Penticton: A Hidden Gem for Craft Beer Enthusiasts

If you aren’t familiar with Canada and the Pacific Northwest, the Okanagan Valley might have flown under your radar. For those who do know of the region, they typically think of the great outdoors and wine. After all, the 125-mile-long titular valley boasts more than 180 wineries and is Canada’s premier grape growing expanse.

However, tucked away in the heart of the Okanagan is one of North America’s most dynamic communities centered around another delightful beverage: beer. The town of Penticton is one of Canada’s best-kept secrets when it comes to exceptional craft brews, long before it became a badge of honor for outdoorsy towns from Asheville, North Carolina to Vancouver, BC.

On the Forefront of a Movement

“The cool thing about Penticton is that we had a beer industry before it was cool. We weren’t even calling it ‘craft,’” says Kim Lawton, marketing director for Cannery Brewing and coordinator of the Penticton Ale Trail, an offshoot of the larger BC Ale Trail.

This tiny, 34,000-person community at the southern edge of Okanagan Lake started with just one brewery more than two decades ago and has since organically grown to seven (the newest – Neighbourhood Brewing – is expected to open this summer). Consequently, Penticton has emerged as one of the foamiest cities in the province, with one brewery per 4,857 people, ranking among the most breweries per capita of any Canadian city. To put that into perspective, Calgary has an estimated one brewery for every 29,411 people.

The growth can partly be attributed to the Okanagan Fest of Ale, one of the longest-running craft beer festivals in the Pacific Northwest. Every April, revelers gather to enjoy some of the best beers from Penticton and surrounding cities, with this year marking the 25th edition.

According to Fest event manager Sarah Taylor, “The whole community gets involved over the weekend, and all of the breweries have events on either side of the festival.” This gradual growth has allowed the festival to focus on smaller craft breweries and keep the lineup local. Therefore, it has evolved into a destination event for beer and outdoor enthusiasts, who often overlap in their interests.

Making a Splash

Moreover, Penticton’s breweries have enjoyed notable recognition. Cannery Brewing won two medals at the 2019 Canadian Brewing Awards in Toronto, while Slackwater Brewing earned multiple awards, including the People’s Choice award at the 2019 Great Okanagan Beer Festival, which is a separate celebration held in Kelowna, the region’s anchor city. This highlights the exceptional quality of craft beer in Penticton.

Lawton acknowledges that the city’s ethos of acceptance and inclusion has fostered a collaborative rather than competitive spirit among the breweries. “We support each other and collaborate. We have some of BC’s oldest breweries and some of its newest; we view each other as supporters of a larger piece of the pie,” she shares.

Looking to the Future

Looking forward, the collective of Penticton breweries intends to grow in response to the increasing demand. Local pizzeria and brewery Bad Tattoo Brewing Company constructed their relatively new space with additional capacity in mind and has actually lent that space to Neighbourhood Brewing so they could experiment with beers and regulate batch sizes until their own location is finalized.

No one is striving to become an enormous brewery; instead, as Lawton puts it, “Everyone wants to grow as big as they need to be.”