Women brewing for change in Alberta craft beer industry
'It just feels like I have a bit more to prove as a woman in beer'
When Chelsea Tessier started homebrewing in 2016, it was hard for her not to stand out at gatherings.
"I would be one of two women in a room of 40-plus people," she recalls. "It was intimidating."
Six years after joining the Edmonton Homebrewers Guild, she became president, but still faces questions over her skills even as she prepares to open her own brewery.
"It's frustrating when you tell people you're opening a brewery and the first assumption is that my husband is the brewer," she said. "It just feels like I have a bit more to prove as a woman in beer.
"It's not right, but it is what it is. It's a gender bias."
Brewing's #MeToo moment
The craft beer industry shifted in 2021, after Brienne Allan, a U.S. brewer with the Instagram handle @ratmagnet, asked her followers in the industry "do you get sexist comments on the job?"
Hundreds responded, sharing stories of sexual harassment and discrimination. What followed was a global conversation about the discrimination and harassment women, BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ individuals face while working in craft beer.
"I think that for a while, quite honestly, we thought we were escaping some of that," Kari Stenhouse, who works on the sales side of the beer industry, told CBC's Radio Active.
Stenhouse also sits on the board of Pink Boots Canada, the local chapter of a global organization aimed at supporting women in beer.
"We've had a reckoning of our own in the past few months prompting Canadian breweries to take a really good long look at what they're doing as far as their code of conduct," she said.
The reckoning is important as Pink Boots works to promote more diversity within the industry through scholarships, she said.
"We're seeing that movement is really starting to take effect and change is starting to happen," she said. "But we have a long way to go."
Change from the boots up
For brewers like Tessier, change starts with hiring.
"I really think it does come from hiring a diverse group of people and tailoring job descriptions, having gender in mind when you're writing them so that it's not just applicable to men," Tessier said.
The physical aspect of the job can be over-emphasized in descriptions, discouraging women or diverse candidates from throwing their name in, she said.
Even with years of homebrewing under her belt — and a background in microbiology — she still feels pressure to prove herself, she said.
"I think there's a little gender bias, even maybe in how I look," she said. "I don't look like a brewer. I'm also young. I'm 30 years old. So I also have people asking 'Oh, how old are you?'"
Still, Tessier is optimistic for the future of women in brewing. Over her years in the guild, the homebrewing community in Edmonton has become more diverse, with more female leadership.
"I really do think that things are shifting and things are getting better," she said. "I was really looking forward to celebrating International Women's Day for the first time in a long time."