"You have to give them a lot of respect; they can sink you, they can kill you. A bunch of fellows drowned out here just a few years ago. They came to get a chunk to get in their drink, they chopped a little chip off and it rolled. The guy drowned." You don't want to hear a story like that as you motor close to the edge of a huge iceberg, its lower edge sliced clean away by the salt water, deep cracks in the ice swirled into incredible patterns and a slender vein of cobalt blue gleaming with an almost otherworldly light. But Ed Kean, Canada's only commercial iceberg harvester, knows what he's doing.

Each year for around six weeks during the season, Ed tracks icebergs and then heads out with his 180-foot barge to harvest the pristine, 10-20,000-year-old ice that takes three to four years to float down from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland before arriving off the shores of eastern Canada. This is ice that was formed before the Industrial Revolution, the purest water on earth, and it's what Newfoundland's Quidi Vidi Brewery uses to make its Iceberg Beer. I'd driven to the curiously named Random Island to join Ed and his crew on a sunny day in May. Some 15 minutes away from the shore, a massive 'berg hove into view; tall and flat, it was the size of a football pitch and the height of low-rise apartment block. Ed's barge and boat were dwarfed beside it.