Beer trail 09 · Victoria & Saanich Peninsula · British Columbia, Canada
THEOldest Brewing City
Victoria had a brewery in 1858. It has had fifteen since, and lost them all.
- Distance
- ≈ 35 km including the run to Sidney
- Driving
- Under an hour driving · the Victoria stops are close together
- Stops
- 6 breweries
A route through Victoria, where brewing in western Canada started — a city whose archive record runs to fifteen closed breweries beginning in 1858, and which now has thirteen open again.
Best travelled Year-round — this is the mildest corner of the country
The history
Before there was a province
The Victoria Brewery opened in 1858. British Columbia did not exist as a province yet — Vancouver Island was its own colony, and the mainland became one that same year. The brewery predates the place.
What followed was not a slow build. The Colonial Brewery in 1859, the Halfway House in 1861, the James Bay Brewery in 1862, the Phoenix in 1868. Then the Vancouver Brewery in 1883, the Pacific and the Tiger in 1884, the Empire in 1885, the Excelsior lineage in 1894.
Fifteen Victoria breweries sit in this archive, and every one of them is closed. A colonial port with a garrison, a naval base and a gold rush passing through it drank enormously, and the brewing consolidated and died like everywhere else.
The city has thirteen breweries again. This route runs them in the order they opened, which is also roughly the order in which the modern scene was built.
The route
Six stops, oldest first
Start with the oldest of the modern ones
Vancouver Island Brewing
Victoria · British Columbia
Founded 1984 and holding eight awards — the most decorated record in the city, and the one that was here before any of the others.
On the old ground1984 is a full ninety years after the last of Victoria's Victorian-era breweries opened, and decades before the rest of this route existed.
Next
Driftwood Brewery
Victoria · British Columbia
Thirty-eight beers in the archive — the deepest recorded range of any brewery in British Columbia.
On the old groundFounded 2008. The generation that made Victoria a beer city rather than a city that happened to have a brewery.
Next
Hoyne Brewing Co.
Victoria · British Columbia
Twenty-three beers and four awards. Classic European styles brewed straight, in a city that mostly went the other way.
On the old groundFounded 2011, three years after Driftwood, in the same wave.
Next
Île Sauvage Brewing Co.
Victoria · British Columbia
Belgian and mixed-fermentation beers — the stop on this route doing the least predictable thing.
On the old groundFounded 2018. Its name is French for Wild Island — a reminder that Victoria was a colonial port long before it was a provincial capital, and that the island had its own government first.
Downtown
Whistle Buoy Brewing Co.
Victoria · British Columbia
Eleven beers and two awards, downtown, in a small room that does not try to be more than that.
On the old groundThe newest of the Victoria stops, and the closest to the harbour the colonial breweries were built to serve.
≈ 30 km north up the Saanich Peninsula
Small Gods Brewing
Sidney · British Columbia
The finish, and worth the drive: nine awards, the most decorated brewery in British Columbia on this archive's record, in a town of twelve thousand.
On the old groundFounded 2022 — the youngest thing on the route, outscoring every brewery in the province including all fifteen that came before it in Victoria.
What this page does not knowThe running order is chronological rather than geographic — the five Victoria stops sit close together and can be taken in any order, while Sidney is a genuine 30 km drive north. The archive holds no street addresses for these records yet, so check each brewery's own site for where it is and when it opens.
Tally's Take
What 1858 actually means
Victoria is routinely called the birthplace of brewing in western Canada, and for once the claim survives contact with the record.
The Victoria Brewery of 1858 opened into a colony of a few thousand people, before the mainland had a government, before the railway, before the province. Beer arrived with the first permanent settlement because beer always does — it is safer than the water and it keeps.
None of those fifteen breweries survived, and that is not a sad fact so much as a normal one. Almost no brewery founded in the 1860s anywhere in Canada survived; consolidation, prohibition and refrigerated freight took them in that order.
What is interesting is the shape of the return. Nothing came back until 1984, and most of it arrived after 2008 — and the single most decorated brewery in the province opened in 2022 in a small town up the peninsula. A hundred and sixty-four years of brewing in one city, and the best-scoring record in it is three years old.
This page is the story; the passport is the journey. Open the route there to track how much of it you have actually done.
Follow this route in your passport →Guided
Tours on this route
Nobody runs a guided version of this route yet, so it is self-drive.
If you run shuttles, guided tours or designated-driver trips in Calgary, this route is open. We list real, bookable tours here with your booking link — and never a placeholder for one that doesn't exist.
Run a tour on this route →Drink responsiblyFive stops in one city plus a drive up the peninsula. Take transit or a taxi in town, and do not drive the Sidney leg after tasting.
The Oldest Brewing City is open for anchor stops.
Breweries on the route get a full archive profile, a scannable code, and a place in the itinerary. Tourism boards get a packaged route with the traffic tracked end to end.