New book charts history of Vancouver independent beer scene

Vancouver has become home to dozens of craft breweries over the years, making it a hub arguably equal to other famed beer destinations like Portland and San Francisco. But what isn’t as well known is the fact our beer scene is as old as the city itself. Now, the author of a new book hopes to change that.

Noëlle Phillips, a member of the English faculty at Douglas College, has written and co-edited two academic books on craft beer marketing and medieval beer history. Brewmasters & Brewery Creek: A History of Craft Beer in Vancouver, Then and Now is her first book intended for a general audience.

Brewery Creek was a body of water in Mount Pleasant that was home to Vancouver’s first breweries. It ran across what is now Main Street and down toward the original boundary of False Creek. Unfortunately, Brewery Creek was among the casualties when the city began filling False Creek to lay down railway tracks around 1913.

In the first half of the book, Phillips takes us back to Vancouver’s independent brewing scene as it was from the 1880s to the 1920s.

“So, I wanted to find a way of telling the story in a manner that was interesting, that maybe let people know things they hadn’t heard of before and uncover some stories about breweries and brewmasters that had never been heard,” she said.

In those days, Vancouver was a lager town, a variety popular in Germany, where many of the local drinkers of the time had come from originally. Charles Doering was one of them. He would also become one of Vancouver’s most successful early businessman brewers.

“It was really him that said, ‘Hey, I can make Vancouver feel like home for other German immigrants.’ And so, he was the first one to really kickstart the industry. Then we have others following him, and it’s really a part of immigrants finding a home in Vancouver, of not just importing their beer, but really making beer that felt like home, making it in this new country. So, I think we owe a lot to those German and English immigrants, for sure.”

Born in Leipzig in 1856, Doering sailed to North America at age 19. He first set up shop in Victoria, but by 1888, he had sold off his interests on Vancouver Island to make a go of it here in Vancouver. His Vancouver Brewing would become one of the largest breweries on the Pacific Coast. Doering would later serve a term as an alderman from 1890 to 1891 and was elected to the Park Board in 1906. Vancouver Brewing would eventually become part of BC Breweries, which would eventually become Carling O’Keefe, which would ultimately be acquired by Molson Coors.

As Phillips puts it in the book, “All roads lead to Big Beer.”

Brewmasters & Brewery Creek covers the heyday of the city’s original independent breweries, before tax hikes, corporate consolidation, and finally prohibition brought down the curtain on that era.

“Prohibition in B.C. only lasted from 1917 to 1921, but it was sort of a combination of forces,” she said.

“It came at a time that really enabled corporate beer to gain a foothold and essentially destroyed the possibility of any more independent breweries cropping up, and the consolidation of breweries, the merging together of large breweries, was starting around the turn of the century.”

“And you have basically three huge breweries dominating Canada for most of the 20th century. So, from about 1912 until 1982, that independent brewery culture had essentially disappeared. We don’t really see it in Canada, and definitely not in B.C.”

Phillips charts the modern craft beer revolution to the summer of 1978, when all three major breweries of the time locked their unionized workers, leading to the driest four months in memory.

“Yeah, so when that lockout happened, the brewery workers were advocating for various kinds of rights, improvement of working conditions, and they were locked out of their jobs. The owners were trying to run the breweries, and they couldn’t. They ran out of beer. B.C. had no beer. People were bootlegging Budweiser into Vancouver on their pleasure boats, and the reputation of Canadian beers took a real hit.”

That, in turn, led to the revival of B.C.’s craft brewing scene, which has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Phillips says, when it comes to the modern craft beer industry, two men in particular, John Mitchell and Frank Appleton, really got the ball rolling.

Appleton wrote “The Underground Brewmaster,” a now famous article in Harrowsmith magazine, that would inspire Mitchell and countless others.

“And the two of them together made a business plan. They met with ministers and the head of the Liquor Control Branch, and it was a long process, but by 1982 they were the first people in Canada to be making beer on-site, independently, the first people since prohibition, essentially, and that was at the Troller Pub in Horseshoe Bay.”

Some key regulatory changes also helped. First, in the year 2000, brewpubs were permitted to sell their products off site, and then in 2013, legislation allowing brewpubs to operate tasting rooms was enacted.

“So, the growth since 2013 has been unprecedented. It has skyrocketed. We’ve seen an explosion in the brewery industry like we’ve never seen before, which has been amazing, but it’s also not sustainable over the long term.”

Phillips sees a natural retraction in the industry coming, but one that will ultimately be good for everyone.

“I do think that the turn back towards more traditional styles is a good sign that we don’t need to do the newest, weirdest version of an IPA to make money,” she said.

“But I do think there is a turn back towards more traditional brewing styles, more slow growth and sustainable growth. So, I actually think there’s a lot of positive things to look forward to, despite the difficulties of the past couple of years.”

Ultimately, she hopes Brewmasters & Brewery Creek gives the reader a greater appreciation for the craft beer industry and the people behind it.

“[It’s] an industry that used to be a lot of beards and plaid shirts,” she said. “I think is becoming much more welcoming and inclusive and diverse. There’s still work to do, but I want to make those people visible, because it’s thanks to them that the industry is what it is.”

Brewmasters & Brewery Creek: A History of Craft Beer in Vancouver, Then and Now is published by Touchwood Editions.