Region & History

How many breweries are there in British Columbia? The BC Ale Trail network counts more than 220 craft breweries, spread from Vancouver Island through the Fraser Valley to the Okanagan Valley. For a province in western Canada, that's remarkable, and nearly all of them are young. Their history only begins in the early 1980s.

According to tradition, it all started with a pub: in June 1982, brewer John Mitchell opened a brewery with its own equipment at the Troller Pub in Horseshoe Bay, on the edge of West Vancouver. Two years later, on June 16, 1984, Spinnakers followed in Victoria, founded by architect Paul Hadfield and that same Mitchell. Spinnakers is considered Canada's first brewpub, a tavern that brews its own beer and serves it on the premises.

Also in 1984, Granville Island Brewing was founded on Granville Island in Vancouver by Mitch Taylor. The brewery calls itself Canada's first microbrewery. Its path shows how the industry changed: in 1989, wine company Andrew Peller bought it, and in 2009 it was taken over by Creemore Springs, a subsidiary of Molson Coors. Today, Granville Island belongs to a large corporation, and that's seen as its own kind of topic in the craft scene.

In the Okanagan Valley, Okanagan Springs began in 1985. Tree Brewing in Kelowna started operations in 1996 and was, by its own account, only the sixteenth brewery in the entire province at the time. Things moved quickly after that: almost every town now has at least one brewery with a tasting room.

There's no protected designation of origin for beer from British Columbia, and the EU register doesn't list any Canadian beer either. What's called "craft" here is a self-image held by small brewers, not a legal term.