When Ryley Schuld was going to post-secondary school in Saskatchewan, he saw just how much people in that province loved the Old Style Pilsner.

But he said even there, “most people [didn’t] realize it came from Lethbridge,” said Schuld whose family farm 30 kilometres north-east of the southern Alberta city.

One hundred years after Fritz Sick brewed the first batch of the now iconic beer in Lethbridge, Schuld is one of several brewery memorabilia collectors, community members and former employees who contributed items to A Smile in Every Bottle.

The exhibition at Lethbridge’s Galt Museum and Archives is all about Old Style Pilsner and the brewery that made it in the city until it closed in 1990. After that closure, Old Pilsner was produced elsewhere.

“Of course, the recipe was changed ever so slightly when we were no longer using Lethbridge water,” said curator Stephanie Laine Hamilton.

She says over 35 years after Sick’s Brewery closed its doors, there’s still a lot of nostalgia for it in Lethbridge. But Sick’s story is bigger than Lethbridge.

“Our local history is maybe larger than just local. It’s regional, also national,” said Hamilton.

Part of Canadian history, says curator

According to the Galt Museum, Sick’s started out in 1901 as the Alberta Brewing & Malting Co., a small operation run and managed by Fritz Sick and his family.

Many breweries struggled financially during the alcohol prohibition years of the 1910’s and 1920’s. But Sick’s was able to stay afloat by getting creative and pivoting to making pop and other non-alcoholic beverages.

This meant when prohibition ended, the Lethbridge brewery was in the position to buy up struggling breweries across Western Canada and the northwestern United States.

The operation was was eventually bought by Canadian beer giant Molson in 1958.

“Without the acquisition of Sick’s, Molson wouldn’t have been able to break into the western beer market,” said Hamilton.

The brewery was a major employer and a key part of the city’s economy for the nearly 90 years it was open.

Pat Thurston worked in the brewery office for over 20 years until the day it closed. She says the workers were well taken care of financially, but it was a good place to work for more reasons than just that.

“Everybody in the brewery knew each other. They didn’t only know each other from the workplace, they knew each other outside. So it was, it was a happy place to go to work,” she said.

As she walked through the exhibition at the Galt, Thurston reminisced about good times at staff parties and softball games.

She says that sense of community didn’t end when Sick’s closed. 

“For probably a good 30 to 35 years after, we continued to get together as brewery employees,” said Thurston.

After the brewery building was demolished Thurston says she wasn’t able to drive past the old building site anymore.

“It was so sad that that all had to be destroyed,” she said.

Brewery’s impact still felt decades later

Even though the “House of Lethbridge” — as it’s referred to on Old Style Pilsner cans — is no longer standing, the brewery’s fingerprints are still all over the city.

Whether that’s through Brewery Gardens, a former refuse dump near the site of the brewery that was turned into a garden, or the south Lethbridge community centre that bears Fritz Sick’s name thanks to a donation from the family.

“Everyone in Lethbridge has a story about old style pilsner,” said Hamilton.

Schuld says he plans to do his bit to keep that memory alive.

His collection of brewery-related items includes old bottles, labels and documents that are now over 120 years old.

He says in the future, he plans to create a museum of his own dedicated to Sick’s Brand other pieces of local history.

“I think it’s important to know where all this came from and how we got here and to not lose that. So much of history and artifacts are lost and without the stories with them, it’s hard to know what they are. So I think it’s important to save,” he said.