Many people assume when they look at our website or walk into our large brewpub that Prairie Dog Brewing is some sort of chain restaurant owned by a larger restaurant group. That couldn’t be further from the truth — we are a fiercely independent family-owned and operated business that was started by two families of regular, down-to-earth people that we call our “Founders”. These are Gerad and Laura Coles, Tyler Potter and his wife Sarah Goertzen, and Jay Potter.
Before we opened in 2018, none of our founders had ownership or high-level management experience in restaurants and breweries, but all of them were unified in their passion for this undertaking, and by a strong set of common ideals and core values. Take a minute to get to know each founder better, below.
Gerad Coles
Founder, President, Brewmaster and Restaurant General Manager
Prairie Dog Brewing founder, President and Brewmaster Gerad Coles. 
Gerad hand-bottling pilot beer in his home garage. 
Gerad Coles, Founder and Brewmaster of Prairie Dog Brewing mashing in at his California garage during the homebrew days. 
Brewmaster Gerad working to clean out our mash tun after brewing our Irish Red. 
Brewmaster Gerad adds carrots to a cask of a special carrot-cake beer. 
T-shirt design #2 has our Prairie Dog crest in bright orange on a base of brown cotton. Gerad is also sporting our 1.89-litre Prairie Dog growler and a glass of pumpkin spiced winter ale. 
Before we put the metalwork up for our exterior overhead door frame, we primed both sides, which we hope will cut down on the amount of rusting that occurs. Gerad used an air sprayer to do this. Gerad works to build a base for our kitchen cooler. 
Tyler and Gerad look over our drawings and formulate a plan for topping the walls around the brewery with hardwood. 
Gerad paints the West wall with a large commercial roller cage and poll. We sourced all the paint from Benjamin Moore Paints, just two blocks down Centre St. from us. Gerad signing the fabled table passed on to us by Village Brewing, Common Crown, and Cold Garden.
Gerad is a man of many hats. He was born and raised in Calgary and before founding Prairie Dog Brewing with his family and friends. Gerad earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering Technology and had a 14-year career managing operations for tech companies, as well as having countless interests and hobbies, including gardening, photography, guitar, cycling, hiking, woodworking, and graphic design. Gerad lived in Silicon Valley, California with his wife Laura for four years, and that’s where he got into brewing beer at home, teaching himself and eventually his friend Tyler, how to brew beer on the weekends. It was this bond over beer that eventually led to the founding of Prairie Dog Brewing. Gerad and his wife Laura have a spunky little girl named Madeline, who you’ll see around the pub with the couple often.
Today, Gerad’s role as President is focused on ensuring that our company is sustainable and always moving in a direction that provides more opportunity for our staff and value for our customers, acting as a creative leader with a talent for forward-looking vision and strategy. Gerad also heads up our admin teams (Finance and HR) and is ultimately in charge of making sure we have enough money in the bank to pay our bills. Gerad assists Laura with photography and graphic design, while maintaining technical infrastructure, such as this website. Gerad’s talents include creative writing, and he is responsible for much of the content on this website, our staff training manuals, etc.
Gerad can be a humble, quiet introvert, so you may not even realize he’s in leadership until you’ve been around for a while, especially because you’ll often see him bussing tables or running drinks and food. During busy times, Gerad spends as much as 120 hours a week at the pub, where he works with our other founders and managers to ensure that they have whatever they need to be successful in their endeavours.
As Brewmaster, Gerad is in charge of creating most of our beer recipes and governing the process of how we make beer, although he rarely is involved in day-to-day brewing activities. Gerad makes the tough calls about which beers will go on tap after brewing and which beers will get dumped down the drain due to quality issues. Gerad is deeply committed to brewing world-class beer and has a very good flavour palate. Gerad is a beer geek and always happy to share his knowledge with anyone who wants to know something, so please feel free to ask him questions!
Jay Potter
Founder and Executive Chef
Jay is our Executive Chef. He was also born in London, Ontario and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. Jay and Tyler, our VP of Brewery Operations, are brothers (Jay’s the eldest). Jay has almost 25 years of restaurant experience and earned his Red Seal accreditation in 2011. Since then, Jay also gained several years of experience working as a sales rep at Sysco, the food logistics company that we use for many of our kitchen ingredients.
Jay’s food-service resume reads like an eclectic music library and he’s done a little of everything, from fast food to high-end cuisine. As our Exec. Chef, Jay is the creative engine behind our menu and his attention to detail shows in every aspect of the food we put on our customers’ plates. Jay is also responsible for maintaining food costing for our menu items, sourcing ingredients, and building the product specs that ensure that our kitchen continues to maintain our current, high standards.
Jay is a self-taught barbecue pit master, and takes the job very seriously, which you can see and taste every time you try one of our delicious barbecued meats. Here’s a video of Jay explaining when and why he wraps our pork butts during the cooking process:
Jay is a people-focused manager and he sees the best in everyone that works for him. He works closely with our Sous Chef, Simon, who is in charge of the production aspects of the kitchen such as staffing, line/prep coordination and food ordering. You’ll often see Jay working in the kitchen on the line or doing prep to take some of the load off of his team and train them up.
Jay’s an easy-going guy who loves to watch and play baseball, and he tries to make it out of the pub at least once a week to play pool. If he’s not in the kitchen or helping out on Expo, you’ll often see him sitting at the bar having a beer with a member of our staff. Feel free to join him on the bar after your shift, Jay loves to get to know everyone on our team.
Prairie Dog Executive Chef Jay Potter. 
Founder and Chef Jay Potter works to roll house-made dough into pretzel bites. 
A major achievement for Jay was getting our dish area walls covered in a fiberglass-reinfoced plastic. Jay paints the c-channel steel that would end up in our ceiling to hang our “Octotron” from. Jay helped Tyler and Gerad empty our first barrel of an Imperial Stout pilot batch into soda kegs. The bottom of the barrel was pretty soupy and it ended up getting all over Jay. Jay picks hops from a friend’s back yard. We used these hops in a wet-hopped version of Super B. Jay Potter works with his father, Gerry, to mash in one of our pilot beer batches in Sarah and Tyler’s garage. Jay drives forklift and holds up metalwork that Tyler created for our warehouse door, so he could test the fit. In this photo, Jay is working to cut a large piece of steel that makes up our roll-up door exterior frame. 
While visiting Toronto over the holidays, Jay met up with Terrance Hill, pit master for Beach Hill Smokehouse, a newly opened barbecue restaurant in the Toronto area, who purchased the same BBQ pit we have.
Tyler Potter
Founder, Head Brewer and VP Brewing Operations
Head Brewer and VP Operations, Tyler Potter. Tyler during a brew day back in Silicon Valley. Tyler adds habanero to a whisky barrel containing what would eventually become our Fire Whistle pale ale. Tyler working with blended ginger in the Prairie Dog brewery for our Ginger Lime Gose. Tyler at the helm of our trusty forklift, Wesley. Tyler is moving our glycol chiller outside to make room for other activities. 
Tyler looks unsure about the usefulness of this mirror on our Toyota forklift. Tyler signs the fabled table passed along to us by Village Brewery, Common Crown, and Cold Garden. The exciting/terrifying moment of signing the lease for our location Tyler and Gerad work to install custom wall bases that they fabricated for the pre-fab walk-in cooler that we bought used last year. Gerad and Tyler mash in a pilot batch of stout in Gerad’s California garage during the early days. Tyler grinds metal work for our big overhead door frame. Sarah and Tyler hauling filtered water up the driveway (from our neighbor’s house, where there isn’t a softener).
Tyler, or Ty for short, is our VP Operations and Head Brewer. Ty was born in London, Ontario and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and began a promising career in tech and computer programming before being snapped up by Google and moving to Silicon Valley, followed shortly afterwards by Sarah Goertzen, now his wife. Ty is a sharp thinker and outdoorsman with loads of creativity and problem-solving skills, and he excels at making processes run more efficiently and smoothly. We often call Ty the “fixer”, because he is great at seeing a problem or need and quickly putting something in place to solve it. Ty and Sarah have a beautiful little girl named Alison, who you’ll see around the pub frequently.
In his role as VP Operations, Ty handles our facilities (such as coordinating fire inspections, waste removal and maintenance of our many mechanical systems), insurance, permits and legal stuff like our trademark. Ty also works closely with Gerad and the other founders and managers to fill gaps in our operations and make improvements to processes.
As Head Brewer, Ty is in charge of the production of our beer, including anticipating demand based on restaurant sales, wholesale keg sales, seasonal trends and upcoming marketing campaigns and pushes from the leadership team. Ty coordinates brewery staffing, ingredient purchases, brew days, brewery/equipment cleaning, kegging operations, our wholesale sales program and much more. Ty also does a lot of brewing, but we are working to scale that back to give him more time to focus on his young family and our high-level operations.
Ty is at the pub much of the time and you’ll often see him working in the brewery or out on the floor helping out the Front of House.
Many people confuse Tyler with his brother, Jay (our Executive Chef), which is a bit of a pet peeve for Tyler. Although there are many similarities in their appearance, we can confirm that these are indeed two different people. See below:
Head Brewer and VP Brewery Operations, Tyler Potter. Prairie Dog Executive Chef Jay Potter.
Sarah Goertzen
Founder and Director of Quality
Sarah is our Director of Quality. Born in Alberta and raised in Ontario, Sarah was a very bright kid who grew up reading lots of books and developing an interest in the sciences at an early age. As an adult, Sarah earned her bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and later her Master’s degree in the same before she moved to California. In California, Sarah launched an exciting career that began in battery research and moved on to pharmaceutical research and testing. Even after she returned to Canada to found Prairie Dog with her husband, Tyler, Sarah has continued to maintain her career in the sciences, working for a medical cannabis startup to assist them in developing reliable testing methods that meet stringent regulatory requirements.
In her free time, Sarah volunteers as a Girl Guide leader and loves to spend time in the outdoors. Recently, Sarah became a mother and spends most of her free time with her young daughter, Alison.
At Prairie Dog, Sarah’s focus is on developing a reliable, robust and sustainable quality management program that spans our entire business. Sarah has applied her expertise to everything from hiring and on-boarding processes through health and safety, and developed checklists and procedural documentation for all areas of our business. Sarah also spends much of her time in the brewery quality lab running analysis on our beers and ingredients.
Sarah has worked tirelessly to document and implement repeatable processes for yeast counting and viability testing, and she works closely with Tyler and Gerad to document and improve brewery processes.
The overarching goal of Sarah’s work is to ensure that we maintain a very high standard for our products and services over time, so that every time a guest tries our beer or sits down to eat, they get the same, top-notch experience.
Although her credentials can be intimidating, Sarah is friendly and fun and she loves to meet customers and talk about our business. You are sure to see Sarah because she often works shifts in the Front of House to help our managers out or get to know our customers and staff better.
2The walls and ceiling throughout our space were all painted a dark teal green, which was really getting on our nerves and didn’t match our tastes at all. Here Sarah applies an espresso-coloured brown paint on our North wall, near the ceiling. Here Sarah and Gerad work to move our brewhouse kettle out of the way of the trades. The great thing about the scale of our system is that a simple pallet jack is sufficient to move all of the vessels around. Sarah and Tyler hauling filtered water up the driveway (from our neighbor’s house, where there isn’t a softener).
Laura Coles
Founder and Director of Marketing and Public Relations
Prairie Dog Director of Marketing and Public Relations, Laura Coles Marketing and PR Director, Laura Coles Laura uses a router to trim the laminate countertop above the pony wall that separates the brewery from the dining room. Gerad and his wife Laura mashing in a pilot batch of Prairie Dog beer. The front side of t-shirt design #1, sported by Laura. The shirt has Alby the Prairie Dog holding a pint of delicious beer. Laura poses from a ferry in the San Francisco Bay Laura home-brewing a batch of beer. Laura signs the fabled table passed onto us by Village Brewing, Common Crown and Cold Garden Laura and Gerad worked late into the night to get a good start on our bar cabinetry, where mug club members’ individualized beer mugs will be stored.
Laura is our Director of Marketing and Public Relations (PR). She was born in Edmonton, AB, but was raised on Vancouver Island where she eventually found her way into customer service for a Victoria-based book publisher before making the leap to the mainland to work in customer support at iStockphoto, a Calgary tech startup at the time (where she met Gerad). Laura and Gerad also ran a successful photography and canvas printing business until they shut it down because it wasn’t enjoyable anymore. After moving to California with Gerad, Laura became involved in organizing a large San Francisco Bay area women’s meetup group (where she met Sarah Goertzen) and expanded her skills into digital marketing and social media.
Laura is a creative who loves free-form art like sculpting and making clay pottery. Laura also enjoys travel and the outdoors, especially swimming, hiking, sailing and camping.
At Prairie Dog, Laura is in charge of all aspects of marketing such as online, print, and radio advertising, and organizing our involvement in festivals and events. Laura also designs and orders all of the lovely merchandise available at Prairie Dog, like our apparel, coasters and glassware, and she has hand-made all of our tap handles up to this point. Laura works very hard to ensure that we continue to operate in a manner than is consistent with our culture and brand.
On the Public Relations side of her role, Laura is the first point of contact for most of our online inquiries and comments. Laura reads and responds to nearly all of our Google reviews, social media messages and website-based emails. Laura is the creative mind behind our posts on social media and she and Gerad share the role of being our resident photographers and graphic artists. Laura handles inbound requests from charities, sporting leagues and teams, and coordinates most of the events and activities going on at the pub, both internally and customer generated.
Because events have taken on a life of their own at Prairie Dog and grown to take the majority of her time, Laura is working to transition event coordination off of herself and onto a resident staff expert so that she can spend more of her time on the marketing aspects of her role. You can find Laura working in the dining room or back office at Prairie Dog 3 to 4 days a week.
