Sup With Your Pup: Halifax Company Brews Up Beer For Dogs
HALIFAX—Pet dogs these days are so much more sophisticated than they used to be. Wearing clothes, eating at the table, going to the spa, and having an Instagram account are all common pooch passtimes in 2021.
Thanks to Crafty Beasts Brewing Co., you can now add having a beer to that list.
The Halifax-based company sells Fetch Canine Pale Ale, a “beer” made exclusively for dogs.
Although Fetch is more of a nutritious broth than an actual beer, it hasn’t stopped pet owners across Atlantic Canada from sitting down and having a brew with their beloved dogs.
From Loophole To Launch
Cindy James is the “head barktender” at Crafty Beasts. Although Fetch is now sold across Atlantic Canada, James says the entire project began almost by accident.
In 2018, James’ doggy daycare was forced to move to a new location. When it did, James ran up against archaic zoning laws that were keeping her from opening.
The only way to make the daycare comply was to set up a small retail operation. So, she began searching for something to sell.
She wanted something fun and different that wouldn’t take up a lot of space in the building and would be easy to maintain while she focused on the daycare.
That’s when she stumbled upon a pooch-friendly bar in Croatia that was selling a “beer” made for dogs. She was intrigued, and after digging around couldn’t find anyone in Canada doing anything like it.
So she decided to be the first.
Add A Neck, Some Feet, And Simmer
Doggy beer, of course, isn’t really beer—it doesn’t even have alcohol in it. Essentially, it’s a bone broth full of collagen and other nutrients that are great for a dog. They also tend to find it very tasty.
In its original incarnation, James cooked her Beer For Dogs in an Instapot upstairs from doggy daycare. She sourced bones, vegetables, and other ingredients from local food producers and bottled and packaged the product herself.
“It was what was easy to get and what had a lot of collagen in it,” James explains. She used a lot of “big bones” in the recipe. “Feet are great. Necks are great, too,” she told Huddle in 2020.
She would often test formulas and recipes with the dogs in her daycare. They lapped it up, of course, but James quickly realized the product’s real appeal was with people, not pooches.
“The dog doesn’t care. You put something down and they’re going to try it. But the marketing appeal is to the owners,” she says. “The people that are purchasing it are looking for an experience with their dog. They want a shared experience with the fur baby.”
James created a mobile doggy bar and travelled around hosting events featuring Beer For Dogs. She enlisted Horizon Eye Photography to populate social media with adorable pooches enjoying a brew.
Soon, Halifax Instagram was full of “fur babies” lapping up doggy beer. Doggy influencers met for “dates” and a drink, and owners were enjoying the novelty of sharing a beer with man’s best friend.
“They come to me, they buy the beer, they go and get their own beer, and they’re sharing a beer with their dog,” James said. “It just makes people smile.”
Crafty Beasts Is Born
James saw big potential in her product and in 2020 began the process of taking it from her Instapot to a full-scale operation.
She took her recipe to a product development kitchen in PEI that helped her figure out the exact nutritional information and, crucially, find a shelf-stable formula that didn’t need to be refrigerated.
Once she had a recipe she partnered with James Ponting and Melinda Moore-Ponting from Fredericton’s Craft Coast Canning Ltd.
Together, they created Crafty Beasts Brewing Company and released James’ revamped product as Fetch, a “Canine Pale Ale.” Far from simmering in a crockpot, the product is now produced at a much larger scale.
The process starts with a broth concentrate that’s made in Halifax by Kitchen Door. The concentrate is then shipped to Fredericton, where a team at Craft Coast takes over, cooking it up in giant brewing vats before canning and labelling it.
Today, Crafty Beasts’ Canine Pale Ale is sold at more than 40 locations across Atlantic Canada, including Global Pet Foods, Pet Value, and local breweries like Garrison and Serpent.
Coast-To-Coast Canine Consumption
James says the team now has its eyes set on a Canada-wide expansion and are seeking out a distributor to help them scale even further.
“It has been a complete blast building it. The thoughts of how it can give back are just as exciting to me as a product–and the opportunity to take another great Nova Scotia product and export it,” James said. “This will be one of Nova Scotia’s export products, I guarantee you.”
Until then, James and the team at Crafty Beasts continue to enjoy giving people a unique way to bond with their dogs.
“The things that we’re seeing out there [are] awesome,” James says. “It’s happy, it’s joy, it’s … the passion and the interest of creating a shared experience with your pets.”
“It’s harmless fun, right? And it keeps people’s minds off of other things that are going on in real life. If we can be a little piece of that, we’re pretty happy.”