savvy locations and his beer being the only one that wasn’t yellow and boring. But isn’t luck part of business acumen, too?

In the past decade, Big Rock has allowed themselves to get passed by. They chose to focus on expanding their distribution across Canada (for example, I found it easier to get Big Rock in Halifax than many Quebec breweries), rather than staying on the cutting edge of craft brewing. As a result the (now not so) young upstarts surpassed Big Rock for quality and adventurousness. In the last year or two, Big Rock has been trying to recapture some of that playful experimentation that makes craft brewers great with their Brewmaster’s Choice line. The results, so far, have been quite mixed, demonstrating how much ground they have to make up on that front.

Even with their less-than-stellar track record in recent years, I still find that I can rely on Trad when attending venues with little else to offer. Hell, I live off the stuff during the Edmonton Folk Festival every year. So, it may be easy for us to point to Half Pints, Yukon, Alley Kat, Wild Rose, Paddock Wood and others and find Big Rock lacking. But, we must acknowledge they blazed the trail for the fine breweries that have come since..

The current reality should not cloud us from recognizing McNally’s beer achievements. Nor should his politics, if I am to be entirely honest with myself. McNally and I differ significantly politically – his being of the right-wing, anti-union type. I still believe that Big Rock’s lowest point was when it decided, at the height of the 1990s cutbacks, to brew a special beer for the Conservative Party convention called Kleineken.It felt quite insulting to me (and thousands of other Albertans) at the time.

But for this week I am prepared to put politics aside and give Ed McNally a richly deserved “cheers!”, as we honour a man who helped shape Alberta’s beer scene. However, next week it is back to chastising him for his most unpalatable politics – I have a reputation to uphold, after all.