Craft Beer Rescues Canadian Brewing Industries

Craft brewing businesses contribute to Toronto’s local economy and community.

By Jackie Marchildon, Staff Writer

Steam Whistle’s Roundhouse downtown, Mill Street’s Brew Pub in the Distillery District and Amsterdam’s old Brewery on Bathurst Street are tough to miss in Toronto. They now serve as landmarks, but many people don’t know about the positive role craft breweries play in the local economy, and how little the “big three” craft brewers actually contribute to the industry.

You can see Steam Whistle Brewery, located right by Toronto’s Rogers Centre, when you’re driving in and out of the city, next to its actual steam whistle, placed just outside the Roundhouse building. This whistle serves as a reminder to the brewery’s staff that when the workday ends and the bell sounds at 5:00 P.M., it’s time to relax and enjoy a cold one. Needless to say, the atmosphere in the Roundhouse during brewery tours is fun and relaxed.

When you enter into the architectural wonder that is the Roundhouse for a brewery tour, Steam Whistle staff greet you with smiles and — even better — beer samples. Enjoying the streaming sunlight through the windows, tour-goers are free to mill about the bar area while waiting to begin their tour. When the tour is announced, everyone gathers to listen to staff describe how the brewery was created and how the historical space came to belong to Steam Whistle.

After Sleeman Brewery bought out Upper Canada Brewing Company, many of Upper Canada’s old staff remained friends and reminisced about their days together at the brewery. One fateful camping trip, three young men were hanging out by a campfire when they decided they would start their own brewery. They resolved in the early morning hours that the name of their new brewery would be “3 Fired Guys.” The name later changed, but if you look closely at every bottle of Steam Whistle, you will see “3FG” embossed at the bottom of the bottle — “3 Fired Guys,” the first name of the now influential brewery.

“When Sleeman bought the brewery and closed it down, 110 of us lost our jobs, and we did other things for a number of years,” explains Sybil Taylor, wife of co-founder Greg Taylor and Steam Whistle’s first employee. “But we always kept in touch, a lot of the people kept in touch, and we had a desire to get back in the business.”

Of the original 16 staff members of Steam Whistle Brewery, 11 had worked together at Upper Canada, and according to Taylor, this allowed them to “hit the ground running.”

“The timing of starting our business was good in that there’s this world-wide trend right now to what I would call ‘the local food movement,’ where people are trying to support local producers,” Taylor comments. “And I think this is the same for craft beer… People are seeking it out. They want to know the producers. They want to come visit the brewery. They want to ask questions. They want to meet you. They want to understand your moral fibre because people are aligning their beliefs with their consumer activity.”

Undeniably, Steam Whistle’s tours are very informative and help consumers understand where the products are made and who exactly make them.

Not only are craft breweries like Steam Whistle involved with their consumers, but they are also locally oriented in that they pay municipal taxes, offer sponsorships to their communities and maintain a strong neighbourly presence.

According to the Brewers Association of Canada (BAC), its members generate at least $14 billion annually. “This includes the entire value chain, if you will, all the way from making the beer to the consumer consuming the beer,” says Luke Harford, president of the BAC.

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. The Belgian brewery Interbrew, now part of Anheuser-Busch InBev, bought out Canada’s Labatt Brewery in 1995. After acquiring smaller breweries like Upper Canada, Sleeman Brewery eventually sold to Japanese brewer Sapporo Breweries. Molson merged with the American brewery Coors to create Molson Coors in 2005.

With the growth of microbreweries, you can’t help but wonder whether these businesses risk being bought out by a larger brewery, which was the fate of some brewers like Upper Canada. Could Amsterdam be bought out? “I hope not,” Carefoote laughs. “As long as I’m here, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s not our goal, anyways. I have worked for the large brewers, and I’m happy doing what I’m doing.”

Michael Wolfson, senior advisor of the Food and Beverage Sector in Economic Development and Culture for the City of Toronto, advises that the beer industry plays a significant role in Toronto’s economy. Wolfson explains that breweries contribute to the economy not only on a production level, but also on a value chain level — especially due to their work on the development of hops in southwestern Ontario, where hops is replacing tobacco crops. Several of the grains used in beer are grown in Ontario, so we’re seeing the food-to-fork effect — “although you don’t think of eating beer with a fork, so it’s food-to-cup, or in this case field-to-cup, with beer,” amends Wolfson, chuckling.

Back at my Steam Whistle tour, a tour guide named Jasmine gestures to the crowd to gather around a large, bottle-shaped unit, exclaiming, “Come on and meet Beverley! She’s the most important on this tour. She’s a beer fridge! Come over and get a beer. Everyone gets one for the tour.” Every tour at Steam Whistle starts with a visit to Beverley. “We get a case of beer with every paycheque. We’re taken care of here,” Jasmine mentions with a smile during the tour.

Visitors can experience this sense of community at all of the Toronto craft breweries. You can walk away from the Steam Whistle Roundhouse, the Leaside Brewery where Amsterdam now resides or the Mill Street Brew Pub feeling very good about having drunk one too many beers — because at the end of the day, you’re helping the local economy!

Image provided by @CRAFTbeermarket

Curated: Jackie Marchildon recently graduated with her degree in journalism from Ryerson University. After spending a semester abroad, Jackie has avid travel plans and enjoys writing about almost everything, from human rights issues to arts and entertainment. For examples of her recent pieces visit: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jackie-marchildon/59/b84/131.
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