In 2016, Chelsea Tessier began homebrewing in her home in Edmonton, Alberta. She joined the Edmonton Homebrewers Guild and six years later, she became president, but still faces challenges 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.”

There was a shift in craft brewing last year 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?”

There were hundreds of responses and shared stories of sexual harassment and discrimination. A global conversation about the discrimination and harassment of women, BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ individuals face while working in craft beer soon followed.

“I think that for a while, quite honestly, we thought we were escaping some of that,” Kari Stenhouse, who works in beer sales, told CBC in an interview. Kari Stenhouse worked in the craft beer industry in Alberta before joining Pink Boots Canada and now sits on the board.

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“I think there’s a little gender bias, even maybe in how I look,” she said, even with years of homebrewing under her belt and a background in microbiology. “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.”

Photo Credits: Chelsea Tessier and Kari Stenhouse