Red Cap Ale

Carling's ale flagship by the late 1930s (a La Patrie advertisement of 9 January 1938 names only Red Cap where 1932 ads had it under Carling Amber); brewed at Waterloo for years and, from 1953, at a new Montreal plant built for Black Label and Red Cap. The Carling Red Cap Forever campaign — Terry O'Malley, Vickers & Benson — began on television on 1 July 1967 with an anthem sung at rinks and recesses; "for a time, Red Cap held as much as 40% of the Ontario market" (Brock University's O'Malley exhibit; the agency's figure). It "fared poorly throughout the '70s, under new ownership, and eventually disappeared". About 1994 Molson, which still held the brand, sold the "68-year-old" label and the original recipe to Brick Brewing of Waterloo — which puts the label's origin about 1927, a derivation not a sourced date — and Red Cap was back in Brewers' Retail from the autumn of 1994 with the original brewmaster, Bill Barnes. Brick's own application for RED CAP ALE (filed 1992) was abandoned in 1996. Waterloo Brewing, Brick's successor under Carlsberg Canada, does not list Red Cap on 24 September 2026. When the first run ended and when the revival ended: both UNKNOWN. A viewer wrote "Red Cap was popular"; the archive can now say how popular, and roughly when.