Well, it took far too long, but I finally got into print a full accounting of my Canada’s beer personality series. In Planet S Magazine I  have been running a series about how each of Canada’s regions display unique personalities, linked to their area’s history, politics and culture. The last remaining piece came out last week – the Prairies (read this post for an overview of the other regions).

You can read the final installment here.

In a way the Prairies – despite being the region I know best – are the hardest region to classify. In part because it is also the region with the fewest breweries (only 14), with most of those being in Alberta. But also, there is simply less of a trend to discern. There is simply an eclecticism to brewing patterns in the west.

I could go two ways with this finding. First there are really three-sub personalities in each province. This makes some sense given that the settlement history, culture and (by no small measure) politics of each province diverge. However, this theory hits the shoals of the hard reality of too small a sample size. It is hard to generalize about beer sub-personalities when two of the provinces have two breweries each, and arguably a single craft brewer each.

But also I think the more fitting theory is that hard-to-pin-down diversity IS the personality. The prairies are generally known for hardy, rugged pioneers, who did what they had to do to survive, break the land and build communities. That hardiness may have led to a cooperative communalism in Saskatchewan, a thorough-going individualism in Alberta and a pragmatic survivalism in Manitoba, but it all comes from a common history. And so maybe that pioneering, find-your-own-way spirit extends to the region’s brewers. Each has found an unoccupied niche for its products. Maybe that is necessary if you are this small.

One thing I am pretty clear is that the small size of the brewing community here is by no means a marker of their quality. I have drank beer in and from every region in Canada, and can safely say this treatise on beer personalities is not about one region’s beer being “better” than another, but simply about trying to capture the subtle differences.

A final post-script: I realize this tour of Canada has left out our good friends in Yukon. Alas, being the only brewer in the vast north does creating  the problem of preventing me from talking about a beer personality of the North, as I would simply be talking about the personality of Yukon Brewing. The day a second brewery opens north of 60, I promise to amend my theory.