The Bar Towel

"The West is the Best if You Know Where to Go"

When I moved to Toronto in summer 2011, this is what the brewery scene in the west end (well, west of Yonge) of Toronto looked like...



This is what it looks like now:



Rainhard, Junction Craft, Indie Alehouse, Burdock (brewing this week I hear), Lansdowne (opening today with guest taps, brewing hopefully soon), Habits Nanobrewery (soon to be more of a proper brewpub, says I), Bellwoods, and Duggan's. That's a lot of breweries. Eight in four years, with most coming in the last.

In the next year we can expect the two bigger box breweries 3 Brewers and Big Rock to open in Liberty Village. Liberty Village Brewing should be opening a brewpub in the next year or so within the bounds of this map, as should Halo Brewery and High Park Brewery. And Kensington Market is included in here too, so Kensington Brewery will be on here too.

That'll bring the number of breweries within the bounds of this map to fourteen.

And that's not counting great beer bars within this range including Tall Boys, Wenona, Wise Bar, Porter House, Get Well, Hole in the Wall, The Dock Ellis, Trinity Common, Thirsty and Miserable, and countless other bars serving great beer. And that big The Craft place. Most of those were not here four years ago.

A pretty amazing amount of growth, honestly. Should be an exciting new few years as these places all get into their stride and as the city of Toronto begins more activity promoting breweries as a city attraction. Let's hope this all continues!

Nice map…now, who has a bike and wants to do a pub crawl?

Seriously though, even in the almost 3 years I've lived in Toronto, there's been a marked improvement in quality of beer.

It sure is nice to have so many options.
I biked over to Lansdowne last week, for a $5 sausage and rootbeer lunch. I doubt they'll keep such an affordable lunch option going when they start brewing real beer...but I'd make it a weekly thing if they had a cheap lunch deal.

With all this activity and what's happening in the east end, I find it interesting (and disappointing) that there is absolutely nothing, nada, zip, zilch, north of Eglinton. You might consider Black Creek sort of a player, but it's not really accessible as a location. There must simply be demographic differences.

I bet it' would look like those political maps showing where all the conservatives are hiding. I guess nobody in Rob Ford country consumes craft beer, only vodka and crack....