$300,000 out of total funding of $660,000 from the Ontario Centres of Excellence will be applied to fund research and development of a cannabis beer, which will hit the market in Canada by 2019 when edible cannabis is meant to be legalized.
Student researchers at Loyalist College in Belleville, which was chosen for funding as one of over 60 projects in Ontario, will help Province Brands, a fledgling company based out of Toronto, to develop the new product.
Dooma Wendschuh, Chief executive of Province Brands, wanted not simply to add extracted oil to the beer but to replace barley with the cannabis plant. When contacting craft brewers “everybody basically laughed at us. They said it couldn’t be done,” said Wendschuh.
Finally Loyalist College’s Applied Research Centre for Natural Products and Medical Cannabis, was able to help. “The year-long partnership between the Loyalist applied research centre and the cannabis beer company allows Province Brands to get into the Loyalist research lab, which is one of the few labs in Canada licensed as a cannabis dealer facility, and work one-on-one with the students,” said Kari Kramp, the principal investigator at the Loyalist research lab.
However, it seems that the researchers are already one step behind. In March 2018, Keith Villa, former brewmaster and inventor of Coors Brewing’s craft-like beer Blue Moon, announced to have have invented the world’s first true Cannabis “beer”. The product developed by Villa promises intoxication without the alcoholic headache, because it contains THC, the chemical in cannabis that produces a buzz, instead of alcohol. (inside.beer, 29.3.2018)
