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FARNHAM — In business, opportunity often presents itself where you least expect it.

For Alexandre Jacob, it arrived during a beer-sampling visit last year to a small brewery in South Burlington, Vt.

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Jacob, 35, already owned a brew-pub in St-Georges de Beauce and was one of the four partners in Farnham Ale & Lager, a microbrewery that opened in 2013 in the town of Farnham, about an hour southwest of Montreal.

He said he regularly visited breweries in the northern U.S. to get a feel for the business there, because the goal was to get Farnham products into that market. The company actually exported to Maine on a small scale last year, and while its beers were well received, the costs of shipping and selling through an importer added too many layers to the retail price to make it financially viable.

At the brewery in Burlington, Jacob asked the employee who served him why the selection was so limited. She told him it’s because Infinity Brewing Co. was in the process of being wound down, after less than two years in operation.