A Scottish brewer, a waterfront brewery and a mayor’s chain.

Alexander Keith’s takes its name from its founder. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in an entry by K. G. Pryke published in 1972, says Alexander Keith was born in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland, and was sent at seventeen to an uncle in northern England to learn the brewing business; the Parks Canada register of historic places says he gained his experience in Edinburgh and London. He emigrated to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1817, according to English Wikipedia.

In Halifax, the Dictionary says, Keith became sole brewer and business manager for Charles Boggs, and in 1820 he bought out Boggs’ brewery — the date the brand still uses. In 1822 he moved to larger premises on Lower Water Street, by the harbour, and in 1836 he built a new brewery, on Hollis Street, the Dictionary says. The historic-places register, drawing on Halifax’s heritage file, dates the purchase of the Lower Water Street building to 1822 and the present ironstone brewery building to 1837. Keith brewed strong ale, porter, ginger wine, and table and spruce beers, the register says, at a time when the end of slavery in the British West Indies was reducing the sugar supply for rum and beer was gaining ground in Halifax.

Keith also made a public career. The Dictionary records that he was elected to Halifax’s first city council in 1841, served as mayor in 1843 and again in 1853 and 1854, joined the Legislative Council of Nova Scotia in December 1843 and became its president in June 1867, and was a leading Freemason. He held the council presidency until his death in 1873, the register says. In 1863 he began building Keith Hall, an Italianate house on Hollis Street designed by the Scottish architect William Hay and linked to the brewery by a tunnel, according to the Dictionary.

From the Keiths to the Olands to Labatt.

The brewery stayed in the family for more than a century. Labatt’s website said in 2002 that in 1928 the founder’s granddaughter sold the family business to John Oland, and that the Olands kept the Alexander Keith’s beers. English Wikipedia’s article on Oland Brewery, the Halifax brewer formerly known as S. Oland & Sons, records the same 1928 purchase. In 1971 Labatt acquired Oland, Labatt’s 2002 website and English Wikipedia both say; Labatt in turn passed to Interbrew in 1995, InBev in 2004 and AB InBev in 2008.

For much of that time the beer was a regional one. Strategy, the Canadian marketing magazine, reported in December 2015 that by 1990 one in three beers drunk in Nova Scotia was a Keith’s, and Labatt’s website called its India Pale Ale the province’s most popular beer in 2001. The magazine traced the brand’s modern voice to a television campaign launched in 1993 by the agency Corporate Communication Limited, featuring a British admiral, the privateer Roger and a cast of period characters, which introduced the line “Those who like it, like it a lot.”

The founder himself became part of the marketing. Strategy reported that Labatt held its first formal party for Keith’s birthday in 1995, marking 200 years since his birth and 175 years of the brand, and that the October celebration has since spread to bars across Nova Scotia and beyond, with foam antler hats and Maritime music. In 2001 the brand bought all the airtime during a television premiere in the Halifax market to show a 14-minute mini-film continuing the admiral’s story, the magazine said.

The heritage extends to the building. Labatt said in 2002 that the original Alexander Keith’s Nova Scotia Brewery had been restored in 2000 on its original site in downtown Halifax, with a recreated nineteenth-century general store, brew house and tavern; Strategy reported that the design agency Shikatani Lacroix worked on the project, which uses guides in period costume.

Atlantic Canada’s beer brands.

The seven brands in this group are all Canadian beer and whisky names: Molson Canadian, Labatt Blue, Sleeman, Moosehead, Kokanee, Alexander Keith’s and J.P. Wiser’s. Beer and whisky brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family companies that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner store to a bar rail.

A beer or whisky brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer or whisky is actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer or whisky is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A regional ale that went national.

Labatt took the beer beyond the Maritimes in the late 1990s. Its website said in 2002 that Keith’s IPA had been introduced to Ontario in 1996, and Strategy reported that in 1997 Labatt revived the Oland Specialty Brewing Company name to market Keith’s and Stella Artois across the country. Production followed the sales: English Wikipedia says the beer, once made only in Halifax for the Maritimes, is now brewed at AB InBev plants across Canada, and in 2009 the Kokanee brewery in Creston, British Columbia, began brewing it, a local report cited by English Wikipedia says. That July, Anheuser-Busch added Alexander Keith’s to its US import portfolio. The range has since widened beyond the IPA, with wheat, red and hop-led beers, Strategy reported.

The flagship’s name has drawn comment from beer writers. English Wikipedia cites Maclean’s in 2011 as saying that the modern Alexander Keith’s IPA, at 5% alcohol and lightly hopped, does not meet the accepted criteria for an India pale ale, and notes that at the 2016 Canadian Brewing Awards it took third place in the North American-style blonde or golden ale category; the writer Craig Pinhey reported in The Coast in 2010 that the brewery’s early-1900s recipes were all-malt and much more heavily hopped.

The Lower Water Street site remains a landmark. Keith Hall and the brewery were formally recognised as a heritage property by Halifax in 1985 and entered on the Canadian Register of Historic Places in 2009, which notes their ironstone walls and granite trim and that the complex also houses restaurants, shops and the Halifax Farmers’ Market.

Two names need care. Alexander Keith, the Scottish clergyman of the same era, was a different man, as was the founder’s nephew Alexander Keith Jr.; the brand’s site is keiths.ca.

For a design guide, Alexander Keith’s shows how a founder’s name, a founding date and a surviving waterfront brewery can carry a beer from one harbour city to a whole country. Compare Kokanee, the British Columbia lager Labatt also owns, and Moosehead, its independent Maritime rival. For this guide we use brewery green, antique gold and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Alexander Keith’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.