Kazuko Komatsu, CEO, Pacific Western Brewing Company

Kazuko Komatsu, Pacific Western Brewing Company | BCBusiness

Beer fads may come and go, but diminutive Kazuko Komatsu has run B.C.’s biggest independent brewery for the past 20 years.

Her roughly five-foot, pencil-thin frame is barely noticeable in a room full of people. Her English is just short of painful to decipher if there is a lot of noise in the room. Many simply offer a polite smile, a nod or an awkward laugh before excusing themselves to an easier-to-understand conversation. I know, because that’s what I did the first two times I met Kazuko Komatsu, CEO of Prince George’s Pacific Western Brewing Co. Ltd. And I would learn that, as Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman, dismissing Komatsu is a “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”


It’s not her Order of B.C. that’s impressive. Or the fact that she was the first female brewery owner and the first Asian-Canadian brewery owner in Canada. It’s the life lessons that Komatsu learned from her father, about perspectives and balance, that make her fascinating.


“My father taught me to be able to look at things differently,” says Komatsu, who is celebrating 20 years as owner of Pacific Western Brewing. “To be able to go into situations with no preconceived notions, which allows me to see things as they are, not as others expect them to be.” 


For example, Komatsu says, when you ask most people in Canada to describe a tree, they usually depict a typical ash tree that is commonly drawn by a child. “They rarely describe a tree with branches that grow down,” she says wryly. “Even if people can describe it, most can’t name it.”


Komatsu explains that it’s her ability to see what others cannot that allowed her to take Pacific Western, which was founded in 1957, from the verge of bankruptcy in 1991, to B.C.’s largest and longest-established independent brewery. “Only one banker would lend me money to buy it,” she says. Since then, the brewery’s output has almost quadrupled, from 40,000 to 150,000 hectolitres a year. Sales also grew to $18.9 million in 2010, a 24 per cent increase from 2009. 


Komatsu’s unfettered perspective also opened the way to expand Pacific Western into Natureland Products Ltd. in 1997, a line of specialty health products and beverages, including Energymax, Vitalmax and Relaxmax, that are produced in her brewery.


But despite all of her successes, Komatsu is quick to point out that she didn’t do it alone. She insists her employees were instrumental in the company’s change of fortune in 1999, when they reduced their wages so Pacific Western could survive changes to the liquor retail system. The move paid off and Komatsu rewarded her employees by paying them back their lost wages as well as bonuses. “Life is about balance,” says Komatsu, who is Pacific Western’s seventh and longest-running owner. “You must give back to keep things in balance.” 


It is her father’s philosophy of balance that is the guiding principle behind Pacific Western’s numerous environmental initiatives. The company’s Forests for Tomorrow program has already planted 100,000 trees, with 50,000 more planned for spring 2012. Referring to the devastation resulting from the pine-beetle infestation, she says, “When I flew over Prince George and all of the mountains were red, I wanted to do something. I wanted to make up for the pine beetles.” 


Komatsu also wanted to help restore the key ingredient in all Pacific Western products: water, which Pacific Western draws from a natural aquifer below the Prince George processing plant. That love of water led her to create the B.C. Waters Clean-Up Challenge, a $25,000 campaign to help clean up lakes, streams and rivers in the province. 


“I care about the environment. You are living in the environment as part of it. You must give back to it. The environment and people should embrace each other,” she says passionately. 


Komatsu says her proudest moment came in 2005, when Pacific Western became the first Canadian brewery to win a gold medal at the Industry International Awards in Munich. She credits the award with proving the quality of Pacific Western’s beer on a global scale. This was an immense improvement for a brewery that was known for inconsistent quality when Komatsu took over, and she has made ensuring consistent quality of all the company’s products her first priority. Komatsu says it was important that the employees understood the quality of the beer was the basis for everything. It is also why she was so proud when Pacific Western became the first brewery in North America to receive ISO 9002 quality certification.


While Pacific Western is currently undergoing a $1-million renovation, Komatsu doesn’t expect major changes in the next 20 years. She has no interest in seeing Pacific Western grow to become a major Canadian brewer, but instead prefers to remain fifth-largest overall among B.C.’s breweries, behind the local plants of giant national and multinational brewers. “We are the people’s beer. The people’s brewery,” she says with pride. “We may increase to 200,000 hectolitres per year someday, but that’s likely it.”