Editor’s Note, July 9, 2026: An earlier version of this article omitted brewer and co-owner Gab Vetklà, who joined Messorem as a partner in 2020 and played an important role in expanding the brewery’s brewing program. The article has been updated to reflect his contributions.
It’s a warm evening and a crowd is lingering outdoors, chatting excitedly over pints of Messorem.
“This is great,” says one of the revellers, contemplating the hazy IPA in his hand.
This isn’t during terrasse season in Montreal, though; we’re in Hong Kong, where Messorem’s staging a tap takeover at a tiny craft beer bar, part of a two-week Chinese tour in February 2026.
When the brewery opened its doors near the Lachine Canal in 2019, it shook up Quebec’s beer scene by bringing US-style taproom culture north of the border. The branding was immaculate, the bar lively, and the lineups epic: “People would camp out overnight for our can releases,” recalls Messorem’s events manager, David Roberge.
That early success also prompted the founders to expand the brewery’s expertise. In 2020, brewer and co-owner Gab Vetklà joined Messorem after working with Ménard at Pit Caribou. Brought on as the brewery’s first major hire during its rapid pandemic-era growth, Vetklà helped broaden the brewing program beyond hazy IPAs into barrel-aged beers, stouts, lagers and mixed-fermentation styles.
As the brewing team has grown from one to 11, the range of beers has expanded beyond IPAs to include everything from smoothie sours and crisp lagers to funky barrel-aged saisons. Messorem’s reputation has since spread around the world, thanks to a packed calendar of events like the one in Hong Kong.
In April alone, Messorem will star in festivals and tap takeovers in a bewildering range of cities, from Fargo, North Dakota to Zurich, Switzerland, by way of Lyon, Warsaw and Miami.
“And we’re always present,” says Marc-André Filion, one of Messorem’s three founders; someone from the brewery is physically present at each event. “We’re all over the place. It’s not stopping.”
“(The province’s brewing scene) is world fucking wide, man,” he says. “We’re making Quebec shine.”
Your favourite band, but beer
If that sounds a bit like a band on tour, it’s no coincidence. Messorem owes its existence to three metalheads who, before getting into beer, made their living in touring bands. There’s Filion, singer for Orphans in Coma and Here Comes the Hurricane and now part of Quebec rap group La Carabine. Sébastien Chaput is a guitarist for Ion Dissonance. Vincent Ménard was a drummer for The Last Felony.
“We toured, we slept in vans in Walmart parking lots. Sébastien has toured the world two, three, four, five times,” says Ménard, back in Montreal and sitting inside the brewery’s spacious taproom in an old industrial building.
“It’s the same spirit as what we’re doing now,” adds Filion. “We’re putting on a show. And we want to be seen.”
It all started with tours to the US, where the three founders fell in love with a craft beer scene that felt entirely different to the European-influenced brewpubs commonly found in Quebec. They would line up for the freshest hazy IPAs—a low-bitterness, hop-forward style that first emerged in Vermont before exploding across the US in the mid-2010s—which they would bring back across the border, maxing out their duty-fee allowance each time.
Ménard remembers once sitting on the patio of Zero Gravity, a brewery in Burlington, chatting with some people he had just met from Connecticut. “They were like, ‘We’re going to Montreal next, where can we go that’s like this, with cans to go, hazy IPAs, all that?’” And we didn’t know where to send them. I mean, we all love Dieu du Ciel!, but it’s a brewpub, it’s not the same atmosphere.”
That was in 2017. At the time, most local breweries focused on traditional Belgian and English styles, and there were almost none with the kind of taproom that had been mushrooming around the US: places with counter service and an easygoing atmosphere, the kind of place where you can roll up with a dog, a baby, or a big group of friends and nobody would look twice.
Strange brew
Ménard had been homebrewing for a while, so Filion and Chaput suggested he try his hand at making a hazy IPA. “It was really, really good,” says Filion. “But Vincent said, ‘I can do better.’ And we looked at each other and were like, ‘Guys, we don’t have a choice. We need to start a brewery.’”
Filion moved back in with his parents to save money, Sébastien went back to university to study business, and Roberge had already gotten a job as a brewer at Les Trois Mousquetaires, after studying brewing and interning at renowned Gaspé breweries Auval and Pit Caribou. In the meantime, the trio drove around the Sud-Ouest, looking for a space.
Finish “How Three Metalheads Built One of Canada’s Most In-Demand Breweries”
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