At Brasserie Harricana, the chairs are a trendy shade of millennial pink, a pink that finds its way into all aspects of the brewery’s branding, from its labels to the benches on the sunny patio where regulars sip beers. Except the chairs aren’t actually pink, explains the brewery’s co-founder, Marie-Pier Veilleux.
“They’re orange,” she says. “They’re just faded because they’re more than 50 years old.”
Stout, sturdy, side-armed, and made of heavy wood, these upholstered tavern chairs date back to the years when Veilleux’s parents ran the original Brasserie Harricana. That Harricana was a neighborhood restaurant and watering hole in Amos, a mining town on the shores of the Harricana River in the remote Abitibi region of Quebec, seven hours by car from Montreal, where the last arable land of the north finally gives way to thick, boreal forest. Though the current Brasserie Harricana is now a craft brewery hundreds of miles away in Montreal’s Mile-Ex neighborhood, its story is intertwined with its far-flung namesake, which opened in 1975 as one of the first bars in Quebec to admit women—a revolutionary act in a province where, at the time, only men were permitted to drink in taverns.
“I wanted to run a business with the same philosophy and same values my parents had in their brasserie,” says Veilleux. “Egalitarian. A place where everyone is welcome.”
That spirit of inclusivity informs everything Harricana does, from the diverse range of beers it makes to the way it conducts business, like donating proceeds from beer sales to a nearby women’s shelter. That has drawn in people who sense a different kind of culture at Harricana. In the wake of last year’s flood of allegations of abuse in the brewing industry, Jennifer Nadwodny was ready to get out of the beer scene entirely. But when she was offered the chance to helm Harricana’s newly built production brewery, she decided to take the job.
“I like the fact that this is a queer-women-owned brewery,” she says. “I’ve been part of the industry for a while, and it’s not often you get the chance to work in a brewery that’s more diverse, where it’s not just everybody being a straight white dude. I like how they don’t play to trends, how they’re willing to be under the radar.”
Nadwodny is standing in Harricana’s brewhouse, which opened in the summer of 2021. It’s a remarkably serene space for a working brewery, illuminated by diffuse light from the wraparound windows in this mid-century industrial block.
“I like the fact that this is a queer-women-owned brewery. I’ve been part of the industry for a while, and it’s not often you get the chance to work in a brewery that’s more diverse, where it’s not just everybody being a straight white dude. I like how they don’t play to trends, how they’re willing to be under the radar.”
“I’m at the point where this might be my last brewery,” she says. “This is an industry that does not seem to be treating its workers well. Year over year, nothing seems to be changing and I’m tired. But I was interested in being able to come in here on the ground level into a business whose values and culture seem more aligned with my own—and to be able to help shape the culture, to create a different environment in a brewery. It’s still a brewery, there’s always an element of chaos, but the difference is that this is a brewery with an interest in listening to everyone’s opinion and accommodating everyone’s unique needs.”
None of this is necessarily obvious to outsiders. Harricana doesn’t generally promote its LGBTQ+ ownership, nor does it wear its politics on its sleeve. Like the origin of its pink chairs, the things that make this brewery remarkable are only revealed with a bit of time and interest.
“It’s not that we don’t want to take a big political stand,” says Veilleux, sipping a Kölsch at Harricana’s white marble bar. “It’s just that we want to lead by example. We want it to happen systematically within our brewery. And I think that is eventually reflected on the outside.”
Veilleux may have grown up in her family’s brasserie, but her path to the brewing world was circuitous. She was an avid basketball player in her youth, and after she moved from Amos to Montreal in the mid-1990s, she joined the team at Concordia University, where she studied economics and politics. When she graduated, she was left wondering what to do. “A 9-to-5 isn’t necessarily cut out for me,” she says. So she gravitated towards what felt most natural: the restaurant world. She spent a decade working in hospitality across Canada before returning to Montreal with the intention of starting something of her own.
“My parents warned me against it,” she says. “But being in a restaurant was my life.” She jokes that she was nearly born in the original Brasserie Harricana: Her parents were inaugurating a second-floor banquet hall when her mother’s water broke. Veilleux wanted to open a place that felt like the one her parents had run. “It was a small town and everyone was there—white-collar, blue-collar. Lawyers and plumbers.” They all passed underneath the “Bienvenue aux dames” (“Ladies welcome”) sign mounted over the front entrance to enjoy hearty homestyle cooking with draft pints of O’Keefe Golden Ale—a novelty at the time, since most traditional taverns only sold bottles.
“Beer is affordable and inclusive. We didn’t want people to be stuck with $14 glasses of wine. And especially since we wanted all of the food to be made in house—everything but the ketchup and mustard—we wanted to make the beer in house, too.”
Veilleux’s parents sold the restaurant to a family friend in the 1980s. More than two decades later, on a trip back to Amos to visit her parents, she noticed that it was once again up for sale. “I went in and that’s when it struck me: Almost everything was intact. It was shocking. The smell, the feeling,” she says. She had been working in a fine-dining restaurant and realized how much she missed the down-home atmosphere of her family’s old place. Her business plan finally began to crystallize. “I wanted something true and real—I wanted to build an institution, a place with the same feeling of inclusiveness.”
She arranged to buy the brasserie’s furnishings—chairs, tables and light fixtures—and packed them into a van for the seven-hour drive back to Montreal. “My dad helped. He said, ‘I put these lights up 40 years ago and I can’t believe I’m taking them down for you now.’” They were reinstalled in a 10,000-square-foot, two-story commercial space on Jean-Talon Street, not far from where Veilleux lives, in a semi-industrial neighborhood near Little Italy that had become popular with artists and designers. To help her open the business, Veilleux recruited her friend Cynthia Santamaria, a research scientist and former basketball teammate, who became co-owner.
“If I could convince her, it meant it was a good idea, because she’s not easily convinced,” says Veilleux. “She’s a good sounding board.”
In French, “brasserie” can refer both to an informal eatery with a large selection of drinks as well as to an actual brewery. Veilleux and Santamaria decided the new Brasserie Harricana would live up to both meanings of its name.
“Beer is affordable and inclusive,” says Veilleux. “We didn’t want people to be stuck with $14 glasses of wine. And especially since we wanted all of the food to be made in house—everything but the ketchup and mustard—we wanted to make the beer in house, too.”
Veilleux had once tried homebrewing as a teenager, but she had limited beer experience. She took brewing courses as she developed her plan for Harricana. It proved to be mind-opening. “I had always thought that beer was beer, in a way,” she says. As she learned more and more, she found her tastes expanding. “It was a revelation how the palate evolves.” She and Santamaria decided that they wanted Harricana to make as wide a range of beer as possible, so they invested in a 44-tap, three-temperature system with five different blends of gas. “It was important to have a beer for anyone, to have someone who’d normally order a glass of wine and transform them into a beer drinker,” she says.
They just needed to find a brewer who was up to the task of filling all of those lines. “Someone who wants to explore, who has an open mind,” says Veilleux. She found him through her brewing course: a homebrewing enthusiast named Mathieu Garceau-Tremblay. “We clicked right away,” says Veilleux.
When Harricana opened in December 2014, it gained attention for running against the grain. The decor was a mix of high and low, with the vintage tavern chairs and tables somehow at home amidst a sleek interior of white brick and warm wood designed by Alain Carle, an architect known more for working on high-end Aesop cosmetics stores and upscale restaurants like Milos than on neighborhood brewpubs.
Then there was the beer concocted in the brewhouse tucked behind the restaurant. There were Pilsners and barrel-aged Saisons but no IPAs, even though IPAs were beginning to dominate the market. And they were served only in 8oz glasses—“So people could try different things,” says Veilleux—which was out of the ordinary in a city whose beer scene was dominated by sticky-floored pubs serving 20oz pints.
Somehow, it worked. An early review in Montreal newspaper La Presse, headlined “Against the Current,” lavished the brewpub with praise. “To fill a refined interior with tavern chairs, to serve only small glasses of beer, and to put your mother’s spaghetti sauce recipe on the menu when you’re not Italian, you’d have to have your head on backwards, or maybe you’re just delusional,” wrote critic Ariane Krol. “But there’s nothing pretentious, nor anything left to chance, in this friendly watering hole.”
In 2016, Garceau-Tremblay went on parental leave after the birth of his second child, and a recently hired brewer, Francis Richer, was tasked with filling in. He became head brewer after Garceau-Tremblay decided to move permanently to the countryside, where he now runs the farmhouse brewery 11 Comtés. Richer had previously worked at Glutenberg, a rapidly growing brewery specialized in gluten-free beers. “He’s as creative as Mathieu, but because he also had that industrial experience, he’s strong on process and consistency,” says Veilleux.
Around the same time, Harricana swapped its brewpub license for a microbrewery license, allowing it to bottle and distribute its beers. “We focused more on barrel-aging at that point,” she says. They converted a storage space above the brewpub into a barrel room and began packaging one-off and barrel-aged beers, selling them directly to consumers and distributing them to a handful of specialty beer stores around Montreal. It was a slow but steady expansion, says Veilleux, and most of the operation was still focused on the restaurant, which accounted for 75% of beer sales. And then the pandemic hit.
Quebec closed indoor dining for a total of 13 months between March 2020 and June 2021. Harricana pivoted entirely to cans and bottles, and with limited space for canning in the brewpub, the need for a production brewery became obvious. After signing a lease in a building on Hutchinson Street, about 10 minutes by foot from the brewpub, the new brewery opened just as pandemic restrictions were beginning to relax last summer.
A year later, Richer and Nadwodny are standing in the new brewhouse, discussing their upcoming beers. There’s a Grisette in the foeder and a Premium Lager in the conditioning tanks, along with a Saison, a Golden Ale, a Margarita IPA, and a New England IPA: “Our first NEIPA,” says Richer, who is not shy to admit he isn’t a huge fan of the haze craze. Production has quadrupled over the past year, with room to eventually expand to six times the quantity of beer that was being produced before the pandemic.
For licensing reasons, the brewpub and production brewery are two separate legal entities, though most of the beer from the production brewery is sold on the brewpub’s lines.
“They’re our best customer,” jokes Nadwodny.
And that range of beer is as eclectic as it was when Harricana first opened. On a summer weekend, the brewpub’s menu included everything from a Hefeweizen, an Altbier, and a Berliner Weisse with local blackcurrants and sour cherries to a Grodziskie, a hoppy American Amber Ale, and Assemblage Prune, made from a Brett Saison that is mixed with beers aged two to three years on plums.
The brewers try to strike a balance between core beers, seasonals and one-offs. “With just the brewpub, it was easy, because we’d brew something and wait until it sold out,” says Richer. “Now we have to think more about supply and demand.” But the selection is still ultimately driven by curiosity and a desire to experiment.
“We do a lot of beer with wine yeast,” says Richer, who says he was particularly delighted by 51 Bīru Saké, which was brewed with sake yeast, giving it a lingering fruity sweetness. (Most of Harricana’s beers are numbered, a nod to Veilleux and Santamaria’s careers in basketball.)
“I’m drawn more to simplicity—I just like a good old-fashioned yellow beer,” says Nadwodny.
“When we brewed our Pilsner six years ago, we were one of the only breweries [in Quebec] to do it,” says Richer. “And we were known for lower-ABV beers. We had a 2% Porter that stayed for almost a year on the tap.” Some customers were angry because they thought it was bad value. “But it was one of the best beers we ever made.”
“We try not to be the brewery that just does what people want,” adds Nadwodny. “We brew what we want to drink and hope that people follow.”
“When we brewed our Pilsner six years ago, we were one of the only breweries [in Quebec] to do it. And we were known for lower-ABV beers. We had a 2% Porter that stayed for almost a year on the tap. ”
D’eux is a case in point. Brewed in collaboration with Mellön, an upstart brewery that opened less than a mile from Harricana’s brewpub, it is a 3.7% Bernsteinbier, a style of amber Lager with roots in the German town of Lahnstein. (Its name is a play on words, literally meaning “from them” while also sounding like “two”; it’s also the name of a Céline Dion song.) The collaboration was set in motion when Richer visited Mellön before it opened in the spring of 2021. He tasted their first brews and gave some constructive feedback to owner-brewers Alexandre Pontbriand and David Goudreau.
“After a few conversations we realized our visions really matched,” Pontbriand and Goudreau write in an email. “We definitely wanted to brew a Lager together, because that's the style of beer we all prefer. And we wanted to give ourselves a little challenge not only by brewing a Lager, which is already a more delicate process, but one that was low in alcohol but strong in flavor.”
Richer, Veilleux, and Nadwodny all say they would like to see more collaboration and mutual aid in the Quebec beer industry, but the trend seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Although there are roughly 300 craft breweries in the province (more than triple the number a decade ago), craft beer only represents 10 to 15% of the overall beer market. Like Harricana, most breweries were forced to switch from kegged to canned beer in response to pandemic restrictions, and shelf space in Quebec’s supermarkets and corner stores is now saturated. “Some [craft] brewers are doing what the big brewers do and buying fridges in stores, or buying lines in bars,” laments Richer. “You’ve got to jostle more for your space,” adds Nadwodny.
To make matters even more complicated, Quebec still hasn’t had the same reckoning about abuse and poor working conditions that is happening in the United States; the outpouring of stories and accusations on English-language Instagram hasn’t filtered through to this mostly French-speaking province. Veilleux says she and Santamaria both feel like they’ve had to “constantly justify themselves” in the industry; she is still occasionally referred to as Madame Richer at industry events by people who think she is simply Richer’s companion.
A lack of professionalism in the industry is the crux of the problem, says Nadwodny. “People aren’t always behaving in professional ways and there often aren’t any protections for workers against that. [As an industry] we’re in a weird teenage phase right now. Everybody’s got to grow up.”
For its part, Harricana is making an effort to do things properly. As it has grown rapidly over the past two years, it has set up internal guidelines over workplace behavior, and tried to establish a more structured environment. “We have seven departments, even if all of them only have one person,” says Richer.
The challenge is for the brewery to stay true to its ideals even as it expands.
“The bigger you grow, the more your job is managing people,” says Nadwodny. “It’s definitely a learning curve.”
None of these challenges are obvious to Harricana’s customers, but surely they can sense something about the open-mindedness and positivity with which the brewery is tackling them.
On a warm August afternoon at 5 o’clock, Harricana is already full, and the atmosphere is easygoing and convivial. Outside, tennis fans are sitting on the pink benches, taking a break from a tournament at a nearby stadium. Inside, a group of older women tuck into an early dinner of moules frites—a good deal at two pounds of mussels for $21, or about $16 U.S. A group of tattooed twentysomethings squeeze into a table next to a mirror cabinet full of basketball trophies earned by Veilleux and Santamaria.
“Harricana has always had something about it, this way of dancing between neighborhood bar, trendy restaurant, and good brewery,” say Pontbriand and Goudreau. “They have this aura of knowing how to do things well, of not trying to be anything other than who they are. Basically, it’s a place where you feel good, where you drink well and where you eat well.”
It’s a long way from Amos, but at least a part of that small-town spirit has found a home in the city.
Words + PhotosChristopher DeWolf
