Jerry Vietz is a stout, broad-shouldered man with fists like mallets. He looks at home in the brewery, but one could just as easily imagine him on a construction site directing larger-than-life equipment. He’s the continuity between Dion and sales to both Sleeman and Sapporo, and it’s Vietz’s face that now graces the brewery’s marketing and events. But his role at Unibroue was entirely unlikely. As he puts it, "I only wanted to be here for 2-3 years.”

Vietz studied food sciences and afterwards went to work in the cider and wine industries in Quebec, implementing microbe labs, building IT systems to track fermentation data, and running QA programs. Then he started an obsessive array of personal projects devoted to fermentation, which lead him directly into the path of Unibroue. Well, maybe not so directly.

"I was brewing and fermenting wine at home just to experiment. I was making a very nice strawberry wine, which is really hard. You lose a lot of flavor for things like strawberries and raspberries through fermentation. I had to manage the temperatures based on the types of acids. During that time, I also had a little farm with my wife, with our own animals, we made the cheese, our own wines, beers, I grew my own malts and hops. But I still had some fees to pay for my studies in food science, so I figured I would go work with some of the cheese factories for a couple years. And while I was looking at the cheese factories, a guy told me he was working at Unibroue — he was filtering the beer. It was small back then. So I met the brewmaster at the time, and the owner, Dion. They were excited about all the things I was making at home, but they didn’t have a role that was interesting to me. But I liked the profile of the brewery. When I left that day, André called me and said we needed to talk. He told me to stop taking interviews with the cheese factories. I came back the next day and he told me about many other projects they could create, one of which was a distillery at the time. He was curious about distilling different fruits and even Unibroue beers to produce liquors. So I signed on.”

But Vietz’s first role was technical. In his first year, he worked on automation. Unibroue was a complicated, highly manual operation that required long hours. As a result, they were losing employees. So Vietz set out to make the environment more comfortable and efficient. That helped clear the way for the fun stuff, at least for a short time: "I made some distillations with Trois Pistoles and Maudite, some fruits from the north of Quebec. It was very interesting. But finally when it was sold to Sleeman the following year, they didn’t want to continue that project. It was interesting to me, and maybe we could have been pioneers. But they promoted me to the director of the brewing department and that meant managing capital expenditures and structural changes as we became bigger and bigger.”