INTRODUCTION

I’m sitting at one of the high tables by the bar at Vancouver’s Main Street Brewing, sipping a pint of their Hazy Chain IPA. The tasting room patrons and their beer flights are dwarfed by the huge space. Brightly coloured murals cover most of the walls, but one wall is left in its original 1920s brick form. “The Main Thing is the Beer” is painted across those bricks, and above it, rafters crisscross below the high windows. Through the front entrance, I see glimpses of Mount Pleasant’s quiet suburbia: blooming trees, sidewalks, and glass-fronted condominiums. But beyond the quiet I can also hear, just a block up the road, one of Vancouver’s main arteries buzzing with life and noise: the junction of Main Street and Kingsway. It feels like I’m inhabiting two very different urban spaces at once. I’m also inhabiting two different times. The building in which I’m currently enjoying my pint is over a century old. Originally built in 1920, it sits in quiet dignity among the gentrified neighbourhoods that have sprung up around it. Now creamy yellow with white trim and white framed windows, the site began as a brewery, explored some other careers over the decades, and has returned to its roots. It takes up a good chunk of the block, claiming its place as one of the city’s founding fathers.

While the site was the location of the old nineteenth-century Vancouver Brewery, Main Street Brewing’s building itself didn’t exist until the 1920s, when it served as the Vancouver Breweries garage. This heritage structure was once a young upstart that replaced its ancestor, the original Vancouver Brewery building that sat on the corner of Scotia Street and 7th Avenue. I couldn’t have found a hazy IPA there. And this brewery was less pretty. Rather than 1920s tile and plaster, this first brewery was assembled from wood, brick, and fieldstone. Instead of creamy yellow, it was dark brown. Three storeys tall with large, cross-hatched windows, it was nevertheless an impressive structure by 1888 standards. The street that is now populated by folks in expensive yoga pants walking their dogs was once a dirt road crowded by horse-drawn brewery wagons that were constantly arriving and departing with kegs of lager for thirsty hotel guests in the newly incorporated City of Vancouver. Alongside the old brewery, supplying it with water and power, was a creek that issued from Tea Swamp (now Tea Swamp Park at the corner of Sophia Ave and 15th), crossing over what is now the intersection of Main and Kingsway and meandering down past Scotia and 7th until it entered False Creek, whose shores were originally at East 2nd Avenue. Although the creek was home to a tannery and some slaughterhouses, it was named for its most popular friends: the breweries. Major J. S. Matthews, famed archivist for the City of Vancouver, interviewed Mrs. Elizabeth Newbury about living by Brewery Creek in the late nineteenth century. Newbury, a long-time resident of Mount Pleasant, recalled her early memories of the creek, its attachment to beer, and the vibrant life of the area: “oh there were lots of trout in that creek, Brewery Creek I think they called it; just east of Main Street; where Doering had his brewery. Go out in the creek and catch trout for breakfast; all kinds of trout in that creek.”

Along the banks of the trout-filled Brewery Creek were Vancouver’s first breweries, including the three storeys of brick and wood that once stood at the location of Main Street Brewing: the Vancouver Brewery, later renamed Doering & Marstrand Brewery and then Vancouver Breweries (Chapter 2 will continue that story). Brewery Creek ran across what is now Main Street and down towards the original boundary of False Creek, taking away the refuse of the tanneries and providing the most important ingredient to Vancouver’s burgeoning beer industry: water. The beer industry is always about water, in one way or another. One of the most successful businessmen brewers, Charles Doering, was the first to dam the creek and use its power and resources for his own brewing systems. Jumping forward a century, one of the great early businessmen brewers of our current era, Mitch Taylor of Granville Island Brewing, built his brewery to supplement the vibrant marina community he already owned. People visiting the harbour or living at the marina quickly became the brewery’s core customer base.

When the City began filling in False Creek around 1913, Brewery Creek was among the casualties, although along its old path Vancouver’s breweries still stand. Where once stood the first breweries of Mount Pleasant—Vancouver Brewery, Stadler Brewery, Lion Brewery, Lansdowne Brewery, Mainland Brewery, San Francisco Brewery, Red Star Brewery, and others—are now Main Street Brewing, R&B, Brassneck, 33 Acres, Red Truck, and Electric Bicycle. Beneath my feet, as I sit at my perch in Main Street Brewing, deep underneath the well-groomed trees and glass condominiums outside the building, Brewery Creek still rushes through the city, unseen and unheard—at least, unheard by most. “Though it is now underground, Brewery Creek is still alive . . . you can hear it,” said City Archivist Matthews. So listen carefully. The water is always there. In this book, I hope you will begin to hear the water of Brewery Creek once again by reading the stories of how craft brewing became one of Vancouver’s most beloved industries, both then and now.