This is part of a year-long ‘Love for Local’ series called NB365: portraits of New Brunswick entrepreneurs, businesses, and organizations. Huddle is a media partner with Love for Local. Today we feature Serge Nadeau of CAVOK Brewing Co. in Dieppe.

OUR STORY OFFICIALLY BEGINS DURING THE SUMMER OF 2010. AFTER A BUSY SHIFT AT THE MONTREAL AREA CONTROL CENTRE, WE (SERGE AND SERGE – TWO NORTHERN NB ACADIANS EXILED IN MONTREAL WORKING AS AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS) DECIDED TO STOP FOR A BEER TO DECOMPRESS BEFORE HEADING HOME.

Chatting about our passions and dreams for the future, we realized that we were both very passionate about beer and that we were both homebrewers. We also discovered that we both had been visiting breweries in different parts of the world since the mid-’90s. It was somewhat of a surprise to find out that we had the same dream of operating our own microbrewery. That moment was the birth of the “Cavok Project”.

Fast forward to 2014, we are now air traffic controllers in Moncton. We began brewing together in my garage. This garage became our testing lab for over two years. During these years, we read lots of brewing books, took advanced courses, brewed multiple beer recipes and spent much time brewing at microbreweries.

Much time was dedicated to acquiring the utmost knowledge of brewing and operating a brewery. Lots of our friends enjoyed this phase as we often exchanged beer for feedback. There was some good beer, some bad, but most importantly, great memories were made. Things have changed since then, as we are now on our fourth brewing system surrounded by a very good team. Our current brewing system is now a 1800L system – a big change compared to our first one that was only 20L.

After a little over 5 years of CAVOK being in existence, we are still air traffic controllers at the Moncton ACC and are still passionate, if not more, about the brewing industry.