Bromlyn Bethune is the president of Steam Whistle Brewing in Toronto.

Everyone in the beer business knows that January and February are slow months. People are doing dry January, which can now extend into Dry February, and they’re more conscious of their spending after the holidays in general. But 2025 has been different. Even when March arrived, sales stayed low, in bars, in restaurants, in stores. In fact, they went lower, and it’s obvious why: all the talk of tariffs and a looming recession has people worried, and discretionary spending has plunged.

When Trump first announced his tariff plans, our immediate worry was the 25 per cent charge on aluminum imports. Eighty per cent of our beer sales come from 473-millilitre cans, or tallboys. The aluminum for the cans is from Quebec, but there’s no Canadian manufacturer that can make the final product. The canning industry in North America is dominated by two major players, both in the U.S., so Canadian aluminum is shipped there to be turned into cans. Canadian brewers then import those finished products. The new tariffs threatened to raise the cost of a single tallboy by 10 cents. We’ll need 9.1 million tallboys........

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