Ontario awards 300,000$ grant to develop cannabis-based beer

Ontario a granted a 300,000$ grant to develop a real cannabis-based beer, in which alcohol would be replaced by THC.

Province Brands, a Toronto-based company, has been working on this project since September 2016. With the help of the government and student researchers from Loyalist College of Belleville, their dream could become reality.

Before embarking on this adventure, Dooma Wendschuh, CEO of Province Brands, consulted expert brewers.

«Everyone laughed at me. They said it couldn't be done.

Traditionally, when cannabis is added to a drink, it's in the form of oil. But Province Brands wants to go one step further, removing barley from the original beer recipe and replacing it with cannabis.

The 300,000$ grant was awarded by the Ontario Government's Applied Research and Development Fund, which described the project as 'oppportun and highly relevant».

In addition to revising the beer-making process, Dooma Wendschuh is keen to maintain similar characteristics, i.e. short reaction and fade-out times. Visit edibles (cannabis-infused foods) generally take longer to kick in, and their effects last longer than those of conventional inhalation joints or vaporization.

Province Brands is hot on the heels of Canopy Growth, which is also currently developing cannabis beverages. The company had already doubled its efforts on this project, introducing a partnership with Constellation Brands, the American distributor of Corona. However, Canopy is not looking to make beer, but a new kind of drink.

«We won't call it beer. Beer is beer. There will be a selection of drinks, which will not usurp their name. Beer is beer. Wine is wine, vodka is vodka. Our aim is not to reproduce these drinks, but to create new ones.»

Canopy will work from a cannabis distillate, a very pure extraction that can be incorporated into all kinds of beverages with very few calories, unlike alcohol.