16. Neolocalism and the Branding and Marketing of Place by Canadian Microbreweries

A brief comment on terminology: the terms microbrewery and craft brewery will be used frequently in this paper. In Canada, there is no nationally established definition of either term. While the definition of ‘microbrewery’ varies by province, the key feature is scale; as the name implies, microbreweries brew on a small scale. A threshold annual production of 60,000 hL is often used as the common defining capacity in Canada. The term ‘craft brewery’ is even less well established. It is not based on size alone, though craft breweries are indeed normally small in scale, or at least the beer is produced in small batches. Rather, the term craft brewery is generally used also to refer to the character of the beer and the method of production. Perhaps the term is best summarize by the author widely credited with having coined it: craft beer refers to beer produced by “a small brewery using traditional methods and ingredients to produce a handcrafted, uncompromised beer that is marketed locally” (Cottone 1986, p. 9). Operationally, this definition is difficult to apply, but without much controversy, it is accepted that the largest, national brewers in Canada are not craft breweries, while the small, local ones are. We might also add that, in general, craft breweries are independent businesses while the larger, national ones are now actually subsidiaries of global beverage corporations. As such, the author hopes the reader will accept this informal method of describing and differentiating breweries for the purposes of this paper.

See Eberts (2007) for a concise overview of the evolution of the brewing industry in Canada, or Sneath (2001) for a more comprehensive history.

At a panel discussion entitled “Can the Small and Microbrewer Survive?” held at the 1997 Annual Convention of the Brewers Association of America, Jim Koch, co-founder and chairman of the Boston Beer Company, stated: “What’s happening in the segment now is a lot of retrenchment, by people who expanded optimistically, and are now pulling back into their core areas of strength, typically geographical. These companies are dropping salesmen in remote markets and pulling back into core areas” (Modern Brewery Age 1997).