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
Bitte Schon Brauhaus, New Hamburg
Charlotteville Brewing, Simcoe
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
Katalyst Brewing, Bracebridge
Little Beasts Brewing Co., Oshawa (100% women-owned)
Louis Cifer Brew Works, Toronto
Matron Fine Beer, Prince Edward County
Muddy York Brewing Co., East York
Outlaw Brew Co., Southampton (100% women-owned)
Paniza Brewing, Toronto
Red Thread Brewing Co., Newmarket
Short Finger Brewing, Kitchener
Sleeping Giant Brewing, Thunder Bay
Split Rail Brewing Co., Manitoulin Island, (100% women-owned)
The Exchange Brewery, Niagara on the Lake (100% women-owned)
Turkey Shoot Brewing, Georgina, Ontario
Together We’re Bitter Co-operative Brewing, Kitchener
Is there a women-owned Ontario craft brewery missing from our list? Please email editor@thegrowler.ca and we will add it!