OUR STORY
"CRAFTING THE BAJAN EXPERIENCE SINCE 2014"
8705.jpg)
From our humble beginnings where we were brewing in old shipping containers to our new state-of-the-art, 2,000-liter brewhouse, DreadHop Brewing is and always has been, dedicated to creating fantastic, distinctive hand-crafted ales one small batch at a time. Our brewing process is extremely hands-on and a great deal of attention to detail is put into every batch of high-quality craft beer we create
​Beer is composed of four essential ingredients: malted barley, water, yeast, and hops. At DreadHop, we carefully select our ingredients from all over the world employing every ingredient for a specific reason and purpose. Our core beers represent a variety of styles focusing on aroma, mouthfeel and flavor. These beers that we produce year round come in 330 ml bottles or 20 liter kegs.
WHERE IT ALL STARTED
Tired of drinking the watery, so-called beer from a variety of regional and industrial breweries, Founder and CEO, Charles Mackenzie decided to start brewing his own beer at home. In 2013, after his home brews became more and more popular with family and friends, he decided to take an old forty foot shipping container and convert it into a small brewery where he could further develop his passion. Purchasing an electric 200-liter brewing system started what at that time was The Brewhouse.
To avoid hand bottling and labeling 200 liters of beer, initially all of the beer was sold in 5 liter mini-kegs to just one or two restaurants. However, the need for bottled beer became painfully evident after a very short time, so Mackenzie set about building his own semi-automated, counter pressure bottle filler able to fill 4 bottles at a time. Labeling was still all done by hand. This bottle filler is still used on occasion to this day for bottling small experimental batches. Brewing, bottling, labeling and delivering soon became too much for Mackenzie to do on his own and The Brewhouse hired its first employee in 2018.
As anyone who has commercially brewed on such a small system would know, the Brewhouse was a labour of love. After four years of back breaking work and tens of thousands of liters of beer brewed on this small system, it was painfully obvious that the situation couldn't continue as it was. A decision had to be made to either shut the brewery down or to massively scale it up. Not afraid of the risk, Mackenzie decided to completely reinvent the brewery by rebranding it from The Brewhouse to Dreadhop Brewing, scaling it up by a factor of ten and relocating it to a new building next door. Dreadhop Brewing was born at the end of 2019 with a new state of the art, steam heated, four vessel, 2,000 liter brewhouse with glycol chilled fermenters and bright tanks as well as a 1,500 square foot tap room.
8601.jpg)
Dreadhop Brewing continues to be a family owned and operated craft brewery focused on creating flavourful brews for the local and visiting community. With the continued support of our beer loving friends, private and commercial, we hope to be here for many more years.
WE ARE SERIOUS ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY
At Dreadhop Brewing, we strive to reduce our carbon footprint through energy conservation and reduced waste production processes. We believe our brewery can be economical, profitable, and sustainable at the same time. By minimally impacting the environment, we will leave a positive impression on everyone that enjoys our beer.
The main areas we have focused on are waste reduction and energy conservation.
REDUCED WASTE
A huge amount of water is used during the various cleaning processes in all breweries. Dreadhop Brewing has 50,000 gallons of underground rainwater storage that we use in the washing and cleaning cycles. This collected water provides almost all of the water we use to clean our tanks and equipment.
​
After every brew, our spent grain is given to local farmers as animal feed. That is approximately 500kg of spent grain per brew going to feed local cows and sheep.
ENERGY CONSERVATION
All of the lighting in the brewery is low-energy LED lights and many of our lights are controlled by motion sensors reducing the need to keep them on all of the time.
​
Our brewing water is also heated from steam generated by high-efficiency LPG boilers and we also capture heat from our brew kettles during the cooling process and redirect it to our hot water tank ready for the next brew.
​
Our air-conditioners are all split system inverter air-conditioners that use about one-third the energy of standard air-conditioners.
​
With the installation of a 650 KW photovoltaic system installed on the roof of the brewery in 2021, we get all of our energy requirements from the sun.
