
Salt Spring Island Ales is proud to be a true ‘cottage brewery’ experience
Our small-but-mighty team is passionate about creating the finest natural ales using local ingredients wherever possible.
- We use exclusively Organic Canadian 2-row barley as our base pale malt.
- We developed a collaborative farming project in 2009 with local farms to grow our own certified organic crop of Nugget, Mt. Hood, Cascade and Willammette hops in the Fulford Valley on Salt Spring. This farming project now has three participating farms and over 600 hop vines. Currently, these hops are featured seasonally in our Autumn ‘Estate Hopped’ special release.
- We ‘close the loop’ by donating our spent grain to neighbouring farms for animal feed. These farms stock their roadside stands with non-GMO organic meat that can be found on and at the base of Furness Road.
- Other brewery wastes, such as spent hops and wastewater, is given to local farmers as compost and/or natural fertilizer.
- We brew with other local ingredients such as Salt Spring Island honey, herbs, roots, and heather flowers, as well as heather flowers harvested from the beloved National Historic Site Butcharts Gardens.
- We have developed our annual Spring Fever Gruit (Ancient Ale) with the help of the Wild Seed School of Herbal Studies on Salt Spring Island.

