The Cottage Brewery Experience

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.

  • We have collaborated with various local artisans such as Salt Spring Kitchen Co., EcoReality ecovillage, and Salt Spring Vinegar to develop our tasty Dry Porter Beer Jelly, a lineup of beer soaps and malt vinegar, all of which are for sale in our tasting room store.
  • When brewing on Salt Spring, we exclusively use our own natural spring water from deep inside the mountain above our brewery. This not only produces a better-tasting beer, but also eliminates chemical impurities (chlorine) and does not draw on municipal water resources.
  • 90% of our production occurs at our small brewery on Salt Spring Island.
  • We are proud member of the BC Craft Brewers Guild, whose mission is the support the ongoing creation and discovery of truly great BC craft beer. We are active members of the Salt Spring Island Chamber of Commerce, whose mandate is to create and maintain a prosperous environment for business and industry, while protecting and enhancing the island's sustainability and improving its economic viability.

    • "A tiny cottage brewery that has been quietly making some rather delicious award-winning ales for well over a decade."

    — Urban Diner