A Thirsty Island
A Brief History of the Brewing Culture of Greater Victoria
Written for a B.C. History Class at UVic in 2007 and dedicated to Greg Evans
Garrick’s Head Pub Victoria B.C 1889 (and still operating today).
Picture from the Royal B.C. Museum and Archives.
Vancouver Island’s history is one that has been shown to be akin with a love for alcohol. As beer began to replace whiskey as the most popular beverage, and as cities like Victoria and Nanaimo began to grow after 1858, Vancouver Island experienced a surge in breweries. The impressive number of breweries that operated on the island throughout the latter nineteenth century is an indication of just how thirsty for beer the island was. By 1864, for example, in Victoria alone there were six operating breweries and 149 licensed establishments in which one could purchase a drink. The following essay will provide a background for the island’s brewing industry, while also explaining why the island possessed such a market and how the local brewing industry responded to this market to form an important sector of the island’s early economy. The essay will conclude with the opposition that B.C.’s liquor trade was facing in the early twentieth century.
Like so much of Victoria’s economy, the start of the brewing industry is owed to the Fraser River Gold Rush that began in the Spring of 1858. Victoria’s population was doubled by the first boatload of some 400 miners, and would continue to rise as an estimated 30 000 would eventually migrate to Victoria and the Fraser River.[1] Before 1858, Victoria had already gained a reputation as a rough city with an appetite for alcohol. One early colonist, Robert Melrose, recorded in the mid 1850’s that “it would take a line of packet ships, running regular between here and San Francisco to supply this Island with grog, so great a thirst prevails amongst its inhabitants.”[2] The social importance of the saloon in small towns should be noted. Saloons served as essential centers for all aspects of town life, often used for conducting businesses, celebrations, and even christenings.[3] Beer consumption in the mid 19th century was also regarded much differently than it is today as beer was taken with every meal by every member of the family, seen as not only a source of vitamins, but also a safer alternative to water, as the water used in beer had been boiled during production.[4] With the 1858 population influx, Victoria would acquire a substantial market in which commercial breweries could thrive.
From what little is known about this first brewery, William Steinberger, who had brewing experience from his native Germany, arrived in Victoria in hopes of striking gold but soon realized the potential that the untapped beer market provided him. Steinberger began operations in 1858 at Swan Lake, in the same location where the Swan Lake Hotel was later located. Steinberger brought up the needed brewing equipment aboard the schooner Pago from San Francisco. Needed barley was purchased from the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, yeast was obtained from San Francisco, and Steinberger initially grew the hops himself.[5] A combination of a need for a bigger brewery to meet high demands, as well as concerns over using the questionable Swan Lake water in his product, within the year Steinberger moved to Yates and Blanshard with his renamed Victoria Brewery.[6] An early advertisement in the Colonist newspaper reveals Steinberger’s successes with the early mining population of Victoria with his brewery offering delivery service to any town on the Fraser River, as well as free delivery anywhere within Victoria.[7] Throughout the 1860’s five more breweries would begin operations in Victoria, such as the Lion Brewery, James Bay Brewery, and Colonial Brewery. Greg Evans explains that Victoria’s brewing industry was not only reliant on the migration of people from San Francisco, but also on San Francisco’s already evolved brewing industry, which would supply Victoria with not only experienced brewers but also needed equipment and ingredients. California already had “dozens of breweries” by 1858, and Victoria was much more closely related to San Francisco transportation and business-wise than any Canadian city.[8] Due to the transient nature of the gold rush, Victoria’s population was declining during the 1860’s, and yet the brewing industry retained a strong economical presence.
Having established that the brewing industry was indeed highly successful, the following will explain why Victoria’s beer market was so strong. The demographics of the Vancouver Island colony suggest a mostly male, transient worker population which would cater to the consumption of alcohol. The harsh, seasonal nature of the mining industry as well as the immense majority of males in the area meant that Victoria and Vancouver would inevitably develop saloons and brothels to cater to thirsty miners looking to kill their time and spend their paycheques. Historian L. Smith concludes that, “The male character of frontier life in the West and North also contributed to heavy drinking by railwaymen, boatmen, lumbermen, and miners.”[9] Author R.A. Campbell explains this notion further in saying, “For young men in bleak, often temporary, company towns, liquor was good cheer, and few were prepared to worry about the evil liquor traffic or its threat to their communities.”[10] Looking at Dawson City for example, an urban hub during the Klondike rush, contained twelve saloons and eight brothels before a church had been erected.[11] The deluge of these transient workers, the vast majority of which were men, into the frontier-like province created the need for an impressive number of breweries and saloons with little reason to question the morality of drinking. The presence of a graving dock and the Royal Navy at Esquimalt was also a great stimulant to local brewers, several Esquimalt based breweries in particular were able to survive on the stable business afforded to them by the dock workers and navy.
Another characteristic held by a substantial number of island residents was British origin. The British population would make up a large percentage of the moderate reform proponents that would eventually overturn the 1917 prohibition. Religions that commonly represented the strongest temperance beliefs, such as Methodists and Baptists, were severely undermined in British Columbia by the number of British Anglicans, whose religion explicitly favoured moderation over prohibition. Campbell reveals that in 1901 about 75% of Vancouver’s residents named British as their ethnic origin.[12] “No other province in Canada contained such a high proportion of immigrants from the British Isles, and their tolerance of alcohol consumption carried considerable weight with those who made the rules.”[13] While British expatriates largely made up the demand for imports, which hurt the local brewing industry, their numbers and cultural ties to both public house and beer drinking positively affected the brewing industry. Victoria, and also the rest of what would become British Columbia, was dominated by certain population characteristics that would contribute to a high representation of breweries and beer drinking.
Returning to the industry itself, the following will explore some of the technological and economic developments of the Vancouver Island brewers. Greg Evans has done extensive research into the agricultural impact the brewing industry had on the island. He explains that the island was well suited for water used in beer production, as the soft water found locally is preferred for the mild ales, stouts, and lagers brewed, versus the hard water found on the Canadian prairies. Before Victoria acquired a piped water connection in 1862, Spring Ridge (located in present day Fernwood) fed numerous breweries in the city, such as the Victoria Brewery and the Union Brewery, alternatively, the James Bay Brewery had a 78 foot deep well dug for their water supply.[14] The other necessary ingredients for brewing, hops, barley, and yeast were not as readily available.
Initiatives to increase local barley and barley malt production were unsuccessful, such as raising import duties and the construction of a malting facility. Fairall and Barry’s North Saanich farm appears to be one of the few taking advantage of the need for barley and thus barley was being imported from San Francisco and elsewhere to meet demands. Pure yeast would not be produced on the island until 1934, and was therefore largely imported from larger industrial centers, Phoenix Brewery had an arrangement with Wallersteins of New York for example. Growing hops, however, was an exception to beer related agriculture on the island as little to no hops needed to be imported to Victoria. Thomas Halliday and partner Henry Clay held a contract with an eastern Canadian brewery for the export of hops over a 22 year period suggesting not only a surplus on the island, but also a hop variety of desirable quality.[15] As for hardware, it appears as though most equipment was imported from California. Yet by the late 1890’s the Albion Iron Works is manufacturing at least some of the needed supplies. The March 12, 1892 Colonist, reporting on the opening of the new Victoria Phoenix Brewery, records that Albion Iron Works constructed brew kettles, ice tanks, as well as exterior gates.[16] The oak casks that were used to transport both bottled and unbottled beer were also constructed somewhere in Victoria. According to the January 1, 1884 edition of the Colonist, the Victoria Brewery on Government Street spent $60 000 dollars annually on these oak casks. [17] While bottling plants often existed as extensions of breweries, they appear only to be involved in cleansing and filling, and not the construction of the bottles themselves which were probably imported from San Francisco.[18] While the brewing industry created work directly and indirectly, the full potential was never reached on the island in creating a fully self reliant industry.
According to Evans, the 1870’s was a stagnant period in the island’s brewing sector with no new breweries having been built. This is credited to the stagnant population at this time which already had six local breweries servicing their thirst. The 1880’s, however, despite an economic depression, experienced seven new breweries in the province thanks to the population expansion created by the railway constructions. The Vancouver, Tiger, Thomas Breece & Co., Pacific, Empire, and E&N Breweries all began operations in the late 1880’s. In the Colonist’s annual business review brewing had its own column alongside the province’s staple industries like mining, timber, and fisheries.[19] This late boom period is due in large part to both the E&N and CPR railways arriving to the west coast.[20] The E&N Brewery, located on Esquimalt Road, was built in 1889 near the railway terminus of the same name in order to capitalize on both the shipping benefits and people traffic. Likewise, the Red Cross Brewery in Granville was built next to the CPR wharf in 1887.[21] The largest newcomer to Victoria’s brewing industry was the new Victoria-Phoenix Brewery constructed in 1892 at Government and Discovery. Thankfully, the Colonist newspaper wrote a detailed article on the large and modern brewery when it opened, giving historians a good idea of the inner workings of the facility, as well as its construction specifications. For instance, the Colonist reports that it took 18 bricklayers, 19 stonecutters, 20 labourers, and 20 carpenters to construct the facility. The two foot thick walls of the 110 foot long building had enabled it to last up until 1982 when it was finally torn down. The building was an impressive five stories tall, which enabled a top down brewing process that incorporated gravity to move the product from stage to stage rather than expensive pumping systems. Victoria-Phoenix also included a state of the art 25 ton ice machine and Victoria’s first steam powered bottling assembly line. The Colonist hailed the building as being “a credit to Victoria in any sense of the word, and is the pioneer of solid edifices in the Northern end of the city.”[22] Evans concludes that Victoria’s brewing industry began during a period of rapid technological development within the trade, and yet local breweries efforts to keep pace demonstrate the importance of the industry to island commerce.[23]
By the 1890’s these technological increases were beginning to alter modes of production to the extent that local breweries were having a difficult time competing with the industrial giants emerging along the Eastern seaboard and Europe. Producers like Bass, Guinness, Molson, Anheuser-Busch, and Pabst had not only increased production rates, but were also capitalizing on the transcontinental railway to slowly dominate western markets.[24] Larger and more modern breweries in Victoria, like the Victoria-Phoenix Brewery or the E&N Brewery, were able to survive this trend by switching to joint stock ownership versus single management, while older, smaller breweries, like the Lion and Bavaria breweries, began to disappear at this time. Let us hope that history does not repeat itself! Evans asserts that because of these technological advancements, despite Vancouver Island’s brewery count decreasing from eleven to six, the actual beer production was roughly ten times higher.[25]
While beer consumption had far surpassed that of whiskey and other spirits by the turn of the century, the high number of saloons and other licensed liquor shops in town still attracted the protests of temperance movements. Protestant and Presbyterian ministers recently arrived to the area sparked a temperance movement in the province furthered by more fanatical Methodist and Baptist groups constituting the social gospel movement. Interest groups soon appeared in B.C. such as the Sons of Temperance, founded in New York and highly influential across North America at this time. Religious groups would use dogma and scare tactics in order to intimidate god fearing Canadians away from the bottle. Such rhetoric is typified in the following speech excerpt by prominent B.C. social gospeller, Billy Sunday; “Selling liquor is worse than murder. The murderer merely destroyed the body; the liquor dealer damned the soul and scarred the next generation. …If the saloon is not the dirtiest thing on the face of God’s earth, the devil ought to be canonized.”[26] Also appearing in Victoria are groups advocating moderation such as The Dashaways, founded in San Francisco and publicly endorsed by local newspaperman and politician Amor de Cosmos, and later supported largely by Anglicans and war veterans. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), coming north to Victoria in 1882, would also emerge to play a large part in pressuring the politicians and citizens of B.C. towards prohibition as well as female suffrage. Despite the presence of temperance movements and liquor reform advocates in B.C. by the mid 19th Century, high consumption rates within the province reveal their ineffectiveness. The 1896 Commission on the liquor traffic found that British Columbia’s yearly per capita consumption of alcohol to be over the twice the Dominion average; 1.262 gallons per B.C. resident versus 0.597 gallons for the average resident in the rest of the Dominion.[27]
Under the direction from such societies several initiatives were undertaken in B.C. to reduce liquor consumption. Firstly, under the McBride government, saloons were required to have dining and accommodation amenities. The main purpose of this was to make it much harder and costly to run a saloon. Despite the costs however, a large number of hotel license applications followed the evidently inefficient initiative. Secondly, the WCTU and other temperance groups began pressuring the McBride government for a local option law. A small step towards total prohibition, this local option law would decide on the issue by each independent municipality. Despite all other provinces passing similar local option laws, McBride’s government was stubborn, partially due to the patronage and influence the liquor industry allocated to parliament. A local option vote would eventually be held and yet the government persisted that because of an insufficient majority and voter turnout the pro local option results were ignored.[28] As demand for a democratic answer to the liquor problem grew in size, largely aided by the People’s Prohibition Association, as well as the liberal opposition party lead by Baptist and prohibition advocate, Harland Brewster, the conservative party announced a double referendum to be carried out with the next provincial election. On September 14, 1916, British Columbians would vote on women’s suffrage, prohibition, and also vote for the next Premier. The results were a liberal victory, a successful women’s vote, and a marginal win for the prohibitionists. It should also be noted that behind Quebec, British Columbia had the shortest lived prohibition, and the referendum is thought to have been largely influenced by the allocation of resources to the war effort over the liquor industry, as well as the absence of the many young men off fighting and who would have likely voted against this temperance movement.[29]
Vancouver Island’s brewing history is a reflection of her population and culture. The large amount of transient male workers, the high proportion of British expatriates and Anglicans all contributed to an above average consumption of beers and liquors in the province. The highly successful and competitive brewing industry from the 1860’s onwards is a reaction to this market. Local breweries and saloons dominated early Colonist advertisement pages, offered delivery services, and spent consider money in maintaining the latest production methods. It was not until the industrial revolution had fully evolved the larger companies as well as the CPR giving these companies more access to the competitive western markets that Victoria’s brewing industry began to lose its prominence. And yet despite domestic and imported beer competition as well as a world war and brief prohibition, Victoria was able to retain several of its larger, more modern breweries.
[1]Jean Barman, The West Beyond The West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1996), 62.
[2] Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British
Columbia from Prohibition to Privatization (Ottawa: Carlton University Press) 9.
[3] Heron, Craig Heron., Booze, A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines
Publishing, 2003) 27.
[4] Molson, Karen Molson, The Molsons: Their Lives & Times 1780-2000 (Manitoba:
Firefly Books Ltd., 2001), 59.
[5] Alford, Sarah, Heather, and Haggarty, Liam, The Victoria Brewing Company,
<http://web.uvic.ca/vv/> (University of Victoria, 200).
[6] William A. Hagelund, House of Suds: A History of Brewing in Western Canada
(Surrey: Hancock House Publishers Ltd., 2003), 11.
[7] Colonist, Victoria: March 12, 1892, University of Victoria microfilm archives, 2007.
[8] Gregory Evans, The Vancouver Island Brewing Industry 1858-1917 (University of
Victoria Masters Thesis, 1973), 12.
[9] Smith, Beer, Wine, and Spirits: Beverage Differences and Public Policy in Canada
(Ottawa: Brewers Association of Canada, 1973) 14.
[10] Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British Columbia from Prohibition to Privatization (Ottawa: Carlton University Press) 16.
[11] William A. Hagelund, House of Suds: A History of Brewing in Western Canada,
(Surrey: Hancock House Publishers Ltd., 2003), 27.
[12] Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British
Columbia from Prohibition to Privatization (Ottawa: Carlton University Press) 16.
[13] Hamilton, Sobering Dilemma: A History of Prohibition in British Columbia (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2004) 65.
[14] Gregory Evans, The Vancouver Island Brewing Industry 1858-1917 (University of
Victoria Masters Thesis, 1973), 99.
[15]Gregory Evans, The Vancouver Island Brewing Industry 1858-1917 (University of
Victoria Masters Thesis, 1973), 104, 112.
[16] Colonist, Victoria: March 12, 1892, University of Victoria microform archives, 2007.
[17] Ibid., January 1, 1884.
[18]Alford, Sarah, Heather, and Haggarty, Liam, The Victoria Brewing Company
<http://web.uvic.ca/vv/> (University of Victoria, 2003).
[19] Colonist, Victoria: January 1, 1886, University of Victoria microform archives, 2007.
[20]Gregory Evans, The Vancouver Island Brewing Industry 1858-1917 (University of
Victoria Masters Thesis, 1973), 34.
[21]Sneath, Allen Winn Sneath, Brewed in Canada: the Untold Story of Canada’s 350-
year-old Brewing Industry (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2001), 58.
[22] Colonist, Victoria: March 12, 1892, May 2, 1892, University of Victoria microform
archives.
[23] Gregory Evans, The Vancouver Island Brewing Industry 1858-1917 (University of
Victoria Masters Thesis, 1973), 73.
[24] Ibid., 41.
[25] Ibid., 88.
[26] Hamilton, Sobering Dilemma: A History of Prohibition in British Columbia
(Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2004) 105.
[27] Hamilton, Sobering Dilemma: A History of Prohibition in British Columbia (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2004) 31.
[28] Campbell, Demon Rum or Easy Money: Government Control of Liquor in British
Columbia from Prohibition to Privatization (Ottawa: Carlton University Press) 19.
[29] Hamilton, Sobering Dilemma: A History of Prohibition in British Columbia
(Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2004), 41.