Aggressive Progress — An Inclusive New Beer Culture in British Columbia
The corner of Richter Street and Baillie Avenue, in Kelowna’s north end, isn’t exactly picturesque. You’re looking at squat buildings, with dirt parking spots, under electrical poles. Nearby business signs read Furniture Plus, Suzuki Specialist, Auto Parts & Repair. Sure, there are low mountains just to the north and Okanagan Lake is a 15-minute walk to the east, but this block of town feels distinctly industrial for British Columbia’s scenic southern interior.
A couple of doors down on Baillie, though, one large building stands out from the rest. Its walls are bright white against the surrounding gray. Its signage isn’t printed on a poster or a cabinet over the door but hangs in huge, shivering black letters that curve around the building’s corners. JACKKNIFE, it reads. And below: Weird Beer. Classic Pizza.
If you get closer, you’ll notice another, smaller sign. It hangs right on the narrow front door. This one reads: No Bad Vibes. BIPOC LGBTQ2S+ SAFE SPACE.
MAKING NOISE IN THE VALLEY
British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, is known for its wine—and, increasingly, its beer. Craft brewing here, like everywhere else, is overwhelmingly white, male, and cisgendered. To many, that’s just the way it’s always been. But to a new generation, it’s a limiting reality that urgently needs changing, and members of the local beer scene are looking at themselves and their taprooms as the best place to start.
Here in Kelowna, Jackknife Brewing is best described as aggressively progressive. The owners refer to the building as “the dungeon” and the brewers as “beer wizards,” and the low-ceilinged taproom is deliberately old-school: There are wooden tables and chairs, aged barrels decorating the bar, and several chalk signs hanging behind it. Covers from Heavy Metal magazine are pasted on the square wooden poles that support the roof trusses. The windows are hung with pub-style green curtains, and the core beers have names like Wizard Sticks and Hammer of Doom. The company’s website copy invites patrons to come on down and “slay a few glasses.”
Pay close attention, though, and you’ll pick up on some telling details. Staff use non-gender-specific language, and the signage on the bathrooms follows that policy.
“As you may or may not already know, the beer industry isn’t as rad as we want it to be,” reads one of Jackknife’s recent Instagram posts. “Like a lot of industries, it’s full of misogynistic, racist, and homophobic assholes who make for toxic work environments and have made going to work feel like hell for a lot of people.” Jackknife’s answer: to “further dedicate our business and space to be free of discrimination (unless you’re a total asshole, we discriminate against assholes), while building towards equity in communities that don’t often get a chance to break into this industry.”
Brad Tomlinson, Jackknife’s brewmaster and one of its co-founders, is keenly aware of the industry’s problems. So far, it hasn’t been easy.
“Sadly, the only thing that the business knows is 100% COVID-related things right now,” he says, taking a long slug from a colorful can of Hair Straight Back, Jackknife’s Nordic Pale Ale; its key ingredient is fresh spruce tips, harvested by hand. “We opened our doors the week after COVID hit.”
Which is a bummer, as Tomlinson might put it, for a place he’d always imagined as loud and laid-back, somewhere between dad’s basement bar and a garage band punk rock show. There’s a personal touch to everything inside Jackknife, from the ephemera on the walls to the spruce tips in the pints. When Tomlinson and his business partner, Ian Middleton, bought the site—an old, closed-down auto garage—it was run-down and full of asbestos, and the two gutted the entire building themselves. After all those weeks of work, they went straight into social-distancing regulations, masks, and public health orders. Definitely no live music. Even the recorded music, for now, has to stay below a certain volume, Tomlinson explains. “So people don’t yell and spit at each other.”
We’ll just keep continuously pounding this, wear it on our sleeves, and hope that people will be like, ‘Yeah, you know, we can make some changes too.’ If you’re going to try and do something, like, do something. Keep trying.
Tomlinson—with his broad shoulders and handlebar mustache, and usually in his uniform of baseball cap and dark hoodie—was born and raised in Kelowna, a small, easygoing city of 142,000 on the waterfront of Okanagan Lake. The Okanagan Valley is one of the jewels of British Columbia: As well as the wide blue lake, it has mountains and pine forests, hiking trails, and wineries. Two decades of craft brewing culture have made it one of the required stops on the B.C. Ale Trail. Vancouver is about four hours’ drive to the west, the U.S. border just a couple hours to the south. Calgary is seven hours to the east through three beautiful national parks. As a result, the Okanagan Valley is a tourist fulcrum for western Canada, one which Tomlinson calls “the party zone.”
It’s also very, very white.
“A total whitebread valley,” he says. “There’s only a couple of people in the BIPOC community that even lived here when I was growing up. Like—people are fucking racist assholes here.”
As a young adult, Tomlinson left Kelowna. He worked and traveled far and wide. What he found was that the brewing industry at large wasn’t much different from his hometown.
“Just through [working], you pick up on things, you see a little bit of the misogyny that happens too, and it’s a total bummer.” When plans for Jackknife came together, he and Middleton wanted to do things differently, and they committed to doing it where it matters the most: at home.
From their first day, they’ve had the sign stating that Jackknife is a safe space. “As soon as you walk in the door, you’re seeing that right away. Just to put a fucking nail in that coffin,” Tomlinson says. “We wanted to separate ourselves and be like, ‘That shit’s not cool.’”
The effort extends behind the scenes. Jackknife’s staff approaches gender parity, both in the brewery and in the taproom, and employees and customers are both asked to adhere by a public code of conduct, which details the brewery’s zero-tolerance policy for “racist, sexist, transphobic, and/or homophobic language,” as well as its expectations for employees to “uphold a level of professionalism that is welcoming and educational,” and a requirement for bigots to “take their bigotry elsewhere.”
Tomlinson is also working to involve marginalized groups and people in the brewing side of the business. Change is further built through partnerships: Jackknife is one of 90 establishments across North America brewing Brave Noise Pale Ale, a beer created in solidarity with survivors of gender discrimination, racism, sexual assault, and harassment within the beer industry. Starting in March, Jackknife also brewed and released six different beers in collaboration with the local T Diamond Ranch, owned by the Terbasket family, who are members of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Partial proceeds were donated to initiatives to search for and support missing and murdered Indigenous women and their families.
The way Tomlinson sees it, people share a few beers to have a good time—and it’s only a good time if everyone is having a good time.
“We’ll just keep continuously pounding this,” he says, “wear it on our sleeves, and hope that people will be like, ‘Yeah, you know, we can make some changes too.’ If you’re going to try and do something, like, do something. Keep trying.”
Out in the “whitebread valley” of the Okanagan, the response has been unexpected. “People are stoked,” Tomlinson says. Talking to him, you get the sense he feels about Kelowna much the same way he feels about the brewing industry: Just because it’s messed up doesn’t mean you can’t take pride in being part of it. Just because it needs changing doesn’t mean there isn’t anything good there.
It’s how he brews, too. Jackknife’s beers are all fermented with kveik—that’s Tomlinson’s old-school, Norwegian-farmhouse-brewing, heavy-metal-playing side talking—but beyond that, what every Jackknife beer most tastes like is his hometown valley. Twice during our conversation, Tomlinson mentions “terroir” as a motivating concept. The Okanagan, after all, was wine country long before it became a craft beer hub. If Jackknife’s taproom is about broadening minds, its beers are all about location.
“Sense of place,” Tomlinson says. “Everybody here talks about that all the time. Sense of place.” The brewery’s grain is sourced from local farms, and when spent is taken to the T Diamond Ranch for cattle feed. The beers ferment in barrels sourced locally, like the red wine barrels from Kelowna’s Arrowleaf Cellars winery. And along the way, Tomlinson and his brewers design their flavor profiles from the land around Jackknife, even foraging for ingredients in the woods, from berries to the spruce tips in Tomlinson’s can of Nordic.
These approaches give Jackknife’s beers their own personality and, as Tomlinson sees it, are one more way of inviting curiosity—and bringing as many drinkers as possible in.
CHANGING THE SUNSHINE COAST
Townsite Brewing, eight hours west of Kelowna along the B.C. Ale Trail in the Sunshine Coast city of Powell River, is also preoccupied with brewing’s evolution and its history. It’s the only brewery in British Columbia that is also a member of an international network of Economusées: artisanal workplaces that are also set up as museums of traditional knowledge and craft.
Townsite’s customer base is made up of residents and visitors in equal measure, according to general manager Chloe Smith, who is also one of the brewery’s co-founders.
“The locals come to support us in the winter, and then in the summer they all go to their cabin on the lake, or they go to the Interior to do wine tours, and we get the tourists coming in here,” she says.
And the tourists are crucial. Powell River isn’t the kind of place you just happen to drive through—it takes not one but two ferries to get there from, well, anywhere. Though it is technically on the mainland, the city, population roughly 13,000, is tucked tight between green mountains and the blue expanse of the Malaspina Strait. The location makes for dramatic, bright orange sunsets, and for an unusual degree of isolation.
When Townsite opened in 2012, in a corner brick building not far from the water, it was Powell River’s only craft brewery. The taproom, which seats 45, has a clean, modern feel, all varnished wood, gently humming fridges, and bright warm lights. The sidewalk patio in the front is small and lively; the pet- and family-friendly beer garden at the back feels more like a communal park than the extension of a business. The resident cat, gray with a white collar, can be found napping on the bar or perched on stacks of beer cans, watching the sparse foot traffic out the window.
The conversations have really just changed from, ‘Well, we don’t get any other resumes, what can we do?’ to ‘Oh, we’re not using the right language in our job postings, and that’s why we’re not getting the resumes.’
Inside, there are educational panels on the walls, mounted alongside a small selection of traditional brewing tools and signage. Some of the facts on display can be described as entry-level—one panel, posted above the refrigerators, is a visual explainer of which type of glass best suits which type of beer—though others are best approached after taking one of the free self-guided tours. (“What does Pajottenland refer to?” asks one board.)
Townsite focuses on Belgian-style beers; its brewmaster, Cédric Dauchot, is Belgian. Showcasing the history and traditional craft of a European industry that has, for centuries, been very male and very white, is both a reminder of what is to be valued—and how far there is to go.
“I started in this industry almost 20 years ago, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of diversity,” Smith says. “That’s been my experience everywhere I have gone in this industry. I’ve been keen to change that for a long time. We’re actually talking about it now, which is incredible. It’s not just me and three other people who used to stand in the back of the room and say, ‘Well, no, we aren’t including everyone, everyone is white in this room, and most of them are men.’ People are actually talking about it now, they’re actually listening, they’re more engaged in it. But we’re still at the initial stages of making any kind of change and difference.”
Progress, for now, is incremental, as much about adjusting perspective as it is anything else. As far as the industry’s approach to hiring, for instance, Smith says many are still coming to terms with what they’re doing wrong.
“The conversations have really just changed from, ‘Well, we don’t get any other resumes, what can we do?’ to ‘Oh, we’re not using the right language in our job postings, and that’s why we’re not getting the resumes.’”
Cultural failings have been glaring in British Columbia’s craft beer world of late. In July 2020, Vancouver’s Parallel 49 Brewing was publicly called out by former employees, who took to an anonymous Instagram account to criticize the company’s toxic work environment and its “inexcusable” treatment of staff, and share allegations of racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic behavior. In January 2021, Backcountry Brewing, in Squamish, took to the same social media platform to apologize, after an ex-worker went public about the unsafe environment leading them to quit the company. Backcountry acknowledged it had failed to demonstrate that it values the voices of BIPOC employees: “We know that we must take responsibility for our serious missteps.”
This past May, B.C.-based beer consultant Jake Clarke shared her own experiences openly on Instagram: “I have been belittled for being a woman in beer, condescended to, mocked, gaslit, had male colleagues take credit for my work, had male colleagues blame me for their mistakes, had male colleagues use my appearance and body to achieve something they want, been told I should be ‘softer as a woman,’ been told I am too aggressive / too ambitious, been touched, cornered, assaulted, and raped,” she wrote. “Enough.” The post prompted others to speak out.
Over the summer of 2021, the Canadian Craft Brewers Association held an industry-wide diversity survey, intended to help the organization put hard data to the issue for the first time in Canada; those results are not yet public. In the United States, as of 2019, just 7.5% of professional craft brewers were women. 88% of craft brewery owners were white.
Few breweries are actively exclusionary, but equally few are actively inclusive. But today, Smith says, at least “people are more engaged in that conversation than they’ve ever been.”
MORE CHANCES IN VANCOUVER
Meghan Fulton, of Strange Fellows Brewing in Vancouver, is one of the people pushing that conversation forward. Fulton, who has worked in tasting rooms since 2015 and is now Strange Fellows’ social media coordinator, is on the board of Diversity in Brewing, an initiative launched in the spring of 2020 by Heather Keegan, another industry veteran. Diversity in Brewing provides free resources to help breweries and their employees foster anti-racist, anti-discriminatory, and inclusive workplaces and cultures. Its Diversity in Brewing Award, funded by donations from 38 breweries in Canada, supports scholarships for BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer or Questioning, Two-Spirit, and additional orientations and identities, the most widely used variation of the acronym in Canada) brewing students at the Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Langley, British Columbia, an hour southeast of Vancouver. (Jackknife, Townsite, and Strange Fellows were all contributors to the first year of scholarships.)
KPU’s two-year “beer school” is one of the best programs of its kind in North America. The first Canadian program to be recognized by the Master Brewers Association, it was named the best Teaching Brewery in North America in the U.S. Open College Beer Championship in 2019, and came in second in 2021. In 2020, the first year of the Diversity in Brewing scholarship, three students—Nishant Amin, Alex Paul, and Jasper Bautista—received the award.
The scholarship is one way to showcase the quality of students’ ideas and methods—Paul’s Noble Steed Coconut Porter, created with fellow students Emily Comeau and Rebecca Deil, won a silver medal at the U.S. Open in September—and to qualify them for work in the industry. It also hopes to train brewers with the background and outlook to modernize brewing culture itself. Paul’s ambition is to one day open an inclusive, openly queer brewery. Bautista hopes to run one that melds beer culture with hip-hop and basketball. Amin, who emigrated to Canada from Mumbai specifically to fulfil his dream of becoming a brewer, was motivated by the opportunity to set an example for others like himself.
Fulton traces the opportunity for Diversity in Brewing directly to 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, following the murder of George Floyd by uniformed police.
Suddenly there was a shift in acceptance of these realities by the general populace. It’s such a huge issue. Something that was important to us in the establishment of Diversity in Brewing was the ability for it to be not a flash in a pan, not a reaction to a moment, without there being continued follow-through from that.
“I think in Canada, we had kind of not the best reaction initially,” she says. “There was kind of this idea that, ‘Oh well, you know, that’s America, and things like that don’t happen in Canada.’ But obviously that’s not true.”
In a blog post for the B.C. Ale Trail website, Fulton wrote of her culture shock, back in 2015, when she left her position at Starbucks—“a working environment that crossed over many intersections of diversity”—and started in the brewing industry, “where no one (to my knowledge) seemed to stray from the cis-het whiteness that I had observed in the brewing world but never really considered before.” She experienced “the sexualization of my body, the othering of my race, the assumptions of me fitting into the predetermined role of a woman in beer, and leaving my life experiences, values, and morals at the door … It often felt that two significant parts of my life, craft beer and blackness, could never work together and would always have to remain separate parts of my identity.”
But in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the protests and hashtags in the United States led to a more global reckoning, including in Canada, where marginalized people, who had vocally advocated for their rights for decades, were now being listened to—and finally believed.
“Suddenly there was a shift in acceptance of these realities by the general populace,” she says. “It’s such a huge issue. Something that was important to us in the establishment of Diversity in Brewing was the ability for it to be not a flash in a pan, not a reaction to a moment, without there being continued follow-through from that.”
Breweries were encouraged to commit financial support for scholarships, not just for one year but for the foreseeable future. “I wanted to help out because, you know, I hate walking into a brewery and just seeing plaid and beards and not seeing people like me, when I know these people [like me] exist,” Fulton says. “You know, I live in Vancouver, where half of the population is not white.”
A CHANGING CLIENTELE
Iain Hill is one of Strange Fellows’ founders and partners, as well as its brewmaster. He’s the kind of guy who talks fast, and could talk for ages. At one point during our conversation, Hill tells me about his love of Belgian beer.
“And yeah, massive cliché, brewer loves Belgian beer, great whoop, tell me what’s new about that, right,” he laughs. “I hate the fact that it’s such a cliché, but there’s a lot of good reasons for it. If you ask me what my favorite style of beer is, it’s gonna be Lambic, and I mean real Lambic, from the Pajottenland. I mean, North Americans struggle to make sour beers a lot of the time, and I don’t even like calling them ‘sour beers,’ but we all do, it’s how we designate them, but sour is like heh. Just call it what it is.” This all comes out when I ask how he met his business partner.
The holder of a biochemistry degree, fascinated by experimental foods and beverages, Hill previously worked as a distiller. He’s a man who loves a steep learning curve.
“Like any brewer, I always anticipated, or wanted, and tried to have a brewery of my own,” Hill says. He’s aware that any chance anyone has of making that dream come true requires access to both education and hands-on experience. “There are many roadblocks for a lot of people.”
To put it another way: The financial hurdles required to start a brewery mirror society’s inequities. Both Hill and his business partner, Aaron Jonckheere, owned homes when they opened Strange Fellows. “We were lucky to have collateral that we could put on the line. It’s sad for other would-be brewery owners who would struggle to get financing,” he says. That’s not because their projects don’t have merit, he notes, but only because they don’t already have capital to hand.
Strange Fellows’ premises are large and striking. The building is painted an eye-catching black with bold red trim. Its sign rises high and tilts up at a jaunty angle. A rainbow flag—which includes black and brown stripes representing people of color and pink, white, and blue stripes representing trans visibility—hangs to the side of the long bar during Pride Month. The food on offer includes vegan subs and Elbo Jamaican patties. The vibe is modern and cultured, reflecting Hill’s desire to elevate his patrons’ experience of beer-drinking. A strong personality comes through—as it does at Jackknife, with its heavy metal playlist and its Viking brews, or at Townsite, which acknowledges its debt to Belgium all over its walls. And yet, none of them feels closed, or culturally narrow. They’re certainly not the same old drinking places of the past.
“I never thought I could come [drink in] a place like this because it’s just so intimidating,” Fulton says. “There’s a fear that people don’t even want to talk about, I think. I’ve heard it expressed with one customer saying that they don’t know how to interact, they don’t want to deal with the snobbery of beer culture, and often it’s just, like, why even bother, if it’s a community that doesn’t seem to care about us?”
But already Strange Fellows’ clientele is changing. “The customers are a lot more diverse, and behind the bar we have people of color, and I think coming into a place and seeing a huge mix of people instead of it being this wall of white, it helps a lot,” she says. “As a company, Strange Fellows is committed to doing those things—and I’m sure there are people who are like, ‘I just want to drink beer. I don’t want to hear about Black Lives Matter, or see a gay flag, or deal with any of that kind of stuff.’ There’s definitely going to be people like that. But there’s, I don’t know, about 35 breweries in Vancouver proper. You don’t have to come to a place that we’re trying to build that is inclusive if you don’t want to be.”
This everyday commitment to change is as important, in Fulton’s opinion, as the work done by programs like Diversity in Brewing. It’s too easy, she says, for some to see such initiatives as a way to shift responsibility.
“I don’t know the way to fix everything right away,” Fulton says. “Everything a brewery is going to do, they have to do internally, and they’re going to have to do their own work.”
She hopes they do, though, even if it’s one step at a time. Inclusivity, when you cut out all the noise, is a no-brainer. Breweries are in the hospitality business, she notes, and craft beer culture, after all, is about getting together and sharing: some beers, an evening, an experience.
“Why wouldn’t you want to do all you can to make everyone at your establishment comfortable?”
Words by Paul Fischer
Photos by Darren Hull and Hailey Poole