Brewed in Canada: The Untold Story of Canada's 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

In his earlier life, the author was a beer industry ad man who concocted
a number of memorable campaigns. His informative book places the
development of the beer industry within its wider context. We learn how
the industry responded to Prohibition both in Canada and in the United
States, and how conglomerates—most especially Carling O’Keefe,
Labatt and Molson—developed in the 20th century. The 1980s saw the
creation of new microbreweries (Sneath himself was as a founding partner
of Algonquin Brewing). Interestingly, the patterns of the early part of
the century repeated themselves as many of them went out of business or
were taken over. What we are left with today is still a smaller number
of companies and a larger number of brands, many imported but brewed
under licence by one of the big firms.

Snead’s book has some obvious flaws. In the first three (of 38)
chapters, his profiles of various early breweries are presented one
after another without any discussion of the many relationships among
them. More important, the author’s assertions are undocumented
throughout the book. Finally, there is no index and no glossary of terms
for those of us who are amateurs in this field. (I am still not sure
what the difference between ale and lager is, although it seems the
former is preferred in Ontario while the latter is favored in Western
Canada.) Such criticisms aside, Snead has motivated this reviewer to
head to the beer store and experiment with different brands.