Brokers Group International says it wants to buy Canadian breweries like Lighthouse, Black Kettle and WestBrew

Google alerts is a content change detection and notification service. It’s an easy way for overworked, wannabe cyber journalists, posting four times a goddamn day, to find and create daily news. You basically get emails when your key words pop up on new or changed web pages, newspaper websites and blogs. Sometimes this news is good. Sometimes this news is strange.

Here’s an odd example: Google alerts kindly notified me that the capital partners at Brokers Group International LLC (based in Vancouver, British Columbia) have formed a venture capital group with the hopes of acquiring some craft breweries and distilleries — specifically in the geographical location of Vancouver and its surrounding areas. To show its interest, Brokers Group released a press release indicating it might like to buy Lighthouse Brewing Co. in Victoria, Black Kettle Brewing Co. and WestBrew (Monkey Business Brewery Inc.).

Brokers Group then goes on to inform us that it has not notified this short-list that the firm has “their eye on [these] 3 existing craft-breweries,” so it seems a smidge bizarre to blast this out into the nethers of the internet, but it’s not like I know anything either. From the press release:

Brokers Group has absolute no idea if the listed companies would be open or interested in a possible buy-out/partnership offer. No contact has been made at this time to ascertain or suggest a completed deal might be in the works. This list is from the point of view of Brokers Group and should not be relied upon in anyway.

Umkay. Well, it looks like the group is already working with WestBrew. According to its website (dated Nov. 21):

 We will now be working directly with only craft brewery located in West Vancouver. The recent addition to BC’s growing craft beer boom, is known as Monkey Business Brewery Inc, and doing business as WestBrew.ca. The guys at WestBrew are working on their first product launch branded as White Monkey Lager. My organizational resources at VAMPT capital partners will help facilitate the start-up with capital requirements needed to have a successful product launch.

In its newest press release, Brokers Group goes on to evaluate each of the three breweries in a fairly critical fashion. Lighthouse has “average tasting beer.” The group was also “not overly impressed by the branding and product line-up [sic]” of Black Kettle. That’s just how money speaks, I suppose. Enjoy the awkward attention right over here, and Google alerts, please keep sending me weird shit from the derelict roads of the information superhighway. I’ve got nothing better to do.