Earlier this week, the war in Ukraine reached the western city of Lviv, but the conflict isn't preventing one business owner from brewing beer.
"Two or three rockets, they targeted an oil and petrol storage place," says Yuri Zastavny, who owns Pravda Brewery in the targeted city.
Air-raid sirens warned his employees of the incoming attack and they managed to make it to a bomb shelter.
"They heard the earth trembling and they heard the explosions and once they left they saw a huge black smoke coming out of the place," Zastavny says.
Lviv is a city of 8 million people. Zastavny estimates another 350,000 Ukranians are now taking shelter in the area.
As a way to raise money for humanitarian efforts, he has provided four of his beer recipes to microbreweries around the world, asking them to brew and sell his product.
"I’m very thankful for international brewers to stand side-by-side with Ukraine by doing what they do," says Zastavny.
Danny O'Hearn, the owner of Nine Locks Brewery in Dartmouth, N.S., is one of the estimated 500 brewers around the globe to take up the cause.
The beer will sell for $7.50 a can with all the proceeds going to help people in Ukraine.
"We made 20 barrels so we should be looking at somewhere around the 4,500 range," O’Hearn says.
There have been around two dozen calls per day from people asking for the release date of the beer -- so many, in fact, O'Hearn expects there will be a lineup when they open their doors on Thursday at 10 a.m.
"It’s been crazy, I have never seen anything like this in the beer business," says O’Hearn.
In the early days of the invasion, Zastavny stopped brewing and began making Molotov cocktails for civil defence forces to use.
Pravda is now back to brewing beer as the violence continues.
"You may think it’s not the best time to brew beer, but actually it is, because brewing is like marriage or giving birth to a child -- it’s an act of hope. That’s what we do, we brew beer now and we hope that we will drink our batches that we brewed in the last couple weeks, in a country that has already won the war," Zastavny says.
