The Cariboo has three breweries, and understanding why takes two facts rather than a list. Quesnel and Williams Lake each hold around ten thousand people, their economies run on forestry, mining and ranching, and the region between them holds very little else, so three taprooms is close to what the market will carry. The other fact is older. Quesnel was the supply town for the Cariboo Gold Rush that began in 1862, and the breweries that now sit in it are a modern arrangement on top of a gold rush layout, which is why one of them is named after a ghost town eighty kilometres east that no longer has a brewery of its own.
The Cariboo List, And What Is Not On It
- Barkerville Brewing is the region's oldest, founded in 2013 and opening in Quesnel a year later, while Fox Mountain in Williams Lake dates from 2020 and Cask and Cleaver in 100 Mile House from 2022.
- Barkerville Brewing sits in Quesnel rather than in Barkerville, which catches people out because the name points somewhere else.
- No brewery could be confirmed in Wells, the Chilcotin communities or at Lac La Hache, and the Williams Lake area names that appear on some listings returned nothing.
- Quesnel and Williams Lake are both flat against the previous census, and each of the three breweries is a taproom first and a producer second, strung out along one highway corridor.
The Three Breweries
Barkerville Brewing is the region's oldest, founded in 2013 and opening its doors in Quesnel a year later, on Davie Street. It took its name from Barkerville, the Cariboo Gold Rush town, and it has won both Canadian Brewing Awards and BC Beer Awards, counting four of the former and six of the latter. Fox Mountain Brewing came later, in 2020, and brewed in the old Greyhound station building in Williams Lake, and the regional trail's account of it notes that its founder was a biologist who studied brewing in England before coming back to open it. Cask and Cleaver is the newest, dating from 2022 and sitting on the Cariboo Highway in 100 Mile House, with a wood-and-steel taproom and a kitchen attached. All three are trading.
That is the complete list for the region, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than padding it. No brewery could be confirmed in Wells, in the Chilcotin communities, or at Lac La Hache, and the Williams Lake area names that appear on some listings, including Red Bluff, Sunflower and Arowana, returned nothing. Barkerville Brewing is in Quesnel, not in Barkerville, which catches people out because the name points somewhere else.
What The Gold Rush Leaves Behind
The rush began in 1862, and the town that became its centre was named for a prospector, William Barker, whose claim produced on the order of 37,500 ounces of gold. Barkerville grew to something like ten thousand people in 1863, which for a settlement that size in the 1860s tells you how abruptly the money arrived, and a fire in September 1868 destroyed much of the wooden town before ninety buildings went back up in about six weeks. Quesnel sat at the western end as the supply and staging point, on the Cariboo Wagon Road that still runs roughly along today's Highway 26. The ground was Dakelh territory before the rush, which is part of the region's history and not a footnote to it.
None of that produced a brewery. Claims that the Cariboo had long-running twentieth-century breweries named for Quesnel, the Cariboo or the Chilcotin could not be substantiated against any brewery record, directory or local source, and none appears in the province's list of defunct breweries, so they are left out. The nearest long-lived brewery in northern interior British Columbia is Pacific Western in Prince George, founded in 1957, which is a different region and roughly five hundred kilometres north.
Why Three Breweries Is The Right Number
The 2021 census put Quesnel at 9,889 people and Williams Lake at 10,947, both essentially flat against the previous census, and that stability is the point. Quesnel's largest employer is forestry, with a pulp and sawmilling operation that has been there since long before the craft era. Williams Lake has sawmills under West Fraser and Tolko, ranching on the open range, and the Gibraltar Mine just north of town, which is described as the second-largest open-pit copper mine in the country. This is a resource economy with a small, stable population and a long drive between anywhere and anywhere, and it is not a market that grows a dense taproom cluster. Three breweries, each in a different town, each more than an hour from the next, is what that arithmetic produces.
The honest way to plan a trip is around the distance rather than the count. Quesnel, Williams Lake and 100 Mile House are strung out north to south along one highway corridor, which makes a three-stop run straightforward and a fourth awkward. Each of the three is a taproom first and a producer second, so the beer that is worth carrying home is whatever the tank is holding on the day you arrive. The provincial trail covers all three, and checking the BC Ale Trail region listing before you leave is worth more than any printed guide to a region this small, because a single-room business on a slow week is the normal condition rather than a sign that anything is wrong.
