When I first moved to the Plateau, I started to encounter craft beer in what felt like every store I went to. Microbreweries are very visible in the neighbourhood. You can find their fare all over the place: Beside the register on coffeeshop counters, through the windows of Lejeune & Frères on Duluth, piled high in dépanneurs. I remember the first time that I visited the Intermarché on Mont-Royal; I was surprised to turn the corner of the store’s final, narrow aisle and find a wall of brightly-coloured cans staring back at me.
It can be easy to see craft beer as just another can on the shelf, but I wanted to go a step further and explore the possibilities microbreweries might open up for reorganizing our society. In an increasingly atomized world where large companies dominate over small businesses, how might microbreweries present other ways of relating to workers, communities, and the environment?
L’Association des microbrasseries du Québec (AMBQ) is an organization that aims to support the work and represent the shared interests of member microbreweries to the government. Éric Grypinich, a project manager at AMBQ, explained in an interview with The Tribune that an important feature that sets microbreweries apart from larger ones is the sense of passion that brewers bring to their product. Grypinich believes that this passion not only enhances the beer itself, but also serves to better connect breweries to their workers and customers.
“The passion is felt in the quality of the beer, in the way that we talk about beer, and how we engage about people,” Grypinich said. “You go to a brewery, you go see the brewers. They’re always proud of their product. They’re always talking about beer, and [...] relating to people [....] Because we’re not into mass marketing, so our best marketing is how we get in touch with people.”
For Vice Presidents of McGill Brewing Club Haley Janvrin, U4 Engineering, and Laura Hebert, U5 Engineering, the intention that goes into craft beer is a key takeaway from their time with the club. The group brews small batches of fermented drinks like beer, wine, and kombucha and regularly partners with microbreweries in Montreal for events. Most recently, the club participated in Saveurs de Génie, a competition at l’École de technologie supérieure where students create a recipe and collaborate with a local microbrewery to brew it. The McGill club’s brew—made in partnership with Benelux—will soon be available for purchase in the brewery’s location on Sherbrooke.
Janvrin and Hebert told The Tribune that getting the chance to learn about how to achieve certain flavours through the brewing process is a highlight of working with microbreweries. In this way, the craft-beer-tasting experience stands in contrast to beer consumption at many other student events, where the priority is often drinking large quantities of brew for cheap.
“I think we’ve come out of it with a much better understanding of not only the work that goes into beer, but how what you do really changes the flavour of it, and how it creates this kind of experience of tasting beer, as opposed to, say, binge drinking,” Hebert said. “I think it’s given me more of an appreciation for the beverage, and also an appreciation for the [microbrewery] community.”
The sense of community Janvrin and Hebert discuss is something that Anne Claude Thivierge, a sales representative and event coordinator at Microbrasseries COOP, emphasized in an interview with The Tribune. Microbrasseries Coop is an association that supports cooperatively owned microbreweries in Quebec. The group is a part of Réseau COOP, a larger network that promotes cooperatively-owned businesses (coops) and offers resources to help create them.
As Thivierge pointed out, microbreweries frequently collaborate to organize events and brew beers together. Many also source local produce for brews or for food at restaurants attached to their breweries. She noted that having a cooperative structure further connects a brewery to the local community in several ways: Sharing decision-making power amongst workers, providing livable wages, and allowing employees to reinvest their earnings in other local businesses. Thivierge stressed that supporting the community is a crucial value for coops.
“It’s not only beer, it’s what beer is made with, and it’s how the profit or the wealth generated can provide salaries, and it also make other local businesses benefit from the dynamism that it brings to a community,” Thivierge said.
For small communities, breweries do not only draw local residents together, but they also bring visitors to the area. Crowds of visitors come to St. Tite each summer for Festival Western, but Thivierge believes that local breweries such as À la Fût can also bolster the community economically throughout the rest of the year.
“It’s amazing to see that the breweries sort of have replaced the church, where everybody would gather and meet one another,” Thivierge said. “Breweries have this role as well in smaller communities in this gathering of people.”
These appeals to the local community can also affirm their authenticity to consumers. Daphne Demetry, an associate professor in McGill’s Faculty of Management who studies organizational authenticity, explained in an email to The Tribune that authenticity hinges on the notion that “an organization’s claims align [...] with what they are actually doing.” Demetry also confirmed that appealing to a sense of local identity is a “major” way many businesses earn this attribution from consumers.
“Terroir and wine is a classic example,” Demetry wrote. “The idea is that a product gains some sort of ‘essence’ from a location.”
According to Grypinich, it’s this sense of community and love of brewing that motivates people to continue working in the industry, despite the increasingly crowded beer market in Quebec; in 2002, there were just 33 breweries in the province. In 2024, there were 332.
“Unfortunately, there’s no money [in the market] [….] but there’s some friendship. There’s a way of building your life and having satisfaction towards brewing nice product, the community that supports you, your family, your friends,” Grypinich said. “It’s a lifestyle, basically.”
Many microbreweries reflect the same community-oriented values, though not all follow the coop business model. Thivierge went on to explain that one of the mandates of the Réseau Coop is to promote coops as a viable business model, not just as an “alternative” model chosen by few businesses and often overlooked at business schools.
“[The coop model] goes well with values that [microbreweries] already have,” Thivierge said. “They just don’t know that there is a structure that would allow them to be [consistent] in their business structure.”
At the same time, Thivierge stressed a distinction between microbreweries and what she calls “fake craft breweries.” These businesses owned by large beer companies are designed to appeal to the values that craft beer espouses despite their lack of commitment to community, such as by brewing products outside of Quebec.
“The small craft breweries always try to educate the consumer, to say, ‘Well, it’s not only about drinking a good IPA. It’s about a beer that also brings wealth to a community that is respectful of sustainable development and that has care for the people that make the product.’”
Thivierge noted that among the microbreweries Brasseries Coop represents, environmental efforts can differ depending on their unique needs. Les Grands Bois, located in Saint-Casimir, limited the brewery’s transportation emissions by increasing their warehouse space. La Chasse Pint in L’Anse-Saint-Jean uses heat produced by the compressor during the brewing process to warm the brewery during winter, diverting this heat from the building during the summer.
Breweries also share strategies for common sustainability dilemmas. One example concerns how breweries dispose of cleaning chemicals that may harm the environment if sent directly down the drain.
“One thing that they share a lot is, ‘What do you do to make your water with chemicals easier on the environment in the city water installation?’” Thivierge said. “There are ways to [dispose of] less chemicals, either by using them more than once, or by neutralizing the chemicals before putting it back into the environment.”
For Grypinich, a commitment to sustainability is a key way that microbreweries distinguish themselves from larger breweries. While the latter simply seek to stay within government parameters, Grypinich believes microbreweries take more active steps to minimize their environmental footprint. Among the AMBQ’s sustainability efforts is an initiative which allows microbreweries to use 500-millilitre reusable glass bottles instead of aluminum cans, cutting down emissions.
“We have internal committees that are really working on the process and helping all the microbreweries to be better,” Grypinich said. “There are many gestures that you could do to lower your emissions, even though you're smaller [....]
This is not to say that microbreweries are idyllic, communal fantasy lands where people can escape the realities of neoliberal life. Microbreweries cannot fix our world’s growing wealth disparity or solve climate change. However, in prioritizing local engagement and sustainability, they normalize alternative ways of doing business that foreground responsibility and prioritize care for workers, the community, and the environment. These values even go hand-in-hand with business models based on collective ownership, which stand in stark contrast to the nested subsidiaries you might find with big beer companies. Considering this, perhaps we can look to microbreweries for ways to move towards broader, more just social and economic arrangements.
The work of craft breweries, then, is not just visible on the shelves of coffeeshops, grocery stores, and depanneurs—it’s in the streets.