01/23/2026
Savais-tu que la toute première microbrasserie du Québec est née tout près d'ici, à Lennoxville? Le Golden Lion Pub & Brewery a introduit la bière brune au Québec et aura 40 ans cette année! Bel article (en anglais) du The Record transcrit ci-bas.
Brasseurs des Cantons Tourisme Cantons-de-l'Est
Golden Lion Brewing will celebrate 40 years this Canada Day
Many reasons it could’ve failed, good reasons it’s still here
By Michael Keegan
Local Journalism Initiative
By rights, they shouldn’t even have the pub.
Well, they shouldn’t have had it for more than five years, anyway.
There certainly shouldn’t be a brewery.
But they’ve had their pub for over 52 years now, and on July 1, they’ll have been running the brewery they started for 40 years.
The Golden Lion Brewing Company, an outgrowth of Lennoxville’s popular Golden Lion Pub, will be celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It was the very first microbrewery in Quebec, and opened on Canada Day, 1986.
The Record sat down with Stan Groves (Jr.) on the morning of Jan. 21, in the pub next to the brewery. Groves is the namesake Stanley Groves, one of three Bishop’s University professors who founded the pub, the others being David Seale and Robert Barnett. The latter two cashed out of the business not too long thereafter, and the pub and brewery have been Groves family businesses ever since. Stan Groves (Jr.) co-owns the brewery with his brother Kevin.
So how did you start a microbrewery in 1986?
It helped if you had a pub first. You had a client base. You knew how much beer you can sell.
Then you brewed what was popular: Blonde beers, like the big beer companies – Molson, Labatt’s, O’Keefe – sold. Right?
Well, not if you were the Groves family. The elder Stan had travelled widely, including to England. And Barnett had grown up there. And they loved British beer. So, the partners decided they wanted to push back against what they thought were the big breweries bland blondes with English ales.
“Choosing the British styled brown beer was probably the worst idea,” admitted Groves the younger. “Because back then, everything was a blonde beer. Even the SAQ was not importing a lot of British beer. You could get Bass, you could get Newcastle Brown Ale. Guinness, of course, […] but nobody was drinking that stuff. It wasn't in cans or in bottles in the stores. You had to go to the SAQ Liquor Commission to get it. There was no brown beer on the market, really, outside of those important ones.”
Groves, meanwhile, had virtually grown up in the pub, which had been fun, but he wanted to do more, so he headed west to Edmonton for a couple of years.
While he was there, the first microbrewery in Canada, Troller, opened in Horseshoe Bay, B.C., in 1982. That meant it could be done: You could start a craft beer company -- or microbrewery -- and go up against the big boys.
Meanwhile, the founders of the pub had been renting, and eventually bought, an abandoned Texaco station next door and its parking lot, for the pub.
They’d been using it as a storage shed for the pub. And they’d rented the rest of the space out to various businesses. It had served, variously, as a paint shop, a tanning salon, a bakery, and an ice cream shop, as Groves recalled.
So when the decision came to found the microbrewery, they had the building. The next thing a British-style brewery needed was someone who knew how to brew beer, any beer. So Groves went to England to learn.
He paid for an internship at the very successful Ringwood Brewery in Hampshire, spending seven days a week there, climbing into and cleaning out the mash tun and learning the craft of making beer from their highly acclaimed master brewer, Peter Austin. Austin’s “second-in-command” as Groves put it, was a young man about his age named Alan Pugsley. Pugsley would eventually get hired by the D.L. Geary brewery in Portland, Maine, one of the first microbreweries on the East Coast, and one of a slew of successful ones Pugsley would help establish.
Why was this important?
Besides becoming a life-long friend of Groves’, Pugsley would eventually commission – or oversee the first brew of – the Golden Lion Brewing Company.
“Two weeks before we opened, he came to help me with the very first brew, just to make sure I didn’t really bu**er it all,” said Groves. That first beer would become Golden Lion’s marquee brown beer, Lion’s Pride.
But before that, to start a microbrewery, you needed microbrewery-sized equipment. For that, said Groves, “it went back to England.” In North America, “you couldn’t get the size that we wanted. You couldn’t get anything. So that was all shipped over from England.”
But besides that, while at Ringwood, he discovered that “they had another little place, more of a brew pub size. Just smaller equipment.”
Groves proceeded to take “meticulous measurements and basically came up with my own schematic blueprints.”
Why? “Because right here in Lennoxville, we have Pro-Par, and they do stainless steel, for propane tanks. […] Forty years later, that equipment that we brew in is still made by Pro-Par.”
Knowing about Pro-Par was a stroke of luck. Another was the owner of the company introducing Groves to one of his engineers who had once worked on a brewery. In England.
“He was the one that sat down with me, and we went over these things, and he did a proper schematic drawing of them, so that they could make the stuff. But without him, it would have been more of a hodgy-podgy thing,” said Groves, using a technical term.
You also needed ingredients for the brewery.
“Canada Malting produces a great barley, and they’re right out of Montreal,” said Groves. So that helped.
“But, […] getting the specialty barleys to add colour and flavour, to make a dark beer, they had none of that,” he said.
Groves said they eventually found the kind of malt they wanted, “which was from England, which was being brought over because now, of course, there’s brewing on the East Coast of the United States. Where does all that come over from England? The Port of Montreal. Who knows the number one importer of all those specialty barleys? Me. Who imports all that stuff? Alan Pugsley.”
So, now Groves had everything he needed to start a microbrewery of English ales. Except the market for it, because no one was asking for them. But if you could lead customers to them, you’d have a local monopoly.
“Yeah, absolutely,” said Groves. So that was the that was a daily, weekly, monthly occurrence was just trying to get people to try it. So, you know, you're giving away little samples whenever you possibly could.”
“Getting 18-year-old, 19-year-old, 20-year-old college kids drinking that was like pulling teeth, so to speak, said Groves. “So, really, the backing for it was the professors, and people from the community who had travelled, and had been to Europe, and had a brown beer somewhere and thought, well, this is different. So that was kind of what kept it going. And then, eventually, the students started to get into it and acquire a taste.”
Having taught his brothers Kevin and Stephen everything he knew, “in case something happened to me,” said Groves, “it was my brother, Stephen, that came up with the Bishop's Best Bitter recipe, so that was the second beer. Again, a British style beer, and much more bitter than the Lion's Pride. So instead of going down to the not weaker beer, but the lighter beers that people were more interested in, we went the other way.”
“And then as we grew and got a bit more equipment, we got into brewing the blonde, La Blonde des Cantons, which is kind of like a pilsner or a longer beer. Again, British style.”
And with that, the Golden Lion Brewing Company began educating students.
“That, of course, made it easier to get people off of the mainstream beers and onto a micro brewed beer. ‘Come here, here's your blonde beer. Oh, while you're here…’ Then the chore became getting them from the blonde up to the Pride. And by the time you graduate from your 3 or 4 year thing, you're going to be a seasoned beer connaisseur, because you're going to be drinking bitter, and then we came out with a stout. So we were developing a whole range. And then they jump from the blonde to the pride was a big one. So, we came up with the amber.”
In fact, Bishop’s University, where the three professors who decided to open the Golden Lion Pub taught, produced a brewing science program, an off-shoot of biology and chemistry. Groves said that program produced graduates who went to work in the industry all over North America.
“Yeah, unfortunately, that shut down” after about ten years, said Groves. General cutbacks in budgets forced Bishop’s to make choices.
And so on.
That’s how you started a microbrewery in 1986, and kept it running for 40 years. If you did it right.
But now, the micro-brewery industry has peaked and is shrinking.
“Just locally, we've lost the microbrewery that was in Coaticook,” said Groves.” They've shut their doors. There's another one in Granby, that is closed down, not bankrupt, but shutting the doors, because they're not making it. And that is going across Canada and across the United States. And it's because […] there are all these different drinks that are out there, and the younger population is going through to them. So, change or be done, is what it is.”
Golden Lion adapted by introducing a blueberry-watermelon beer, and a raspberry beer.
The next step is into the increasingly popular seltzer market. And Golden Lion will be introducing one in time for their grand celebration of their 40 years of existence, on Canada Day.”
Watch for another article featuring a conversation with Glenys Groves, matriarch of the family who’s been there since her husband Stan Sr. decided to open a pub.
