Like a grizzly bear emerging from its winter hibernation in search of food and water, each spring thirsty Canadians from coast-to-coast venture outside to hunt for sunshine, an Adirondack chair, and the opportunity to crack open a cold brew.
Beer is by far the most popular adult beverage in the country. According to Statistics Canada, $9.2 billion dollars was spent consuming 2,120 million litres of beer in the 2020/2021 fiscal year.
The rise of ciders, seltzers and other alcoholic beverages has cooled beer sales in recent years, but there’s no denying that beer still has favour among Canadian drinkers. We have been brewing beer here for over three centuries, and many of the oldest breweries pre-date confederation. In fact, the brewery that makes Molson Canadian today was founded 101 years before Canada even existed.
The rise of microbreweries and craft beer has only intensified Canadian’s thirst for ales, lagers, and IPAs. But it also has complicated one of the nation’s oldest debates. Which province has the best beer?
To try to answer that question, OntarioBets.com is taking a break from analyzing legal Ontario sportsbooks to rank which provinces are the best for beer lovers.
To develop our rankings, OntarioBets.com considered quality, quantity and affordability in each province. This involved consulting three different data sets, then averaging out the results to determine an order from most-beer-loving to least-beer-loving.
We used BeerAdvocate.com to find the average rating of the different beers brewed in each province. We used Statista.com’s data on the number of breweries per 100,000 residents to determine quantity. And finally, for affordability, we dug up this GlobalNews.ca report on the average price of a 24-pack of Molson Canadian in each province.
While there wasn’t enough data to include two of the three territories, we did throw the Yukon into the mix.
It would appear that British Columbia and Quebec share the prize as the toast of beer lovers in Canada.
Long known for its Okanagan Valley wineries, B.C. was quick to adopt the craft brewery trend when it picked up steam in the late aughts. Today there are around 200 breweries in the province, and it boasts 5 of BeerAdvocate.com’s top 10 Canadian beers — with three of those belonging to Driftwood Brewery. Sign me up for a Raised By Wolves IPA the next time I’m in Victoria, B.C.
Quebec has a relatively low per capita brewery rate but French Canada dominates the other two criteria, with the cheapest and highest quality beer across the nation. No offence B.C., but that combo alone makes it tops in my personal rankings.
Quebec is also well-represented on BeerAdvocate.com’s Top Canadian Beers list, with Montreal brew pub Brasserie Dieu du Ciel! claiming the top two spots.
There is very little separating the next few spots on the list. However, the most important criteria in my book is quality. And by that metric, Canada’s most populous province – the one offering Ontario sports betting apps – deserved its ranking of third among all provinces.
Likewise, Alberta is down at a tie for seventh, but according to the BeerAdvocate rankings, that province has the fourth-best tasting beer. Otherwise, the Prairie Provinces rate out quite poorly here, occupying three of the bottom four spots.
More surprising is Newfoundland’s position at No. 10 on the list. It’s well-known across Canada that Newfoundlanders can be a rowdy lot. But perhaps they’re ranked so low among beer-loving provinces because they’d rather get straight into the rum.
For the best lifestyle articles such as this one, and reviews of the best Ontario online casinos, stay with OntarioBets while you enjoy a cold one.
Author
Jeff Parker is an entertainment writer for OntarioBets.com. A writer for film, television and the internet, Jeff is a life long movie buff, with a Masters Degree in Popular Culture. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he works full time as documentary filmmaker and producer.
Cited by leading media organizations, such as:
