Just a few local Canadian notes on Elaine's history of brewing. Saskatchewan has had a tradition of government involvement in brewing. (Compared to the US, Canada has also had a tradition of provincial government monopoly marketing for hard liquor and for beer. This is perhaps partly based upon the old Christian CCF philosophy that if you can't stamp out sin at least you can socialise the profits of it. However in many provinces women were not allowed in beer parlours until just a few decades ago, then later they were segregated for a while in many provinces. Liquor marts did not display liquor but prices were marked on a wall and you filled out slips for the clerk to fill the orders. Some local muncipalities in Manitoba are still dry and do not allow liquor sales of any type.) Saskatchewan has had government owned and worker owned breweries. I believe that the government still has an interest in one Saskatoon brewery. During one period the government brews were not very popular. The government solved this problem through socialist planning. Each brewer was given a quota and hotels had to purchase so much a percentage of beer from each brewer. At the end of the month if you went in many hotels all you could get was government brew as hotels had to sell off their government brewery quota. A strange phenomenon I have noticed in Canada is that large brewers such as Labatt's, Carling-Okeefe's, and Molson often get licences to brew brand name foreign beers and then turn them into something almost identical to popular Canadian beers. This has been done with Carlsberg, Lowenbrau, and Budweiser. Only Budweiser seems to have had any success. As soon as the licensed product is available the imported Carlsberg, Lowenbrau, etc. disappears from the liquor stores. I expect this is because they don't want ayone to compare the original with the licenced product. Cheers, Ken Hanly