Craft Beer Rescues Canadian Brewing Industries

The BAC represents between 95 and 97 per cent of breweries in Canada, including some smaller craft breweries. Domestic brewers employ almost 13,000 Canadians and account for 1.2 per cent of Canada’s total employment. The beer industry generates $4.3 billion in taxes annually and strongly contributes to the nation’s economy. However, over the last 20 years, Canada has lost ownership of larger breweries like Sleeman and Labatt, which has ultimately led to the loss of hundreds of jobs due to plants closing and increased global outsourcing.

Considering these losses, there is a lot to be said for the smaller guys — the breweries that are doing it differently. “When Mill Street started [in 2002], there certainly weren’t many craft brewers in Ontario, so we like to think we kind of laid the groundwork and opened the doors for others to come in,” explains Steve Abrams, co-founder of Mill Street Brewery. “There wasn’t much exciting beer being made, and we launched with our Organic, Tankhouse and Coffee Porter. The Organic we like to think of as a gateway to craft beer for people who aren’t really sure about craft beer.”

And a gateway it was. By 2006, Mill Street had to move its production brewery to a larger venue in Scarborough, having outgrown its original space in the Distillery District.

According to Abrams, craft beer has seen a lot of expansion. Because craft breweries require more manual labour, they require more people and therefore generate more jobs. “If you look at it like this, Mill Street was three guys in 2003, and now there are a few hundred,” he observed.

The Ontario Craft Brewing Association (OCB) is a group of craft brewers working together to establish a niche industry within the larger beer sector. The OCB claims that craft brewers have generated an estimated 600 brewery jobs and 2,400 related jobs within the industry. The jobs created by craft breweries account for 20 per cent of the entire brewing industry — despite the fact that craft brewers make up only about 5 per cent of the Ontario brewing industry.

As the OCB states, there are approximately 50 craft breweries in Ontario, at least 30 of which are OCB members, including Mill Street, Amsterdam and Cameron’s Brewing Company.

Bill Coleman, president of Cameron’s Brewing, explains their mandate. “The OCB is a great group because we are cooperating and obviously competing with each other, because we’re trying to build an industry. So we now employ, we believe, more people than the three big players — Molson, Labatt and Sleeman,” Coleman remarks while sitting at Stout Irish Pub, a local craft pub at Parliament and Carlton.

Coleman further explained how larger plants close breweries, while smaller craft breweries open them. “We say ‘hand-crafted’ because we are hand-crafted. We are pouring in the hops. The barley we’re stirring by hand — literally, ” Coleman laughs as he takes a sip of his pint of Cameron’s Auburn Ale.

Craft brewers support the local economy. “Our stuff is not globally sourced. Graphics, paper products — we buy a lot from other Canadians, and other Ontarians, and in our case other Torontonians. Our bottles don’t come from a container company owned somewhere else. Our labels aren’t printed somewhere in India,” says Jeff Carefoote, CEO of Amsterdam Brewery.

Keeping beer local, as craft breweries have managed to do, greatly affects the provincial and national economies. People don’t realize that a lot of our so-called Canadian products are no longer truly Canadian.

The Beer Store, for instance, is owned by Labatt, Sleeman and Molson Coors, all of which are now foreign-owned companies.