Yukon's brewing history is short, and almost all of it fits inside a single generation. The territory's first craft brewery, Yukon Brewing in Whitehorse, opened in 1997 and everything that counts as the modern Yukon beer scene grew out of it and the handful of breweries that followed. There is no nineteenth century brewery to visit and no long lineage of lager houses, which is the opposite of the story most people expect from a northern territory, and understanding why that is the case explains the whole scene.
What To Know Before You Drink Yukon Beer
- Plan your trip around Whitehorse, because almost every brewery in the territory sits in that one city.
- Ask for Yukon Red and taste it beside the Yukon Gold, since the amber ale is the richer of the two glasses.
- Confirm what each brewery has open in the week you arrive, because a line-up this small changes with the season.
- Expect a small-batch beer brewed from grain and hops that all arrive from outside the territory.
A Territory That Barely Brewed Until The 1990s
Yukon spent its gold rush and railway years as a place people passed through, and for most of that stretch nobody thought it worth establishing a working brewery. The population was small, the settlements were scattered mining towns, and there was a ready supply of beer shipped in from the south. What that produced is a territory with a genuine drinking culture and almost no home brewing industry until very late in the twentieth century, which is why the story of Yukon beer starts in 1997 rather than in 1890.
There is a second reason as well. The territory's tiny population, spread across a vast area, never supported the kind of regional distribution that turned places like Manitoba and Quebec into brewing provinces, so nearly all of what Yukon drank for a century arrived from breweries elsewhere in Canada. That is the historical fact that matters, because it means everything built in the territory since 1997 has been built almost from scratch.
Yukon Brewing And The Name It Almost Did Not Have
The brewery that anchors the territory opened in Whitehorse in 1997 under a different name. It began as Chilkoot Brewing Company Ltd, and the founders, longtime Yukon residents Alan and Bob, came up with the idea on a canoe trip and set out to make beer for northern communities and keep the jobs in the territory. When the company looked to sell across the border, it found it could not use the Yukon Brewing name in the American market because of trademark issues, so it traded briefly as Cheechako Brewing Company. It became the Yukon Brewing Company in 1999 and shortened the name to Yukon Brewing in February 2010.
The beers that built its reputation are simple and durable. Yukon Gold, an easy-drinking pale ale, became the brewery's best-selling draft, and Yukon Red, a richer amber ale, took the Canadian Beer of the Year award in 2009 along with the gold medal in its category at the same judging. Those are the two names to look for. When the territory loosened its distilling rules in 2009, the same company moved into spirits as well, producing a single-malt whiskey called Two Brewers, which is a reminder that a small territory brewery often ends up working in more than one branch of the alcohol business.
The Breweries That Came After
A handful of others have followed Yukon Brewing into the territory's very small market, and two of them come up often enough to name. Winterlong Brewing, also out of Whitehorse, markets its beer around glacier-fed water, which is exactly the kind of local claim you would expect in a northern territory and is a good sign of a brewery trying to set itself apart. Dirty Northern is the other Whitehorse name that keeps appearing on the current map. Beyond Whitehorse, the territory is so sparsely settled that a brewery outside that one city would be a genuine surprise, and you should not expect to find one on a routine trip.
What all of these have in common is that they are taproom and small-batch businesses serving a small local market, not regional plants shipping across the country. That is the honest shape of Yukon beer in the 2020s. If you are planning a trip, the reliable advice is to confirm what each brewery has open and pouring in the week you arrive, because a line-up in a territory this size can change with the season and the cans travel far more slowly than people expect.
Why The History Matters For A Drink In Your Hand
The point of a short history like this one is not the length of the timeline but what it tells you about the glass. A Yukon beer is almost always going to be a small-batch, locally focused product rather than a nationally distributed one, brewed in a territory where barley, water and hops all arrive from elsewhere. When you are in Whitehorse you are in the one place in Canada where the distance a beer travelled is genuinely short, which is the same thing that makes a brewery tour worth doing in most small beer regions.
A Few Honest Cautions
- The brewery list for the territory is short, and most of it sits in Whitehorse, so plan around one city rather than a route.
- Yukon Brewing is the longest-running name, but confirm the specific beer and its availability with the brewery before you drive out for it.
- Do not expect a Yukon beer in a British Columbia liquor store, since a territory of this size does not produce the volume that gets listed on the mainland.
- A claimed local water or foraged ingredient on a can is a nice detail about the brewery, not a promise the style makes.
If You Get One Thing To Pour
Ask for Yukon Red and taste it beside the Yukon Gold. The amber ale is the more interesting glass, richer and maltier, while the pale ale is the cleaner and more refreshing one, and putting the territory's two signature beers side by side tells you more about what Yukon Brewing came to represent than a paragraph of history can. Beyond that one brewery, the most useful thing you can do is ask the person pouring what is fresh, because in a market this small the answer changes faster than any article can.
