Methodology
How we count
No two brewery lists agree. Ask three sources how many breweries a province has and you'll get three numbers, none of them wrong exactly. Here is why that happens, and what this archive does about it.
Four reasons a brewery goes missing
A gap is usually not an error
It closed
Margins tightened, costs rose, and the post-boom correction is still running. A brewery that was on last year's list may be gone this year — sometimes with its beers surviving under someone else's roof.
Lighthouse Brewing shut down in Esquimalt on 25 January 2026 after 27 years. Phillips Brewing bought the brands, so Shipwreck IPA and Race Rocks Amber are still being made — by a different company, in a different building.
Lighthouse Brewing →It shares a roof
Independent brands increasingly pool a single facility instead of each running their own. In a directory indexed by street address, three breweries at one address can look like one — or like none.
Slow Hand, Boombox and Temporal Artisan Ales brew as the Threefold Brewery Collective at 1507 Powell Street in East Vancouver, in the building Andina Brewing left empty in 2023. Each still makes its own recipes. Only the roof is shared.
Temporal Artisan Ales →It has no address at all
Contract and nomadic brands brew inside someone else's facility. You'll find them in a cooler and on Untappd, but they have no taproom, no street address and no map pin — so location-based directories can't list them.
These are real breweries by any reasonable definition. They simply fail the test a physical directory applies.
It was excluded, not missed
Craft directories and guilds usually require independence for membership. A brewery owned by a multinational isn't absent because nobody noticed — it's absent because it doesn't qualify.
Granville Island Brewing is owned by Molson Coors; Stanley Park Brewing by AB InBev. Both are real, both are brewing, and neither appears in an independent-craft directory. This archive keeps them, because who owns a brewery is the thing we're here to record.
Trace any brewery's owner →What we do about it
Reconciliation, not guesswork
We keep a dated snapshot of each authoritative directory we check against, committed alongside the data, and reconcile the archive with it. That produces two lists: breweries in the directory but not here (a gap to fill), and breweries here but not in the directory (which needs a reason, not a deletion).
A snapshot rather than a live lookup is deliberate. An archive should be able to say what a source claimed on a given date — not just what it claims today.
British Columbia, reconciled 2026-08-03 against the BC Ale Trail — brewery directory: 190 entries in the directory, 423 in this archive — 272 operating and 151 kept on the record as closed.
Every remaining difference is accounted for by one of the four reasons above. Where we can't account for it, we say so on the record rather than quietly dropping the entry.
What a number from us means
Counted, not estimated
Any total on this site is the length of a list you can open and read. We don't publish round estimates, and we don't inherit counts from other people's summaries — a headline figure that doesn't match its own list is the most common error in this field, and it is trivially checkable.
We also keep closed breweries. Brewing history is part of the record, and a brewery that shut in 1936 or in January is still a fact about the place it was in. They are labelled, so nobody plans a visit to a brewery that no longer exists.
Found something wrong? Every brewery page has a suggest-an-edit link. Corrections from people who were actually there beat any directory.