Stubby● Trail · crawl
East of the Don
Seven east-end breweries, about 4 km, one afternoon on foot.
Cross the Don and the breweries come thick and fast. Seven of them sit within about four kilometres of Queen Street East and Eastern Avenue, from Riverside into Leslieville - the densest walking cluster of taprooms in the city, with most hops between them ten minutes or less on foot. This is the route: start clean on a Queen East pilsner, wander a rooftop farm and a Black Oak alumni's brewpub, drop onto Eastern Avenue for a dog-friendly warehouse and a rooftop-canopy patio, then climb under the rail line to a Czech-Japanese lager hall and finish on baseball beer. Go on a weekend afternoon, walk every leg, and let the beers get bigger as the light goes.
Start in Riverside, in the old Teck Theatre beside the Broadview Hotel, where chef Tara Lee (ex-Bar Hop) and brewmaster Dave Lee (ex-Mill Street) brew everyday ales in view of a roughly 50-foot bar. Order the Prodigal Pilsner - a clean Czech-style opener - and, if you're hungry, tacos from the Eastbound Cantina before the day gets bigger.
A short seven minutes east along Queen brings you to Avling, a farm-to-table brewpub built around a 4,000-square-foot rooftop farm - a certified wildlife-habitat sanctuary that grows the produce and brewing botanicals for the room below. An in-house butcher breaks down whole Ontario pigs and cows, and the beers rotate with whatever the roof is giving up.
Ten minutes on, still on Queen, Radical Road is the cozy wood-and-copper brewpub that ex-Black Oak brewers Justin Graham and Simon Decosta named for an Edinburgh footpath. All the beer is made behind the kitchen-facing window; they run hands-on 'Brewer for a Day' tours if you want to come back and pull your own. Straightforward pub food, no patio.
Cut south to Eastern Avenue and Black Lab, a 1940s ironworking warehouse painted black and named for Snoopy, the founders' black Lab who was the brand's mascot until 2023. Billy and Anne Madden keep it fully dog-friendly, the front patio open year-round, food from rotating weekend pop-ups. Order the Kit Kat Stout, a sweet stout brewed with chocolate wafers.
Three minutes up Eastern Avenue, Rorschach fills a century-old former house that three U of T chemical-engineering grads turned into a brewpub - the name is the inkblot idea that no two people read the same beer alike. Head up to the rooftop patio, set into a dense tree line so it feels like drinking in a canopy, and chase the Truth Serum double dry-hopped IPA if it's on; the high-gravity releases sell out fast.
Now the one real climb - about thirteen minutes east to Coxwell and up under the rail corridor via the Coxwell Avenue underpass south of Dundas. Godspeed is founder-brewmaster Luc Lafontaine's (ex-Dieu du Ciel) Czech-and-Japanese lager program, which NOW's judges named the best in Ontario, brewed in custom tanks shipped from Pilsen. Order the Cha Cha Cha, a Czech-style pilsner, with something from the WVRST kitchen.
Finish twelve minutes on at Left Field, the baseball brewery Mark and Mandie Murphy tucked off Wagstaff Drive, where a garage door rolls up onto the laneway in warm weather and a basset hound named Wrigley presides. Close on the Eephus, the oatmeal brown ale named for a slow, arcing pitch that made the brewery's name. Kid- and dog-friendly, bring-your-own food.
