If there is anything students like more than beer, it’s cheap beer.

The University of British Columbia’s student union, the Alma Mater Society, believes it can profit off that fact when it opens a brewery on campus in August 2014.

The student-owned brewery will supply the university’s two bars, the Pit and the Perch, with its own homebrew and will also tap into the campus’ various keggers.

The main reason for building a brewery, believed to be the only student-owned brewery in Canada (Niagara College has a university-run brewery), isn’t to help students drink on a dime. It fit, rather, with the union’s sustainability model.

“And we thought it would be awesome to brew our own beer,” said Jeremy McElroy, the student union’s president.

If there is any place where a microbrewery could thrive in a tough market, it is on campus.

“Students are heavy drinkers — the 16 to 25 age group represents the vast majority of beer drinkers,” said Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business. “And students are a large portion of that group.”

There are three factors at play with student drinkers: availability, price and cache. Homebrew being sold on the cheap will “attract one set of students, what I call the guzzlers,” Middleton said. “Those who don’t care what they drink so long as it’s liquid and get’s them pissed.”

The dream, according to McElroy, is to go local — use hops grown on the campus farm to seasonal ingredients grown in the rooftop garden of the new Student Union Building.

The idea for a brewery came from a few far-flung suggestions in a 2006 student survey about what should occupy the $103 million building.

“We laughed it off,” McElroy said.

But the idea had been planted. When the union noticed extra space in the building’s plans, it had First Key consulting perform market research. The recommendation: build a brewery.

The union could make more money that way than by selling swills of Molson or Budweiser. It still plans to offer the standard brands, but will sell its own craft beer slightly cheaper, somewhere around $2.50 for a sleeve of beer, which is 14 ounces. The operation will be run by a professional brewmaster.

About 10,000 litres of beer are consumed at UBC campus bars per year, according to Elin Tayyar, vice-president of finance for the union. The two student-run bars account for about half of that consumption.

The craft beer market is booming. Sales have doubled in the past four years in B.C. and it is the fastest-growing segment in Ontario, with double-digit growth in each of the past six years.

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Tayyar said there are plans to launch a company, partially owned by the union, with the hopes of expanding to other campuses across North America and in Europe.

“The big guys, like Molson, will leave them alone on campus,” Middleton said, “but if they move off campus, the big guys will crush them, just by outpricing them. Students are very important to the beer industry.”

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