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Memoir

“My family lost everything bootlegging beer in the 1930s. I revived our legacy with Sleeman Breweries”

John Sleeman wasn’t all that interested in brewing—until he learned that his ancestors sold beer to Al Capone

By John Sleeman, as told to Caroline Aksich | Photography by Joshua Best
John Sleeman standing in front of a Sleeman Brewing truck

I grew up in a strict household. My parents were devout Christians and had a lot of rules, which led me to develop a bit of a rebellious streak. In high school, in the late 1960s, I loved football, but my parents didn’t want me playing. I’d hide my gear at school and, when I arrived home late, lie and tell them I’d gotten detention. As I got older, I realized that my parents’ vision for my life wasn’t for me. I left home at sixteen and eventually moved to England, got married and started building a life on my terms.

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My wife and I couldn’t afford our own place, so we were living with her parents in Nottingham. After work, I’d join my father-in-law at the local pub for a beer—a ritual I wasn’t used to since my parents didn’t drink. But I fell in love with the bar’s sense of community. I knew I wanted to be my own boss, and since getting a loan in the UK was impossible, I decided to move back to Canada and open my own pub.

At 25 years old, I moved to Mississauga and convinced a manager at TD Bank to lend me $50,000. It was barely enough to open my first business, the Major Oak pub. I built it while working a full-time job as a market research analyst, not knowing if it would succeed. On St. Patrick’s Day of 1978, we got our liquor licence just 30 minutes before the LLBO office closed, and by 8 p.m. the place was packed. I breathed a sigh of relief—it seemed like my gamble would pay off.

At the time, Ontario’s beer selection was pretty limited. I wanted the Major Oak to serve authentic English-style beers, so I looked into importing. It didn’t take long to realize this could be a business on its own. So, in 1979, I started the Imported Beer Company (TIBCO), bringing in brands like Heineken, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Guinness. Before I knew it, business was booming.

Then, in my late 20s, my aunt Florian dropped a bombshell on me. She told me that our family had once been one of Upper Canada’s biggest brewers. She handed me this old book of beer recipes my grandfather had written in the 1890s and started telling me how successful we’d been before Prohibition. From 1836 until 1933, we were one of southern Ontario’s bigger brewers—then we lost our licence because we’d been smuggling beer across the border. Apparently, our beer was so good that Al Capone was a client. I asked her, “Do you have any of this written down?” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “We were breaking the law,” she said. “Why would we have anything written down?”

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After we were caught bootlegging in 1933, we didn’t just lose our brewing licence—we lost everything. The Crown claimed that we owed a fortune in unpaid taxes, likely based on what they guessed we’d smuggled. The family eventually had to auction off everything: the silver, my grandfather’s desk, even the house in Guelph, which is now a strip club. Florian told me the government had imposed a 50-year ban on Sleemans brewing beer in Canada. And while I never found a paper trail that explicitly outlined the terms of the ban, I believed her—she’d waited until 1984, exactly 51 years later, to tell me about it. With the ban ending, she thought it was time to bring the name back, and since I was already in the beer business, she believed I was the one to do it.

But starting a brewery from scratch wasn’t appealing to me. I was already a successful importer, and if I’m being honest, I was scared of failing. So I tried to dodge it. “We can’t do it,” I told her. “I’d have to get the family name back first.” The rights to the name had been sold off when the Sleeman assets were liquidated. But Florian didn’t back down. So I went to Nabisco, which owned the name at the time, and negotiated them into selling it back for just one dollar. I also had to get our logo back. The original Sleeman crest looked almost identical to one trademarked by Canadian Pacific Railway, so I needed their permission to use it.

After that, I needed serious capital—around $10 million. I managed to get a major investor, but I still had to take out bank loans and mortgage my home to cover the costs. I was risking everything on beer, and it was terrifying. Then things took a turn: the bank got cold feet and called their loan early, claiming the project was over budget. I had no way of paying it back, so the bank repossessed my house. By then my wife and I were separating, and I ended up sleeping in my car, which was the one thing I refused to sell. I’d lie there, staring up at the roof, telling myself, “Well, this better work, or I’ll be living in here permanently.”

Then came another blow: the first batch of beer was awful. The recipe book had several entries for cream ale, so we tried them one by one. At the time, the market was flooded with ales and lagers—cream ale just wasn’t a thing in the ’80s. I figured if we went with something different for our flagship product, we might carve out a niche for ourselves. But it still had to taste good, and those early batches were terrible. I started to think, Is this a sign? Am I really cut out for this? I decided to rely on the tradesmen working on the brewery as my litmus test. If they liked it, maybe everyone else would too. Batch after batch, we tweaked the recipes. Finally, we hit the mark. When the electricians gave it the thumbs-up, I knew we were good to go.

As things moved forward, my obsession with the work grew. When my aunt had first come to me, I’d only pursued the brewery out of obligation to her. But I started to get caught up in every detail—not because I had to but because I wanted to. I wasn’t hiding from the family legacy anymore. I was heading straight toward it.

We spent the next two decades growing the company. The original brewery in Guelph got expanded, and I acquired several other breweries across Canada. This allowed us to brew our beer closer to where it was sold, reducing shipping hassles. Along the way, we signed a contract with Sapporo to brew their beer for the American market right here in Guelph. By 2006, the Sleeman name was once again synonymous with Canadian beer, and that’s when I made the tough decision to sell to the brewery. But I stayed on as CEO, and I remain involved as chairman.

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Even though I’d sold the brewery, it was still very much a family business. My sons, Cooper and Quinn, started there as bottle washers and worked their way up. By 2016, both boys had finished high school and were trying to figure out their next steps in life. They wanted to start something new. Cooper has a natural talent for sales, and Quinn, who studied to be a barrel maker, was eager to put his skills to use. So we decided to honour the family’s alcohol-making legacy by opening a distillery.

A long-time employee of mine, Nick Porcellato, asked me to consider making an old stone building in Guelph our headquarters. It was built in the 1830s, around when our ancestors first started brewing. It was totally dilapidated—the ceiling had caved in, debris was strewn everywhere, and there were animal nests, scorch marks and so much grime. But, when Nick showed us around, he pointed out a section of the floor. “Pull back the carpet,” he said. Beneath it, we saw a wooden trapdoor with a brass ring. It felt like a scene out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

John in front of his new distillery
Photo by Caroline Aksich

When I pulled open the hatch, there was a makeshift ladder leading into darkness. I went down, phone light in hand, to find remnants of an illicit whiskey still. It became clear that someone had been making whiskey down there and smuggling it out through the trapdoor. There was even piping that led out to the Speed River, so evidence could be easily flushed away in case of a raid. “It was the Sleemans,” Nick said. Apparently our family had been the only people brewing in the area at the time, so Nick felt sure the whole building had belonged to them. “Your family wasn’t just making beer—they were also making whiskey.”

It felt like we were destined to get back into distilling, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. We took on the derelict mill in Guelph—a real fixer-upper, to put it mildly. Distilling isn’t for the faint-hearted: it demands a pile of cash up front, and unlike with beer, you can’t sell the stuff right away. We would have to wait many years before the first bottle was even close to ready.

Just months after we launched John Sleeman and Sons Spring Mill Distillery, the pandemic hit. Our grand plans for tastings, tours and events had to be shelved. It felt like a cruel twist of fate, but in hindsight, that downtime let us fine-tune every detail. We’d imported Canadian Douglas fir washbacks (made in Scotland using West Coast wood) to make whiskey the traditional Scottish way, and we invested in custom Forsyth stills. Quinn even sourced sherry barrels from Spain to finish the whiskey properly. If we were putting the Sleeman name on a bottle, it had to be authentic—no compromises.

Working alongside my boys has been one of the best parts of this journey. Seeing them embrace the legacy makes me proud. My dad passed away before we opened the distillery, but even when he was alive, he never acknowledged the family business. Maybe he was embarrassed about our past—I don’t know. What I do know is that we’re finally telling our story the way it was meant to be told, not just as brewers, bootleggers or businessmen but as a family. Despite the twists and turns, we’ve always found our way back to what we do best: making damn good alcohol.

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