It was in the year 1818 that a 21-year old Yorkshire farmer named Thomas Carling arrived in Upper Canada to establish a farm. He served as a volunteer in the 1837 Rebellion and started his brewery in 1843 using a recipe from his native Yorkshire. His home-brewed beer was a great local success and the Carling company was established in London, Ontario in 1840.
The brewery consisted of two potash kettles and a horse to turn the grinding wheel. In a short period of time, he was employing six men, along with his two sins Will and John, age eighteen and twelve, as helpers.
His sons nurtured the business, built a new brewery in 1879, which burned down shortly thereafter and then recovered to create a joint stock corporation in 1882 called The Carling Brewery & Malting Company of London Ltd. Over the rest of the century, Carling enlarged its sales agency network into a coast to coast operation,
Many years later the brewery was acquired by E.P Taylor’s Canadian Breweries Ltd., which became Carling O’Keeffe, thereafter merging into Molson, which would become Molson-Coors.
Under Taylor, Carling Black Label became the world’s first beer brand to be brewed on a mass international scale. In Canada, he promoted Black label as his flagship lager from the 1930s onward.
History of Carling brewery
