Sleeman Breweries
brewing company based in Guelph, Ontario
Sleeman Breweries is a Japanese-owned Canadian brewery founded by John Warren Sleeman in 1988 in Guelph, Ontario. The company is the third-largest brewing company in Canada. Along with its own Sleeman brands, the company produces under licence the Stroh's family of brands, Maclays Ale and Sapporo Premium beers for sale in Canada. The company's parent Sapporo owns 4.2 per cent of Ontario's primary beer retailer The Beer Store.
The company is the re-establishment of a line of brewing companies owned by the Sleeman family dating back to the 1830s. The original Sleeman Breweries was established in the 1850s and operated until it lost its licence due to smuggling and tax evasion, for 50 years, in 1933.
John W. Sleeman re-established the brewery in the 1980s using the original company recipes. In 2006, Sleeman Breweries was purchased by Sapporo Brewery for CA$400 million. John W. Sleeman remained as CEO until 2010 when he relinquished that role and was made Chairman of the company.
History
John H. Sleeman was born in Cornwall, England, in 1805 and came to Upper Canada (present day Ontario) in 1834, first settling in St.
“Sleeman Breweries” enters the record as brewing company based in Guelph, Ontario. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sleeman, Breweries and brewing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3486605. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1933, 2006 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sleeman Breweries” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.