Codex Cervisarius: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Medievalism of Craft Beer in Quebec and Ontario

Abstract

In the following chapter, I consider the branding and labeling of microbreweries and regional breweries in Quebec and Ontario, asking what histories we fetishize when we consume craft beers. Unlike European breweries, which are geographically situated in space and time in an explicitly historical and geographical contextualization of a medieval brewing tradition, North American breweries, including those in Canada, often draw on cultural ties to the same medieval past. These ties of medievalism, however, are mediated through a colonial identity built on romantic nationalist myth-making that was established in the nineteenth century. These two nostalgic projects—medievalism and nation-building—align national identity with a mythologized white Christian European past and the imagined “discovery” of the North American continent. I begin by offering a general theory of nostalgia, nationalist myth-making, and medievalism before considering how these traditions are reflected in those Ontario and Quebec breweries that occlude national myth-making under medievalism (medieval-nostalgic breweries). Then, following a consideration of historical brewing in Quebec and Ontario, which separately drew on French and English brewing traditions, I analyze those breweries that present colonial myths (colonial-nostalgic breweries), and the danger these images present in their effacement of Indigenous culture. Finally, I consider those breweries that draw on both medievalism and romantic nationalism (nostalgic magpies, hoarding or stealing objects from the past without a focus on either tradition), which employ both restorative and reflective, ironic nostalgias, and at times offer an opportunity for greater inclusion in modern craft beer culture.