Producers can enter the FieldBrew contest until November 15
A contest is giving Canadian farmers a chance to brew their own beer.
Bayer and Origin Brewing & Malting Co., out of Strathmore, Alta., have teamed up for the FieldBrew contest.
The contest is open to farmers from B.C. to Ontario who are at least 19 years old.
Participants can earn entries by engaging with FieldView.
Using the Field Region Report tool, for example, earns a producer two entries into the contest.
This tool allows farmers to draw a region and see elements like seed product, soil type, elevation and population.
And purchasing a premium service gives a farmer three entries into the FieldBrew contest.
This option provides farmers with additional support, said Jamie Mills, digital account and campaign lead with Bayer CropScience.
“One of them would be coming out and installing hardware into the equipment,” he told Farms.com. “Another one is when your data comes in, because you can pull information from any type of equipment and we have compatibility across a bunch of different platforms, sometimes the information doesn’t come in quite exactly. One of the options there is a data cleanup package where we’ll actually go in and do that for you.”
Farmers can also earn one entry by sharing the contest on social media using the hashtag #FieldBrewContest.
Bayer came up with the idea for the contest after research revealed the sense of community is important among farmers.
“We really wanted to tap into that,” Mills said. “Sharing a beer with your friends and neighbours after a long, hard day of work and getting to share different stories and share experiences that you have. Agriculture is a really unique community in itself, and we wanted to make sure we continue to support that.”
Farmers have until Nov. 15 to enter the contest.
Once the winner is selected, he or she will travel to Origin’s brewery in Alberta to create the FieldBrew beer alongside Sterling Hilton, president of Origin Malting & Brewing.
A fifth-generation farmer himself, partnering in this contest was an easy decision.
“Agriculture in Western Canada is so important for the country, and anything we can do to help promote agriculture and support the companies within agriculture, we’re going to try our best to make it happen,” he told Farms.com.
The winning farmer won’t just be visiting the facility. They’ll be involved in the brewing process too, Hilton said.
“We want some kind of input from them as to what they would like to see,” he said. “So, we’ll do some different taste tests, and we’ll come up with a style of beer the winner wants to work towards. If they want to do a light lager, we can do that. If they want to a darker beer with a little more body to it, we can do that.”
The guest brewer will also get to operate some of the brewing equipment.
It’ll require some elbow grease, Hilton said.
“At the brew house, it’s not quite as mechanized as some of the new equipment that we’d use on the farm,” he said. “So, they’ll get to stir the mash and be around for that whole process. It takes a full day to make before it gets transferred into tanks, where it’ll sit anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month, depending on the style of beer we’re going for.”
It won’t only be the contents of the can that highlights Canadian ag.
The outside of it will too.
The winning farmer will have his or her farm recognized on the front of FieldBrew cans.
“For the winner of this contest to have something that where they've helped with the label, they've helped brew the beer that they can hand out to their neighbours and their family. I think there's always a bit of pride in that, right?” Hilton said.
Once the beer is brewed it will be available for sale on Origin’s website, with a portion of proceeds going to charity.
The charity hasn’t been selected yet but will have ties to ag, Mills said.
Here are some Canadian beer stats from Beer Canada:
- In 2023, Canada was home to 1,320 breweries, up from 1,260 in 2021.
- Canadians drank 59.8 litres of beer per capita in 2023.
- Canadian breweries produced 2,196,400,000 litres of beer in 2023 – enough beer to fill about 878 Olympic swimming pools.
- Ontario has 380 breweries, the most in the country.
Canadian beers are also recognized on the world stage.
At the World Beer Awards 2024, Mill Street Brewery won world’s best flavoured fruit and vegetable beer for its Pineapple Lime Sour product.
And Amsterdam Brewing Company took home the prize for world’s best smoke beer for Rauchbier.
Stanley Park Brewing won the world’s best milkshake IPA for Parklandia. And Unibroue won world’s best pale Belgian style ale for Eau Bénite.