Rwanda Craft Brewery Project fundraising tops $110,000

Craft brewery Beau’s All Natural has announced the successful end for the crowdfunding campaign it launched in September to help build a craft brewery in Rwanda. Powered by Kickstarter, the campaign had 1,138 backers and raised $110,400 CDN from donors in Canada and around the world for the Rwanda Craft Brewery Project. The funds will finance the purchase of a bottling line for the first locally owned and operated craft brewery in that country.

Future brewery owner Josephine “Fina” Uwineza, a Rwandan woman and a successful restaurateur in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, was in Canada for several weeks this fall helping kick off the Rwanda Craft Brewery Project campaign, and also to do some hands-on training at the Beau’s brewery in the village of Vankleek Hill in Eastern Ontario.

Uwineza has since returned to Kigali, but was following the campaign closely. She thanked the donors to the project in a short video, in which she talks about the special connection she feels with Canada and Canadian culture. “We are definitely connected, we are definitely similar, even miles and miles from each other. The culture of helping, and then when it comes to beer… I think we are both love sharing beer.”

Beau’s co-founder Steve Beauchesne says he is very happy about the milestone the successful fundraising campaign represents, but that the Rwanda Craft Brewery Project is by no means done. “We’ve had a great beginning to this incredible journey we’ve started – now we’ll need to take the momentum forward to the next phase. There is still more equipment, as well as shipping and installing it, and training, as well as the initial operations. But there’s no doubt this will greatly help the project move forward.”

Beau’s will be providing financing, expertise, and hands-on employee training to the start-up brewery, and has sourced a donation of equipment from Canadian brewing industry suppliers Newlands Systems Inc (NSI); however, no profits from the new brewery will flow back to Beau’s or to the other partners. Anyone interested in receiving updates on the project can sign up at www.beaus.ca/rwanda.

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