Stubby● Countryside guide
Barns & Back Roads
Barn breweries, a church taproom, and cider country — the Headwaters back roads, an hour or so northwest of the city.
9 stops
These aren't a loop, and they aren't a checklist for one long Saturday. They're the craft breweries — plus a cidery and a winery — scattered through the Headwaters country northwest of Toronto, from Inglewood up to Mono, and each one is worth its own unhurried afternoon. Pick a couple that sit near each other, drive out, and let the farms and the old buildings and the hills be the point; collect the rest over a season. Every one of these is a country-road drive, so whoever's behind the wheel is on soda water — sort that out before you leave, and the day's a lot better for it. The times below are rough drives from the city, not a route to run.
The stops
A suggested order — not a ranking.
The closest of these to the city, about an hour out in Inglewood, and the easiest place to start. Childhood friends Troy Baxter and Mike Nuttall built it in 2015 with Grace Wilkinson on her family's 150-year-old farm, brewing the first batches in a retrofitted calf barn before the equipment outgrew it. The lineup runs hop-forward and small-batch, from crisp lagers up to an 8.2% double IPA — open on the GSP pilsner and browse the bottle shop, and time a weekend for the Badlands Kitchen food truck out in the beer garden.
Just over an hour out, on Boston Mills Road, a straw-bale cidery built around a wood-fired oven. Thomas Wilson — a fourth-generation Caledon farmer whose grandfather planted the family's first apples in 1952 — and Nicole Judge hand-planted some 5,000 apple trees here before opening in 2009. It's cidery, bakery and bistro under one roof: order a cider off the orchard and a loaf from the wood oven, and take the Cider Gardens patio for the rolling-hillside view. Cider-making tours run weekends at 1 and 3.
About an hour and twenty out in Alton, on a 30-acre farm Gail and Phil Winters bought in 2009 knowing nothing about farming, then planted with hops. Today it's a certified-organic hop farm and farmstead brewery: a two-acre hop yard, eight varieties grown on-site, every beer starting from 100% Ontario hops, all of it brewed in an eco-renovated passive-haus barn running on renewable energy. Ask for the Sesh, their Ontario-hopped IPA-style beer, and eat off the GoodSpot food truck out on the open farm grounds.
The far-western edge of this set, the better part of two hours out in the town of Grand Valley on the upper Grand River. It's a small family-run brewery chasing drinkability over hype — anchor a visit on the Original Lager, the all-malt 4.9% they build the rest around.
About an hour and a half out, in Orangeville. Founder Tom Smellie named the brewery for Thomas Hockley, the first postmaster of Hockley Village, and the beer leans European-heritage brewed for a Canadian palate. The Hockley Dark took Ontario Brewing Awards gold back in 2008 and is still the one to know, with an amber, a classic lager and Georgian Bay Beer alongside it.
A farm brewery on Heart Lake Road in Caledon Village, about an hour and a half from the city, with a cozy taproom and a wide-open beer garden set in the Caledon hills. It's a classic-styles house — clean lagers and ales made with a hands-on process — so order the Helles and linger over the garden. There's a darker Dunkel Hour if you want a little more weight.
In Palgrave, a little over an hour out, where the taproom fills a former St. Albans church — a beer hall and a patio under the old roof, right on Highway 50. A Munich-born brewmaster with three decades behind him brews it German-style, with imported malt and authentic technique: 'German craft, Caledon Made.' The Vienna Lager, built on Vienna malt from Germany, is the signature pour.
A change of pace in Mono, about an hour and a half out. Mario Adamo left Calabria at eighteen and saw his home's vine-covered hills again in the Hockley Valley, planting the first test vines around 2012; the estate now runs to some 23,000 vines. It pours small-batch reds, whites, rosé and sparkling — the Estate Riesling and the Underdog Rosé among them. Take the patio for the vineyard view; tours run weekends, noon to four.
The northernmost of these, at the Mono Centre crossroads a short walk from Mono Cliffs Provincial Park — make the hike part of the visit. Brewer Zach Gammage works small-batch across lagers, pale ales and a rotating Back Forty series that runs one base beer through different hops. Order the Island Lake Pale Ale or the In The Pines West Coast IPA, then take the dog-friendly beer garden out among the pines.