The past decade has marked a revolution in Vancouver’s brewing scene. British Columbia’s most populous city, formerly a craft beer desert dotted (thankfully) by some 90s-era downtown brewpubs and a couple of rebel East Van production breweries, gained a community of new-school tasting rooms in a cluster to rival any beer touring neighbourhood in North America. Before long, significant brewery districts sprouted in surrounding areas like the North Shore, Port Moody and the Fraser Valley.

BC has become demonstrably Canada’s premier craft beer province, and despite the outstanding gains in the Okanagan, Interior and Mid-Island regions, Metro Vancouver is without question its most stunning story of growth during the past ten years. What were the bellwethers of change around Vancity?

Carnell Turton of BREWard Inlet contributes a retrospective that looks at five influential Lower Mainland breweries of the 2010s.

As this decade comes to a close, brewers and beer lovers will look back on it as a formative time for Metro Vancouver’s craft beer scene. If the 2020s don’t reach the same heights in terms of explosive growth in craft beer culture, we can always look back on the 2010s and what they brought to the BC Lower Mainland with a heaping spoonful of affectionate nostalgia.

With that in mind, here are five breweries which, for me, defined the decade of craft beer in Vancouver.