A Hobbled History of Beer: Brewing in Canada by Cub Lea Last updated 09/00

Intro | Prehistory | -200AD | 200-1000AD | 1000-1400AD | 1400-1599AD | 1600s | 1700s | 1800s | 1900s | Canada

Typical Canadian that I am, feeling underappreciated by the rest of the world (especially my southern neighbors) and justly proud of my heritage, I've chosen to add a special page listing the highlights of brewing's history in True North where donuts are a dietary staple and reserves of fresh, unpolluted humor are sufficient to supply the entire North American entertainment market. (And for what it's worth, I've never met anyone who says "aboot".)

Surely few of us left school without hearing the tale of the terrible scurvy endured by Jacques Cartier's expedition of 1535/36 and how the First Nations near what is now the Québec capitol taught them how to brew a foul-tasting spruce needle tea rich in vitamin C. A lot of historians believe it wasn't tea at all, but spruce beer. And thus begins the history of brewing in Canada.

Within a century of Cartier's expeditions, beer had become accepted as a staple nutritional beverage for British sailors and soldiers. By 1650 permanent breweries had been established in what later became southern Quebec. As more and more land was claimed and settled by Europeans, more and more immigrants brought barley and hopseed with them to continue the tradition they'd left behind. No doubt hundreds of farmers had been making their own home brew by the time Canada's first commercial brewery appeared.

TV commercials of the 1970s may have inferred that 1782 was the year that John Molson established the first commercial brewery in Canada, but that honor rightly goes to either the Finkle Brothers, who founded our first brewpub just a few years earlier in Bath, Ontario, or to the brewery established in Kingston under the proprietorship of Messrs. Denison and Forsyth. Regardless of who started it, within a generation there was enough commercial domestic production that by 1800 the British were able to cancel soldiers' beer rations. Instead British soldiers stationed in the colonies were given a penny a day to buy their own beer from area taverns, which probably suited the redcoats just fine...a penny, after all, would typically procure six pints at the local pub.

Beer in Canada in the 20th century

Brewing growth and evolution in Canada followed the stereotypical pattern of paralleling American industry with a 10-year delay. By the early 1900s there were 124 commercial breweries in Canada, but that number would soon be decimated when Canada got tired of running behind the US and got a head start on prohibition. Statutes outlawing alcohol spread across the country from 1916-19, beating the Americans to the punch across the country. Canada being the heavily-forested nation that it is, politicians were more readily able to find that vital second twig necessary to form a clue and prohibition ended early in much of Canada as well. Twigs seemed easiest to find in British Columbia, where laws were repealed as early as 1921 after a relatively short five years. But the damage was devastating. Only fifteen of Ontario's breweries survived until 1927 when prohibition was repealed there.

Micro-brewing is a relatively new phenomenon, but small-batch brewing flourished in most regions of the country in the middle part of the century. Any local or regional breweries that didn't go bankrupt or get swallowed up by the big breweries remained "best-kept secrets" of the regions they served, or else they went into hibernation until the early 1980s when Canada's micro-brew industry got its kickstart.

We can credit much of the resurgence of local breweries, brewpubs and craft brewing to the Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA. This high-powered British organization is widely credited for the rise in popularity of traditional brews in Britain, and its Canadian branch managed to lobby successfully for the relatively recent legislation which permitted the establishment of micro-breweries and brewpubs. Today the micro-brew industry is a fixture on the Canadian landscape, brewpubs and micros flourish in every region of Canada, and craft beer accounts for about 5% of all beer sold in Canada.