Big Rock Brewery

Ed McNally, a Calgary lawyer who had learned that Alberta grows two-row malting barley, founded Big Rock in 1985 and named it after the Okotoks Erratic, a 16,500-tonne boulder left by a glacier. When a strike shut the Molson and Labatt breweries in summer 1986, Big Rock was the only beer on sale in Alberta, and its output rose fast. It launched with a bitter, a porter and Traditional Ale, an English-style brown ale; Grasshopper, a filtered wheat ale, and a Czech-style pilsner followed. Big Rock trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It closed its Vancouver and Toronto breweries in 2024 and 2025 to focus on Calgary, and in 2025 its sales rose 34.9% to 311,594 hectolitres, mostly from brewing for others.