They started out small in a barn in Cherry Hill, and have survived an early cease-and-desist order, floods, a pandemic and just recently celebrated their 13th year in business.

Hell Bay Brewing Company in Liverpool marked that milestone on April 1. 

When Melanie Perron and Mark Baillie began their craft brewery in 2011, they were one of only five or six in Nova Scotia. Now, there are more than 50 craft brewers, from nanobreweries to brew pubs to microbreweries.

“That was a nanobrewery then,” Perron said in an interview at the brewery on Thursday.

“We didn’t know where to start or how to start, so we just started very small in our home and quickly grew out of that space and moved here.

“We were just doing it as a hobby, so it was just for fun. And I was on maternity leave at that time. And Mark was always brewing beer and sharing it with friends. And he was to the point where he was brewing so much that we couldn’t consume it all, we couldn’t share it all. So, I just thought, ‘What would it take to do this as a business?'”

Back in 2011, they were known as Rusty Anchor Brewing Company and started out with an English Ale. But three months after they started labelling their beers, they got a cease-and-desist letter from Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, telling them they couldn’t use the word “anchor” in their name.

So, the former husband and wife team had to come up with a new name and Hell Bay was born. 

A couple of years later, they moved into the old Hoggie’s Buy and Sell space in downtown Liverpool. At that time, Perron says, they were focused mainly on selling kegs and bottles to bars in Halifax.

“When we first started out, it was just so busy because we had full reign of everything. It was easy to send 80 kegs to Halifax in a week and then the NSLC, we would send them three or four pallets of beer in a week. So at that time, we were employing probably six or seven staff.” 

As more craft breweries opened, however, the market changed drastically. And Hell Bay had to change with it. 

“When you think of all these breweries fighting for the same tap space and then the NSLC there’s only so much shelf space there. That’s why we had to put more concentration into our store and our pub and doing music and trying to attract more local people.” 

While Nova Scotia craft beer sales increased overall by 6.1 per cent over the past three months, many breweries say the past few years have been a struggle. 

In early March, FirkenStein Brewing in Bridgewater posted on its Facebook page that it was having trouble paying its rent. The brewery said if business didn’t pick up, it may have to close.

Other Nova Scotia craft breweries have closed or announced they will restructure. Uncle Leo’s near Pictou, Serpent Brewing, Off Track Brewing have closed or announced they’re closing. Brightwood Brewery in Dartmouth is closing its tap room, while Harbour Brewing in Musquodoboit Harbour is selling.

Perron says she hates to see other breweries in trouble.

“It hurts my heart because I know we’re in that boat every day. We’re just like, ‘Do we keep going or do we just sell out and close’, just because it’s not as profitable as people think. I always think it’s a good thing that I’m not a person who needs a lot in life. I don’t need a paycheque. I survive off very little. I have two staff who work here. So, my goal is to get my staff paid first. And my paycheque comes after that.

“It’s a hurting industry and I knew there was going to be a bubble. Everybody thought it was a multimillion-dollar business, adn I’m sure it would be if there were only 20 of us. But the market right now is just so saturated.”

Perron says that like with other businesses, Covid changed the landscape for microbreweries in Nova Scotia.

“Everything went to hyper-local. We lost all our accounts in Halifax, so all the bars dropped us. … So as of now, all of the bars we do have are on the South Shore.”

Perron says they’ve worked hard over the years to keep on top of what customers want. She says that’s why they started making more ready-to-drink beverages, like their popular hard lemonades, which often outsell their beer in the summertime. 

And they recently made rum for the first time. It was a small batch but sold 72 bottles in two weeks.

She says that even though the past few years have been “up and down”, they’ve had great support from the local community.

“We wouldn’t be here without them, 100 per cent, especially since Covid. … So I am relying a lot on local business.”

Perron says she’s looking forward to the summer, when tourists return. The brewery plans to bring back its hot dog cart and offer some specialty hot dogs, and maybe even some food nights.

“I’m excited for the summer because I think it’s going to be super busy. I just have this feeling especially with all the new people moving here. The South Shore, it’s so beautiful and people are finally discovering it.”

In the past three months, sales at the brewery are more than double what they were this time last year. 

Perron says the secret to their staying power is pretty simple.

“My perseverance. I’m not a quitter. I live a lot on hope. You know, next year can only be better. Since Covid, things are getting better.

“Just staying true to what you believe, I guess, and what your passion is and lots of hope.”

And that San Francisco brewery that sent Perron and Baillie that cease-and-desist letter 13 years ago?

It closed last year, but Hell Bay is still going.

“We try to keep our beer natural and true to what beer is. Just keeping the hops and barley and water. We don’t use preservatives. It’s all unpasteurized. It’s just the way beer should be.”

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com

Listen to the audio version of this story below

By Rick Conrad

Fires, floods and downpours combined last year to keep visitors away from the South Shore, according to numbers released recently by Tourism Nova Scotia.

Hotel stays, or room nights sold, for the May to October 2023 period were down about five per cent over 2022. That compares to an overall decrease of two per cent in all of Nova Scotia. The only regions that saw more people in 2023 were the Eastern Shore and the Annapolis Valley.

The South Shore was one of the hardest hit areas of the province. Yarmouth and Acadian Shores saw the biggest drop at six per cent over 2022.

Stephanie Miller Vincent, co-ordinator of the South Shore Tourism Co-operative, says the wildfires in Barrington and Shelburne, and torrential rains and floods later in the summer conspired to keep people away from the South Shore.

“We had an odd beginning to our peak season in 2023,” she said in an interview. “We had fires in the Barrington area that shut down (Highway) 103 so folks weren’t travelling this coast. So that affected numbers.

“2023 numbers are tough to look at because we’re looking at numbers that are coming the year following a couple of years of pent-up travel demand.”

The numbers aren’t really surprising to businesses and organizations in Queens County that rely on summer tourist traffic to help float them through the rest of the year.

Melanie Perron, the co-owner of Hell Bay Brewing Company in Liverpool, says she saw a lot fewer visitors from the Maritimes last year.

“We rely so much on our patio season to bring in tourism and people from the city and other places,” Perron says.

“And it seemed like it rained every weekend so those would have been when we would have had a surplus of people coming and enjoying our beaches and our parks and then coming and stopping and having a flight (of beer) or getting beer to go. So I found our numbers were way down because of the weather.”

At the Queens County Museum, which relies partly on donations from tourists, visitor numbers dropped by more than 3,000 across its four properties over 2022. Besides the main museum, Perkins House, Fort Point Lighthouse and the Queens Museum of Justice are also part of the museum complex.

Dayle Crouse, the museum’s administrative assistant, said that despite a spike in visitors in 2022 when people were doing more post-Covid travelling, the numbers still haven’t recovered to 2019 levels.

“We found that after Covid and everybody had a little bit of freedom they really spiked and everybody was spending their dollars and going out. But then I think the next year, people really started to rein in their dollars and numbers have dropped.”

Crouse says a combination of rising gas prices, bad weather and news coverage of the wildfires contributed to the decrease.

Miller Vincent says that while tourists from outside the Maritimes tend to book their vacations six months to a year in advance, those closer to home are more spontaneous.

“As Atlantic Canadians and Maritimers we look on Wednesday and say, ‘OK, what’s the weather this weekend? Should I go or should I stay?’ And if it’s calling for rain, you’ll see those accommodation numbers not pick up where they need to be.”

Perron says she hopes 2024 brings brighter weather and more people back to the area’s beaches and the brewery’s patio.

“We usually bank on the summer to get through the winter. So our summer was so dismal that we’re just scraping by to get through the winter and hopefully we’ll have a nice sunny hot summer to bring out all the beer drinkers.”

Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com