Two things are hopping in British Columbia beer, and only one of them is a pun. Hops are farmed in this province again, on acreage small enough that a locally grown cone is still a special case rather than a supply line. The other is in the glass, where the hop-forward pale ales and IPAs the province is known for sit beside a lager trade that gets less attention than it earns, poured in a province whose brewery map rearranges itself every year. Both answers are worth more than a list of the month's ten best.
What To Ask About Hops On A BC List
- Ask whether the hops on the list are grown in the province, because a variety name tells you the cultivar and not the farm.
- Read the plain lager on the board as the better test of a brewery, since a clean pale lager hides nothing and shows every equipment and temperature mistake.
- Expect the industry to stay small, because the present acreage across five commercial farms is a fraction of what the valley once held.
- Check any brewery name before driving, since the map has lost or renamed several well-known operations in the past two years.
Where The Hops Actually Come From
Commercial hop farming in the Fraser Valley began with John Broe's planting at Aldergrove in 1884 and Henry Hulbert's fifty acres at Sardis in 1892, laid out by a man who had learned the trade in the hop fields of Kent. Growth was fast enough that British Columbia had become the largest hop-growing region in the British Commonwealth by the early 1900s. E. Clemons Horst took the BC Hop Company from a few acres in 1902 to more than three hundred by 1940, the Canadian Hop Company formed in 1926 on six hundred acres of land newly drained from Sumas Lake, and by the late 1950s the John I. Haas company held all 1,325 acres of yard land in the Chilliwack area.
That scale did not survive the second half of the century. A hop louse infestation wrecked the yards on the Saanich Peninsula, large breweries concentrated and bought elsewhere, cheaper supply opened from Europe, Australia and the Pacific Northwest, and the Chilliwack acreage ended in 1997, when the land Fred Haas left to a university on his death in 1991 was finally sold. Growing came back in pieces after a global shortage in 2007 and the rise of small breweries, with Topp's Hops starting on the Topper family farm in Abbotsford in 2014 and now growing, processing and wholesaling eighteen Canadian varieties to more than ninety brewing partners.
The honest description of the industry today is that it is small. A CBC report in October 2023, quoting members of the B.C. Hop Growers Association, counted five commercial-grade farms cultivating not more than 50 acres in the whole province, around Abbotsford's Sumas Prairie, in Delta and near Pemberton, against the thousands of acres of Washington's Yakima Valley. KPU has run the NextGen Hops research program since 2019 under molecular biologist Mathias Schuetz, which says more about how the revival is being attempted than any festival poster would, since the work is trial plantings and variety selection rather than acreage.
What A Hop Grown Here Does To The Glass
Hops are the dried female flower of a perennial plant that throws bines several metres up a trellis in a single season and is cut once a year. The two things a brewer wants from them, alpha acids for bitterness and essential oils for aroma, both move with sunlight, temperature and the length of the growing season, so the same variety reads differently in a mild maritime Fraser Valley spring than in a hot interior valley. That is the whole case for a locally grown cone, and it is a farming difference rather than a marketing one.
Freshness usually beats geography in the glass, and that is the part a drinker can test. Hop oil degrades with time and warmth, so cones used within days of the pick carry aroma that a pellet shipped across a continent has already lost. That is why wet hop beer arrives in the autumn rather than sitting on a shelf all year, and why the freshest version of a local hop is poured close to the farm that grew it.
What To Look For On A BC Tap List
- West Coast pale ales and IPAs are what this province is best known for, built on American varieties such as Cascade, Centennial and Chinook, which give pine, grapefruit and resin rather than the floral, herbal character of continental European hops.
- The plain lager on the list is the better test of a brewery, because a clean pale lager hides nothing, takes longer in the cellar, and shows up every equipment and temperature mistake a heavily hopped ale would cover.
- Session-strength pale ales are where a small local hop supply shows up cheapest, since a smaller beer needs less material to taste of something and a grower with more cones than one large brewery can absorb will sell them into beers like this.
- Ask whether the hops on the label are BC grown rather than assuming it, because a variety name tells you the cultivar and not the farm, and most of what is brewed here runs on pellets from the large growing regions.
The Map Moves Faster Than The Writing
Any list of BC breweries has an expiry date, and recent years have been unusually clear about it. Vancouver Island Brewing announced on 28 August 2024 that a 35 per cent rent increase at its Government Street site in Victoria had ended the operation there, with the taproom closing on 14 September, brewery operations stopping on 1 November, roughly fifteen production jobs going and the beer moving into Phillips Brewing's plant under a co-packing agreement while the brand carried on. Moody Ales announced on 4 December 2025, after eleven years on Murray Street in Port Moody, that it was closing, and North Point Brewing took the lease. HUBCo Brewing in Mission opened in February 2022 and shut on 4 July 2026, and Central City Brewers in Surrey obtained creditor protection on 21 November 2024 before Mark Anthony Group bought it in 2025.
Four well-known names gone or renamed in two years is the argument against publishing a top ten of any kind, and it is why this page describes geography instead. What holds up longer is where breweries sit, which in this province means a cluster running from Vancouver through Langley to Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Mission and Hope, with Old Yale, Mission Springs, Mountainview and Barnside spread along it and Fernie Brewing in the East Kootenays rather than anywhere near the coast. Check any of it before you drive, since the map is the part that moves.
Events That Mark The Hop Year
BC Hop Fest ran from 2015 to 2018 on a working hopyard on Sumas Prairie in Abbotsford, built around dozens of breweries pouring wet hop beer at the farm, and the 2019 edition was stopped when the organizers could not obtain the right permit for a site that was not selling hops to the public. It has not come back since. Langley's craft beverage week, run by the Langley Loop collaborative of township breweries with a cidery, a distillery and KPU's brewing program, is a June event now rather than an autumn one. The harvest has a festival in the valley's history but not on this year's calendar, so the reliable way to drink at a hopyard is to watch what the growers and the breweries announce themselves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do BC breweries use hops grown in BC?
Some do, and you have to ask, because a label naming a variety tells you the cultivar rather than the farm. A brewery can buy a small quantity of local cones for one release while the rest of its lineup runs on pellets from Washington or Germany, so the question worth putting to a bartender is whether anything on the list uses BC hops this year. The answer changes with the harvest and with whatever a grower has left to sell.
Is BC hop growing back to what it was?
No, and the older industry was a different business anyway. The valley once held more than thirteen hundred acres of yards around Chilliwack alone and sold into a bulk market, while the plantings today total something near fifty acres across five commercial-grade farms and sell to breweries that want local character. Anyone describing Canadian hops as a major crop is overstating the case.
What should I drink to taste local hops?
Start with the simplest canvas available, which is a pale lager or a pale ale where malt and hops do all the work and there is nothing to hide behind. A beer whose flavour comes almost entirely from two field crops shows the growing season in a way a heavily roasted stout or a fruit beer never will, since roast and fruit cover exactly the differences you would be trying to taste.
The Version Of The Question That Stays True
A roundup of what is hopping ages within a season, so the durable answer is structural rather than a list. This province has a hop industry small enough that a locally grown cone is still worth asking about, a West Coast hop palette the rest of the world spent two decades copying, and a brewery map that has lost or renamed four well-known operations in two years without warning. Learn those three things and you can read a BC tap list yourself, in whatever month you happen to find it.
