FREDERICTON – NB Liquor has informed Picaroons Traditional Ales that it can no longer sell beer from Nova Scotia microbreweries in its retail locations in Fredericton and Saint John.

Sean Dunbar, the owner of Picaroons, says he made many attempts in the past year to find out if selling Nova Scotia micro-beer alongside New Brunswick ones in its retail outlets was permitted under a trade agreement between the two provinces brokered in 2007.

When Dunbar received no answers to inquiries made last April and again in October, he decided to begin stocking the shelves in January with select Nova Scotia microbrews from companies like Big Spruce Brewing, 2 Crows Brewing, Good Robot Brewing Company, and Boxing Rock Brewing Company.

“Frankly, it was going really well,” he said in a phone interview with Huddle. “But I still had no response from anybody about whether I could or couldn’t do it though.”

On the day the Supreme Court ruled against the New Brunswick man who tried to bring beer and liquor purchased in Quebec in quantities exceeding established limits set by the province, Dunbar sent another note to several provincial government departments, including NB Liquor, and he received a prompt reply.

“Look, I’m doing this,” Dunbar says he told them in a note. “Can somebody either tell me to stop, tell me to keep doing it while you investigate and give an interpretation of this trade agreement, or just tell me it’s okay because I don’t want to be sitting here wondering if I or my staff are going to get fined or hauled off or something. The response came back quite quickly saying, ‘Stop.’ So we stopped.”

In a phone interview with Huddle, Mark Barbour, communications officer with NB Liquor, said that Picaroons signed a contract in 2016 which clearly stated they could only sell beer from microbreweries licensed by the province.

“He was fully aware he was not allowed to do this,” said Barbour.

Barbour says the 2007 agreement doesn’t apply to this issue, and he says all microbreweries are aware that this is the case.

As it stands, the province’s microbreweries can buy beer from other New Brunswick microbrewers at wholesale rates and resell them at retail prices in their own stores, which is a “good thing” says Dunbar.

He hasn’t seen the formal agreement signed by the NSLC and NB Liquor. He has only seen a joint press release issued by them in July of 2007 that mentions a “new policy on microbreweries.”

“Nova Scotia will treat New Brunswick microbreweries the same way we treat Nova Scotia microbreweries, and vice versa,” said Bret Mitchell, NSLC president and CEO, at the time.

In Dunbar’s view, that means Nova Scotia microbrewers should be able to sell in New Brunswick microbrewery retail outlets.

“If New Brunswick brewers are allowed to do it then Nova Scotia brewers can do it as well,” said Dunbar. “That’s the simple explanation as I know it.”

Ultimately, Dunbar says the province and the breweries themselves should do right by the consumers. If he can sell beers from other New Brunswick companies like Grimross or Trailway, he should be able to offer customers the Nova Scotia ones too.

“I thought we should be able to expand that to the beers coming up from Nova Scotia as well,” he said. “There are a lot of different breweries, different beers. We love curating beer offerings for consumers, so I thought that was a good thing.”

The shelves at Picaroons were still stocked with the Nova Scotia micro-beers when this story was published. But the company warned on its Facebook page that customers can only get these beers while supplies last.

“There’ll be no more new N.S. craft beer coming in and the current [supply of] beer won’t last long,” it says.