Canadian Company Developing Beer That Gets You High
An Ontario-based company, Province Brands of Canada, is developing two beers that are created from cannabis. The first product is a beer brewed from barley and infused with cannabis oil, while the second product is made completely from cannabis.
Province Brands of Canada’s CEO is Dooma Wendschuh, who recently left a video game company that worked on titles such as the Assassin’s Creed franchise, told his wife he was leaving the world of video games to develop beers created from cannabis, and she had this to say “I married a writer and I was so excited about that, and now you’re telling me you want to become a drug dealer.”
At the Canadian Brewing Awards and Conference in Halifax, Canada, Wendschuh said “It was really hard. Making that jump was the hardest thing I’ve done in my life and the past five years have probably taken several years off my life expectancy.”
The beer that is being brewed completely from cannabis will use waste products from cannabis growers, such as the stalks and stems of the plants, and will contain no alcohol. Rather than getting drunk, consumers will possibly become high, and while it is still under research and development, Wendschuh’s goal is to create something that will affect the consumer and leave their system within a similar amount of time as alcohol does.
“If we can create something that is a true alternative to alcohol, you know, that could change the world in so many ways … to make that kind of change and to create something that could be healthier and safer but still convey a lot of the benefits of psychoactives,” he said.
“Thinking back in my own life, so many of the most memorable and most important experiences of my life involved some kind of a psychoactive substance. You know I never would have gotten married if I didn’t have alcohol on the day I proposed to my wife. I would have chickened out. The champagne really helped … I was so nervous.”
“Through alcohol you can relax, you can be more natural, you can build bonds with people that you can’t normally build but it’s like a tradeoff because every time you do that you’re sort of shortening your life expectancy. And I would love for there to be a product which could give a lot of those benefits without so many of the harms.”
“There [are] 144 phytocannabinoids that can be found in a marijuana plant and some of those other ones could get you pretty rocked. The regulators aren’t seeing the full picture by only sort of paying attention to one of those compounds and people could take advantage and make something that only has six and a half milligrams [of THC] but actually had, you know, a whole bunch of some other non-THC compounds and maybe was really strong.”
“If we can start with cannabis,” Wendschuh said, “we might realize that there are other substances that are less harmful than alcohol that we might want to legalize as well and give people opportunities, you know, to still enjoy the many benefits of psychoactives without doing so much harm to themselves.”
