Melanie MacInnes, the founder of B.C.-based craft brewery Locality Brewing, says her connection to the land infuses every part of the business.Supplied
When Melanie MacInnes thinks about the 96 acres of rolling fields and old growth woodland she lives and works on, she can’t help but get emotional.
“There’s definitely something special about this land,” says MacInnes, who grew up on the property located near Langley, B.C. “I have a deep, deep connection to it.”
When she was a child, it was a dairy farm, before the family pivoted to boarding horses. More recently, it has even been used as a film set, starting with Scary Movie 4, a spoof of the M. Night Shyamalan horror The Village, followed by productions such as When Calls The Heart and La Brea.
Like many small operations, finding long-term economic stability has been a challenge. However, what MacInnes calls “field-to-glass” craft beer appears to be the solution.
After spending some time in Australia—where her engineer husband is originally from—and getting a taste for the farm-to-table dining and farm-based breweries and vineyards there, MacInnes wondered if it might be possible to do something similar back home. A trip to Mexico with a cousin, where they stopped at a restaurant that sold pizza made with vegetables grown in a garden on the property, also lodged in her brain as inspiration for some kind of business on the farm.
Finally, in 2021, she launched Locality Brewing with her parents, husband and brother. The artisanal brewery makes beer from barley and hops grown on-site and occupies the old buildings where her family used to milk cows and process the milk, plus a hopyard, which MacInnes’ husband built himself.
Undergirding everything they do is that “field-to-glass” philosophy, which means that the beer is made with ingredients grown on the farm, right down to the well water that goes into the beer.
“We want people to look at where your food is coming from, and where that place is,” MacInnes says of the bigger passion behind this approach. “We need to be more grounded in the earth. We are not separate. We can’t protect what we don’t value, or understand.”
This approach is informed, in part, by MacInnes’ background. She is Métis, a heritage that she is working to re-discover after generations of attempted colonial erasure left major gaps in her knowledge of the culture.
“As with most Indigenous cultures within Canada over the last hundred years, there’s been a great attempt to eliminate those cultures, which eroded that connection for a lot of people,” she says. “Trying to re-connect is a very difficult path.”
MacInnes describes Locality’s beer as “field-to-glass” because the ingredients she uses during the brewing process— hops, barley and even well water—come from the on-site family farm.Supplied
One way that she is connecting her cultural heritage and the work she does now is through an embrace of “Indigenomics,” a phrase coined by economist Carol Anne Hilton to describe an Indigenous-rooted approach to economics that values relationships and sustainability over productivity at the cost of those values.
“Whatever we put out there doesn’t just have a monetary value. We still have to make money, but we need to value what a business is putting back into the living circle,” she says. “And the land just always was important to me. I could make the link and say that is because the Métis is grounded in the land, the water.”
Feeling so strongly about a place, she says, is in her DNA, though not exclusively because of her Indigenous heritage.
There’s also a chance that she has a specific ancestral connection to brewing specifically. That’s because, according to Dr. Michael Doxtater, associate professor of Indigenous Creative Practice at Toronto Metropolitan University, there’s good evidence to suggest that there was wine-making and brewing in the Americans before European settlers arrived.
In fact, there’s clear evidence they did just that he says, referencing a ceremony that happens in February, and involves drinking “the new brew, a medicine that helped them re-set their clocks” to start a new year.
“One of the things we find in our research about food and nutrition is that you have people who for thousands of years have been making clay pots. You also had mortars and pestles that weren’t just used for grinding corn, they were used for grinding up fruit,” says Doxtater, who has a PhD in agriculture from Cornell University.
“The ‘stupidification’ of Indigenous people says that we couldn’t possibly figure out how to make wine by pressing juice and putting it in clay pots before the Europeans got here,” he says.
“We had a diet and nutrition culture that was much more sophisticated than people gave us credit for.”
Doxtater also noted there are records of birch beer being produced by some Indigenous people, a beverage similar to ginger ale. He praises MacInnes’ vision and drive to carry her Indigenous culture forward into the future.
“One thing that is demonstrated by Melanie’s brewery is that cultures that invent, adapt and innovate, are alive,” he says. “She is demonstrating that our culture is still alive because she is adapting, inventing and innovating.”
One in a regular series of stories. To read more, visit our Indigenous Enterprises section. If you have suggestions for future stories, reach out to IE@globeandmail.com.