Craft beer in Canada is losing its fizz, as sales dry up and more breweries go bust
CBC
After years of seemingly unlimited growth for the craft beer industry, the party is winding down.
Beer sales are down across the board and the number of breweries in Canada has started to decline, a shift driven by a mix of cost pressures and changing consumer tastes and social habits.
"A lot of us who'd been in it since the start of the small breweries knew at some point there had to be a bit of a correction," said Ben Leon, co-founder and CEO of Dandy Brewing in Calgary.
"We weren't going to ride this rocket ship forever."
But while the 2010s hype around craft beer might be over, there are still businesses finding success by offering different drinks and taking a more expansive view of what a brewery can be.
WATCH | Beer sales falling across Canada:
In 2014, Leon opened his brewery's first location inside a tiny warehouse space in the city's north-east.
It was good timing. All over North America, millennials were going crazy for craft beer, and in Alberta, the government had recently changed rules to help microbreweries get their product to market.
"There was a huge thirst in Alberta for craft beer," said Leon, who recalls getting emails about new breweries opening nearly every week. "It was a pretty wild time."
A similar trend was unfolding across the country in the 2010s, with craft breweries opening at a rapid clip.
Their taprooms were popular with both customers and governments, who saw craft breweries as a source of economic stimulus and a way to revitalize rural areas and dilapidated downtowns, according to the Canadian Craft Brewers Association.
"It was almost as though anybody who had a dream of opening a brewery, or maybe who won an amateur brewing competition and they were running a little craft brewery, like, out of their garage, suddenly had the opportunity to say, 'I'm going to get behind this,'" said Christine Comeau, the association's executive director.
"There [was] a lot of excitement, a lot of funding behind it."
The golden age of craft beer kept humming through the late 2010s into the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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