Shop these women-owned Ontario craft breweries

beer is a girls drink

Why we need to start tracking diversity statistics in Canadian craft beer

This International Women’s Day we’re once again raising our pints to all of the women-owned Ontario craft breweries, and hard-working women in the beer industry.

We’re just days away from the one year anniversary of the pandemic and women-owned breweries deserve more love than ever because female-owned businesses are TWICE as likely to have shut down this pandemic than those owned by men.

But the question we have is how many women-owned Ontario craft breweries do we have in Ontario, or the country? And why aren’t any provincial or national brewers organizations keeping track? ⁠

If we don’t begin to benchmark how many women work in breweries, in various roles, and how many breweries are female-owned, there is no starting line, and no way to measure progress. ⁠

That’s the reason the Brewers Association, the industry group for American craft breweries, finally decided to start tracking gender and racial diversity among its members in 2019. (Some notable findings: just 7.5% of brewers were women, and of all single-owner breweries, women made up just 4 percent of the owners.) The picture in Canada is likely quite similar, but unless we start tracking nobody has a clue. It’s time to start. 

As beer drinkers, we also want a resource to point us to women or BIPOC-owned breweries that we can support. We love how the Ontario Beer Delivery Index highlights breweries that are female-owned, Indigenous-owned or owned by a person of colour, and we encourage more breweries that are in that directory to self-identify their diverse ownership and workforces. 

We’ve also started our own list of female-owned Ontario craft breweries and we wanted to share it here in hopes that our readers will help us fill in any breweries that we have missed and build a solid resource. Please add any breweries we’ve missed in the comments and we’ll add it to the list.

In the meantime, if you’re shopping for beer this month, choose a woman-owned Ontario craft brewery to sip from:

Women-Owned Ontario Craft Breweries

Badlands Brewing Co., Caledon

Bicycle Craft Brewery, Ottawa

Bitte Schon Brauhaus, New Hamburg

Black Lab Brewing, Toronto

Charlotteville Brewing, Simcoe

Concession Brewing, Jarvis

Descendants Beer & Beverage, Kitchener

Eastbound Brewing, Toronto

Gillingham Brewing, Prince Edward County

GL Heritage Brewing, Amherstburg

Goodlot Farm Brewing, Caledon

Grain & Grit Beer Co., Hamilton

Grey Matter Beer Company

Half Hours on Earth, Seaforth

Katalyst Brewing, Bracebridge

Left Field Brewery, Toronto

Little Beasts Brewing Co., Oshawa (100% women-owned)

Louis Cifer Brew Works, Toronto

Matron Fine Beer, Prince Edward County

Meuse Brewing, Scotland 

Muddy York Brewing Co., East York

Outlaw Brew Co., Southampton (100% women-owned)

Paniza Brewing, Toronto 

Red Tape Brewery, Toronto

Red Thread Brewing Co., Newmarket

Short Finger Brewing, Kitchener

Sleeping Giant Brewing, Thunder Bay

Split Rail Brewing Co., Manitoulin Island, (100% women-owned)

Sweetgrass Brewing, Toronto

The Exchange Brewery, Niagara on the Lake (100% women-owned)

The Second Wedge, Uxbridge

Turkey Shoot Brewing, Georgina, Ontario

Together We’re Bitter Co-operative Brewing, Kitchener

Tooth & Nail Brewing, Ottawa

Is there a women-owned Ontario craft brewery missing from our list? Please email editor@thegrowler.ca and we will add it!

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