Tilray and AB-InBev to hit Canada with CBD drinks in late 2019

Canada | Ten months into the partnership between Canadian cannabis company Tilray and the world’s largest brewer AB-InBev, they are ready to launch CBD-infused drinks in December. Beverages containing the psychoactive cannabis compound THC will be made available at a later stage, as they require more time to research.

Canadian media report that one of the challenges researchers encountered was how to keep the active ingredients stable and potent throughout the drinks’ shelf life. So far, they have only managed to formulate beverage recipes with CBD, the non-psychoactive compound, because THC has proven much more unstable.

At the moment there is no timeline as to when THC beverages will be ready.

Developing cannabis drinks has been a challenge in other ways too, not least because ingredients that are concentrated as an oil are hard to mix with water into a beverage. Moreover, there was the issue of a lag in onset time that ingestible cannabis, such as pot brownies, can have when compared with smokables.

Canada legalised cannabis for recreational use in October last year, starting with dried and fresh flower, seeds, plants and oils, but legislation governing edibles, beverages, vapes and topicals only came into force on 17 October 2019. Due to the mandatory 60-day notice period companies must provide to Health Canada, a government agency, the earliest CBD beverages or THC-infused hand lotions can legally go on sale in Canada is mid-December.

For the time being, the partners prefer to keep shtoom about their CBD line of beverages. All they are prepared to disclose is that they will not look or taste like a non-alcoholic beer. Reportedly, they are looking at sparkling, slightly sweet beverages, and teas.