Stubby● Trail · crawl
The Junction Works
Five breweries across the old Stockyards, about 2 km on foot - in a neighbourhood that was dry for 97 years.
For almost a century this was the neighbourhood that said no. The Junction voted itself dry in 1903 and stayed that way until 2000 - roughly 97 years without a legal drink. Today the old Stockyards beside it hold Toronto's tightest cluster of breweries, and you can walk the lot in an afternoon. Start on Runnymede, where Lost Craft and High Park share one room, cross the CP rail corridor at St Clair Ave W into the Symes Road strip, and finish inside a restored 1934 incinerator. Five breweries, about 2 km, no leg over a fifteen-minute walk - and two pairs share a building, so those legs are zero. Pace yourself - flights over pints if you want to make all five.
Begin on Runnymede Road at Ontario's first BIPOC-owned brewery, a Certified B Corp founded by Shehan De Silva, who left finance to chase session-style artisan beer. Since 2021 Lost Craft has shared this Stockyards room - exposed tanks, 30-foot ceilings, a winterized dog-friendly patio - with High Park Brewery - the first collaboration of its kind for a Toronto brewery. No fixed pick in our notes, so work the 12-tap wall and ask what's fresh.
Same room, second brand: High Park Brewery started in 2015 when four hockey teammates decided at a beer festival to brew together, then moved into this facility with Lost Craft in what the two call Toronto's first collaborative brewery arrangement. Six core beers pour year-round beside brewer Mark Samborski's seasonals. You don't even change seats - just switch to the other half of the tap list.
To reach the Symes Road strip you cross the CP rail corridor - the practical crossing is the St Clair Ave W bridge, about a fourteen-minute walk. Rainhard opened in 2015 inside a 1940s manufacturing plant, sandblasted walls and original glass-paned windows, with a bar that brewmaster Jordan Rainhard built himself in the middle of the working brewhouse. It took Best Newcomer at that year's Golden Tap Awards for clean, dry-finish beers; Sweetback's Milk Stout and Lazy Bones IPA are the house names. Dog- and kid-friendly patio if the weather holds.
Same building as Rainhard, no walk at all: Shacklands is one of the only Ontario breweries built around Belgian ales, farmhouse saisons and a funk-and-sour barrel program you can watch aging from the bar. The name nods to the 'shacklands' - the working-class suburbs that immigrant rail and stockyard workers threw up around old Toronto, which is exactly where you're standing. Quirky, cozy room with action figures on the shelves; try the Saison Davenport or the Razzle Blazzle sour.
Ten minutes down Symes Road - no rail to cross this time - to the finish: Junction Craft fills 'The Destructor,' the Art Deco incinerator R.C. Harris built in 1934 to burn the city's trash, which it did into the 1970s before sitting derelict until a 2018 restoration. You order from an electronic board that flashes beer names where the old rail schedules once ran, on what The Growler calls one of Toronto's great patios. Close the day with a Conductor's Craft Ale, the smooth amber that's been the flagship since the brewery opened in 2011.