Backcountry Brewing (Squamish, BC)

You can feel the peculiar energy as you walk around pretty much anywhere in Squamish. It’s there downtown while your buying groceries and wafts around in Brackendale’s backwoods, you even get it up in Garibaldi Heights. It’s omnipresent, a feeling of electricity that you might attribute to the towering skyline, but it’s not all just mountains so close you could jog to them… It’s right in front of you: It’s a feeling of youthful exuberance!

Everyone here is so damn young! It’s like they politely asked everyone over the age of 60 to leave and sold all the houses to 30-something couples with four kids, no-one over 15% body fat, please. They are everywhere, jogging and mountain biking, opening yoga studios and breweries like Backcountry Brewing.

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Blogging, Bannock and Eventually a 2025 Beer List

Looking back, it’s amazing to me that in the early years of this blog I banged out two beer lists a year. Either I was drinking ten times the amount and variety of beer I drink now… possible, or I had far more disposable time to dedicate to writing as I have now.

Scrolling down my mid-2000s ubiquitous right blog sidebar it looks like I can barely get off my ass to do a blog post a year, which is a bit melancholy and also a tad misleading. It’s not for love… Food blogs didn’t die the way I was predicting back when I wrote this and I didn’t slow down due to work. In fact, I have MORE free time now that I’m not in a professional kitchen.

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Ace Brewing (Courtenay, BC)

During a couple days off this summer Crystal, me and our MTB buddies Jen and Sean spent a scorching afternoon thrashing around Hornby Island’s beautiful Mount Geoffrey trail network. After packing up the bikes the crew needed shade, food and alcohol and seeing as the local Meadery was closed we headed to nearby Courtenay where the breweries are plentiful and the IPAs flow like Mrya Falls.

The newest of these watering holes, Ace Brewing opened up in 2019 just in time to fill the vacuum left by the now- defunct Forbidden Brewing. This cemented Courtenay’s hipster cred as a two brewery town and gave people a place to enjoy craft beer and a bit of socially-distanced social time during the worst of the pandemic.

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2018 Autumn BC Beer List

It’s been almost a year since my last beer list and the landscape of my local liquor store has once again reconfigured Matrix-style to suit the tastes ‘n times.  I’m happy to report that the BC craft beer industry in general has mostly marched past the pumpkin spice frenzy of Octobers past (only counted two!) and has focused on more quality-crafted brews with, say a new strain of hops standing in for what used to be a lot of guava and Vanilla-Rooibis nonsense. Read More