Railside Brewing is Kelowna’s newest brewery, opening its doors earlier this month. This marks the city’s 16th brewery.

Owners Rob Leinemann and Matt Grieve launched the brewery in just eight shot months and it all started in Leinemann’s yard:

“We both love drinking beer, that’s always a good start,” he said. “I’ve been a home brewer for the last three years, just brewing beer in my driveway.”

“I’ve had my eye on this building for quite a few years with that in the back of my mind in potentially doing something,” said Leinemann.

‘I was a carpenter, and Matt’s an electrician so we built like 95 percent of this place ourselves,” said Leinemann.

The name the two put together stemmed from the Okanagan Rail Trail just off of Clement Avenue:

“We wanted rail-something; it was going to be railway, rail-line and then Matt came up with Railside and we loved it,” said Leinemann. To add to the rail concept, Railside has seven beers on the menu, the most popular being the Summer Ale.

“We have small batch beer here and my homebrew system is smaller than what we have here so I had scale them up but I took my favourites from what I was brewing at home,” said Leinemann. “Our Summer Ale, which is my favorite beer to brew at home, we scaled that up to a thousand-litre batch. Our other (beers), we’ve been working with a brewing consultant who’s been helping us out just to develop some of our other recipes.”