9 Mile Legacy Brewing: Saskatoon's Fifth-Generation Prairie Brewery
How two Saskatchewan farm families turned a 9-mile gap and a 100-year collaboration into one of the province's flagship craft breweries.
May 2, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Saskatoon, SK · Business · 11 min read
The Quick Picture
Walk west from downtown Saskatoon, cross the river, and you arrive in Riversdale — a neighbourhood that has spent the last decade quietly remaking itself into one of the city's most interesting commercial corridors. Sit on the patio at 402 21st Street West on a Thursday afternoon and you will find 9 Mile Legacy Brewing's Cellar Door, the public-facing retail counter for a brewery that has come a long way from the 100-litre setup it opened with in 2015.
The company describes itself, in the plainest possible language on its own About page, as "a flagship Saskatchewan brand" with "a sound international reputation for pursuing excellence." That is a confident sentence for a brewery that has been operating for just over a decade. It is also, by most reasonable measures, accurate. 9 Mile Legacy now operates two breweries, cans its beer for retail distribution across Saskatchewan, and has spun out a separate research-and-collaboration venture under the LGCY: Innovation Hub name.
What makes the company worth profiling is not just the scale it has reached. It is the particular Saskatchewan story behind it — five generations of prairie farming, a 9-mile gap between two homesteads, and a corporate lawyer who walked away from a downtown legal practice to brew beer for a living.
Two Families, Nine Miles Apart, One Hundred and Twenty Years Later
The brewery's name is a literal one. In 1907, the Moen and Pederson families both settled in the Cabri and Abbey area of Southwest Saskatchewan. Their original farms were nine miles apart. Over the intervening century, the two families have collaborated in agribusiness — in one form or another — for more than 100 years.
Shawn Moen, the brewery's Co-Founder and CEO, and Garrett Pederson, his Co-Founder, are the fifth generation of those families to work together. They are also, by their own account, the first generation to collaborate off the farm.
That detail matters. There is a long, well-documented pattern in prairie business of multi-generational farming families branching into adjacent agricultural ventures — grain handling, equipment dealerships, agronomy services, food processing. Brewing is, in some ways, a continuation of that pattern: malted barley is a prairie crop, and Saskatchewan has long supplied raw inputs to brewers across North America. What is less common is for two families connected by a century of farm collaboration to step into a value-added consumer business together, in a city, on a retail block.
That is what 9 Mile Legacy is. The name is not marketing window-dressing. It is a literal coordinate from a specific township map.
From Bay Street to Brew Tank: Shawn Moen's Pivot
Before he was running a brewery, Shawn Moen was running case files. He holds an LL.B. from the University of Saskatchewan and an LL.M. from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and he practised as a commercial lawyer before launching 9 Mile Legacy in 2015. Past roles included Associate Lawyer positions at MLT Aikins and McKercher — both well-established Western Canadian firms with deep regulatory and corporate practices.
A legal background is not a guarantee of business success, but in the heavily regulated world of Canadian alcohol — where every label, every distribution agreement, every hours-of-sale notice and every interprovincial shipment touches a regulator — it is a usefully transferable skill set. Saskatchewan has spent the last decade liberalizing parts of its liquor regime, and a generation of small Saskatchewan producers has had to navigate the resulting transition in real time.
9 Mile Legacy launched in that environment. The company's own description of its early days is that it began as a 100-litre nanobrewery, "serving growlers and pioneering the Saskatchewan craft beer movement." That is a self-description, and it is worth taking it at face value: in 2015, the Saskatchewan craft brewing scene was small, and a 100-litre tank in Riversdale was, on the timeline of the modern provincial industry, an early move.
What They Make, Where You Can Get It
9 Mile Legacy does not behave like a one-recipe brewery. Its public brand language clusters around three words on the About page — "Innovative. Collaborative. Premium." — and a four-beat tagline: "Building. Better. Beverages." Both phrases are doing the same job. They are signalling that the company sees itself as a beverage business that happens to make beer right now, not strictly a single-category brewer.
In practical terms, the company today operates two breweries and cans its beer for retail distribution. The brewery's own line on this is admirably plain: its product is sold throughout Saskatchewan "where good beer is sold." That phrasing is doing two things at once. It is a wink at the consumer, and it is an accurate description of how craft beer in the province actually moves — through licensed retail, restaurants, and on-premise accounts.
The Riversdale Cellar Door is the company's direct-to-consumer counter. It is the place to taste what is currently in tank, see what has been canned, and pick something up to take home. For specific stock, releases, and tap-list updates, the company's website at 9milelegacy.com is the source of truth — release calendars and seasonal cans move quickly enough that any specific list in an article like this would be out of date before it was read.
LGCY: A Separate Lane for Innovation
One of the more interesting strategic choices 9 Mile Legacy has made is to spin off its more experimental work under a separate brand. The company calls it LGCY: Innovation Hub, and it has its own dedicated email address — lgcy@9milelegacy.com — for inquiries.
LGCY is described as a venture for "innovative and collaborative beverage projects." In a category where most small breweries simply expand their core line whenever they want to try something different, carving out a distinct sub-brand for experimentation is a notable decision. It allows the parent brewery to keep its flagship identity disciplined — the cans you can find across Saskatchewan should stand for a consistent thing — while giving the team a separate creative lane for one-offs, partnerships, and category-bending releases.
It also signals the broader ambition implied by the company's "Building. Better. Beverages." line. A beverage business is a different thing than a beer brand, and LGCY is the part of the company that explicitly leaves the door open to whatever comes next.
Riversdale: The Neighbourhood Behind the Cellar Door
9 Mile Legacy's address — 402 21st Street West, Saskatoon, SK S7M 0W4 — sits in the Riversdale district, immediately west of downtown across the South Saskatchewan River. Riversdale has been one of the most-watched neighbourhood-scale revitalization stories in the prairies for the past decade or so: a historic streetcar district that has gradually attracted independent food, retail, design, and arts tenants alongside its long-standing residential base.
A brewery is a particular kind of neighbourhood anchor. It is not just a retail tenant. It is a small piece of light industry that produces a tangible, regional product, employs people in skilled production roles, and gives the surrounding street a Wednesday-afternoon-to-Friday-evening rhythm. The 9 Mile Legacy Cellar Door's hours — Wednesday to Friday, 2pm to 6pm — are deliberately unfussy. They are the hours of a working brewery that opens its front door for customers who want to meet the producer directly, not the hours of a full-service bar.
The office side of the operation runs Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, closed statutory holidays, which is the schedule of a serious commercial business that happens to also pour pints at the counter.
The PRC Editorial View
What makes 9 Mile Legacy worth a long profile rather than a passing mention is the way the brewery has resisted both of the failure modes that catch a lot of Canadian craft producers in their second decade.
The first failure mode is staying too small. A nanobrewery that never graduates from growler-fill volumes and never builds the operational discipline to package, distribute, and supply a province at scale eventually plateaus and gets squeezed by both larger craft players and the macros. 9 Mile Legacy has clearly chosen to scale: two breweries, canned distribution across Saskatchewan, a defined commercial sales contact at sales@9milelegacy.com.
The second failure mode is scaling without identity. Plenty of regional breweries, once they hit canned-distribution volume, drift into being functionally indistinguishable from any other mid-size craft producer in the country. 9 Mile Legacy's identity — fifth-generation prairie families, a literal nine-mile origin story, a Riversdale Cellar Door, an explicitly separated innovation arm in LGCY — is unusually specific. It is the kind of story that does not exist anywhere else, because it cannot.
That combination — operational seriousness plus a specific, non-portable origin — is what the company is referring to when it calls itself "a flagship Saskatchewan brand." It is a defensible claim.
How to Visit, Order, or Get in Touch
The Cellar Door is open to the public Wednesday to Friday, 2pm to 6pm, at 402 21st Street West, Saskatoon, SK S7M 0W4. That is the easiest way to taste what is currently in tank and pick up cans to take home.
For wholesale and on-premise accounts — bars, restaurants, and licensed retailers across Saskatchewan looking to carry 9 Mile Legacy beer — commercial inquiries go to sales@9milelegacy.com. Private keg requests go to cellardoor@9milelegacy.com. General inquiries can be directed to hello@9milelegacy.com, and the LGCY: Innovation Hub team can be reached at lgcy@9milelegacy.com. The brewery's main phone line is 1-306-373-BEER (1-306-373-2337).
For up-to-date information on what is in stock, what is releasing next, and where to find 9 Mile Legacy beer across the province, the company's website at https://9milelegacy.com is the authoritative source. Social channels include Facebook (/9milelegacy), Instagram (@9milelegacy), X (@9milelegacy), LinkedIn (/company/9-mile-legacy-brewing-co-ltd), and Untappd (9milelegacybrewing).
Key takeaways
- Founded in 2015 in Saskatoon's Riversdale district by Shawn Moen and Garrett Pederson, beginning as a 100-litre nanobrewery.
- The name comes from the 9-mile distance between the founders' families' original 1907 farms near Cabri and Abbey, Saskatchewan.
- Co-founder Shawn Moen left a commercial law career — including roles at MLT Aikins and McKercher — to launch the brewery.
- Now operates two breweries with cans distributed across Saskatchewan.
- Cellar Door at 402 21st Street West is open Wednesday to Friday, 2pm to 6pm.
- Runs a separate innovation venture, LGCY: Innovation Hub, for experimental and collaborative beverage projects.
- Describes itself as "a flagship Saskatchewan brand" pursuing "Building. Better. Beverages."
Frequently asked questions
- What is 9 Mile Legacy Brewing?
- 9 Mile Legacy Brewing is an independent craft brewery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, founded in 2015 by Shawn Moen and Garrett Pederson. It launched as a 100-litre nanobrewery in the city's Riversdale district and now operates two breweries, with cans distributed across the province.
- Where is 9 Mile Legacy Brewing located?
- The brewery's World HQ and Cellar Door retail space is at 402 21st Street West, Saskatoon, SK S7M 0W4, in the Riversdale district just west of downtown Saskatoon.
- What does the 9 Mile Legacy name mean?
- In 1907, the Moen and Pederson families both settled near Cabri and Abbey in Southwest Saskatchewan. Their original farms were nine miles apart, and the two families have collaborated in agribusiness for more than 100 years. Co-founders Shawn Moen and Garrett Pederson are the fifth generation of those families to work together — and the first to do so off the farm.
- What are the Cellar Door hours?
- The Cellar Door retail space is open to the public Wednesday to Friday, 2pm to 6pm. The office runs Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and is closed on statutory holidays.
- Who is Shawn Moen?
- Shawn Moen is the Co-Founder and CEO of 9 Mile Legacy Brewing. He holds an LL.B. from the University of Saskatchewan and an LL.M. from Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, and previously practised as a commercial lawyer with roles at MLT Aikins and McKercher before launching the brewery in 2015.
- Where can I buy 9 Mile Legacy beer?
- Beer is canned and distributed across Saskatchewan "where good beer is sold," in the brewery's own words. The Cellar Door at 402 21st Street West sells direct to the public during posted hours. For the most current list of where to find specific releases, check the brewery's website at 9milelegacy.com.
- What is LGCY: Innovation Hub?
- LGCY is a separate sub-brand and venture run by 9 Mile Legacy for innovative and collaborative beverage projects. It allows the company to keep its flagship beer line disciplined while giving the team a distinct creative lane for experimental and partnership work. Inquiries go to lgcy@9milelegacy.com.
- How do I contact 9 Mile Legacy for wholesale or events?
- Commercial and wholesale inquiries go to sales@9milelegacy.com. Private keg inquiries go to cellardoor@9milelegacy.com. General inquiries can be sent to hello@9milelegacy.com or by phone at 1-306-373-BEER (1-306-373-2337).
← Back to PRC Newsroom · Public Relations Canada
Enable JavaScript to view the interactive version of this page.