BEER MADE AT MEMENTO.

Memento could have bought its beer. The building would have been the same and so would the evening. We put the brewery inside it because a place that makes something has a reason to keep changing.

A beer here rarely starts with a recipe. It starts with an ingredient somebody wants to try, a cartoon, a collaboration with another brewer, or an idea that sounds impossible until it is in a tank. The name and the label come with it — some are drawn by artists, some by a machine, and for every label made by a machine we give to an art school.

That is why the tap list is never the same two seasons running. Some beers are simple and made for a second pint. Others divide the room, which is fine: they taught the team something.

The brewery is a few metres from the bar, so the verdict arrives the same evening. That is the whole link between the beer and the place: what is brewed here is drunk here, in front of the people who made it.

Memento beer is designed, brewed, fermented, kegged and served in the same building, by two people you can run into at the bar.

That is also why the beer is made here: when a beer changes, it is because one of them changed something — a hop, a yeast, one more day of fermentation — and they hear how it landed the same evening, a few metres from the tanks.

Brewing happens early in the morning, in the room behind the bar: grain, mash, boil, hops. The wort then moves into a fermenter, where the yeast works for days — sometimes weeks, depending on the beer.

When it is ready — by taste, not by calendar — the beer goes into kegs. Every keg is washed before it is filled, and then it has only a few steps to travel: the stock room is in the building and so are the taps. What does not stay here goes out to other bars and other shelves.

Cans are sold from the brewery fridge, and our beer is also on the shelves of 47 businesses across Québec. What each one carries varies — call ahead before crossing town for a particular beer.

Join us for a 30-minute brewery tour and taste 4 Memento beers with a member of our beer team.

You go through the door guests do not: the brewhouse, the row of fermenters, the keg stock. Somebody from the team explains what is happening in each tank that day — because there is always something in them.

Tours run Friday at 5pm and 6pm in English, Saturday at 3pm and 4pm in French, and another day is possible by request. Book a departure online.