Field House at 10: How Abbotsford’s little brewery became a big company made of small things

On a rainy November afternoon, the Abbotsford tasting room at Field House Brewing fills the way it always does this time of year: jackets and umbrellas piled by the door, boots squeaking on the concrete floors, steam drifting up from hot dishes coming out of the kitchen. The wood-burning fireplace crackles — giving the room a warm, lived-in scent. Tables crowd with neighbours shaking off the weather. A dog snoozes under a bench. Someone’s toddler waves a colouring page in triumph.

It feels, unmistakably, like someone’s home.

That feeling is part of what makes Field House Brewing one of the most beloved community spaces in the Fraser Valley — the kind of place locals recommend to out-of-town friends, as if the brewery itself is a piece of Valley identity. It’s also the reason the staff still talk about visitors from Vancouver who arrive, look around, and say the same thing every time: Oh. Now I get it.

A few weeks ago, founder Joshua Vanderheide pulled into a parking lot in Kitsilano for an event. Before he even closed his door, a stranger shouted across the stalls: “Hey man — love your beer!”

“It still catches me off guard,” Vanderheide says. “We still feel like the little brewery in Abbotsford.”

Then he pauses and laughs. “But we know we’re not that anymore.”

Field House turns ten this year. And in that decade, it has gone from a scrappy community brewery to something far bigger: a multi-beverage, multi-brand craft company expanding across Canada. A company fuelled by a philosophy that seems almost paradoxical in an era of consolidation: grow bigger by staying small.

This is the story of how Field House got here, and where it’s going next — without losing the feeling that made people fall in love with it in the first place.

The flooded garage that started it all

Long before Field House Brewing became a fixture of the Valley, it was a construction project that barely held together — literally.

When Vanderheide first stepped into the old Japan Auto building on Railway Street, the place didn’t scream “future destination brewery.” But Vanderheide, who had spent years in Vancouver as a designer working with early craft breweries, saw something in the bones of the building. The Valley didn’t have a modern craft brewery yet. Abbotsford was growing. The timing felt right.

“There were no breweries out here,” Vanderheide says. “Abbotsford was a big community with nothing like this. So I thought: maybe this is the moment.”

As renovations started, optimism met reality.

“We ripped the roof off, and suddenly found all these structural issues,” he recalls. “We were supposed to have a week of dry weather to put the new roof on — and instead, the rain came.”

With no roof overhead, water poured in. One day, Vanderheide walked into the space that would later become Field House’s office and found a foot of standing water.

“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, we might have made a mistake here.’”

Most founders have a “what are we doing?” moment. This was his.

Yet amid the chaos, something else happened: people started paying attention. Field House was already public about the build. The messiness wasn’t hidden — it became part of the story.

They had a Kickstarter scheduled to film that same week, originally planned for inside the brewery. With the interior a soaked disaster, Vanderheide and the team improvised. They shot the video outside, starring his wife’s Dutch Oma as his co-host. It was imperfect and charming and honest.

“It helped us raise $30,000,” Vanderheide says. “It showed people exactly who we were.”

By January 2016, the doors opened.

What happened next surprised almost everyone.

A brewery that felt like a home — and why it mattered

In Vancouver, the early wave of breweries arrived tucked into industrial pockets of the city — shipping bays, concrete rooms, high-ceilinged warehouses. That aesthetic became part of the region’s identity: gritty, urban, cool.

Field House didn’t follow that script.

Inside the Abbotsford location, there was a wood-burning fireplace. Plants. Pillows. Warm textures. Reclaimed materials. Outside, a backyard-style lawn where kids could run around while parents shared pints at picnic tables.

This wasn’t a place to pose. It was a place to exhale.

“We wanted it to feel like a house,” Vanderheide says. “Not that polished hospitality thing where someone says, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah, I’ll be your server tonight.’ More like: ‘Hey, come on in. Grab a seat. Let me know if you need a beer.’”

It was hospitality rooted in comfort. Informal. Familiar. Human.

The difference wasn’t just aesthetic — it was philosophical. Vanderheide describes Field House’s approach as “one part familiar, one part surprising.”

Familiar enough to trust. Surprising enough to feel new.

People felt that immediately. By spring 2016, Field House had become a place people talked about across the Lower Mainland. If you lived in Vancouver and were driving east, someone would tell you, You have to stop there.

Awards followed — Best New Brewery in year one, Innovator of the Year in year three — but the bigger signal came from the community. People didn’t just come for beer. They came for belonging.

“What we built was the brewery people imagined they’d build for themselves,” Vanderheide says. “Rustic, textured, warm.”

Even today, when Field House’s footprint has expanded far beyond Abbotsford, the team still tries to preserve that feeling — even as they scale.

Evolving with a changing industry

It would be easy to romanticize the brewery’s early success, but the last decade hasn’t been straightforward. COVID hit the industry hard. The BCGEU strike forced Field House to overhaul its entire distribution model for weeks. Consumer tastes have shifted dramatically — from big IPAs to crisp lagers to RTDs to non-alcoholic.

And across B.C., craft breweries have struggled. Closures are up. Costs are up. Demand is changing.

Vanderheide isn’t blind to any of it.

“We’ve all gone through five very hard years,” he says. “But when your business gets challenged, you get better.”

Field House’s response wasn’t to dig deeper into beer alone. It was to step back and ask a bigger question:

What does our community want to drink now — and can we make it?

That mindset led to the most significant evolution in Field House’s history.

From brewery to multi-beverage company

About a year ago, Field House acquired Nice Life Cocktails, a brand started by Vanderheide’s former business partner. Shortly after, they partnered with Dry Goods Beverage Co., founded by Powell Street Brewing’s Dave Bowkett. Both brought expertise and innovation — and both fit the ethos Field House wanted to build around: good people, good products, grounded in craft.

Then came new internally developed brands: Sunrise, Hotel Gin & Juice, Recreation, and more on the way.

These weren’t one-off experiments. They were the start of a portfolio — a multi-beverage collective designed to meet drinkers where their preferences are going: beer, cocktails, wine, non-alcoholic, and beyond.

“We want to be a multi-beverage brand portfolio,” Vanderheide says. “If our community is excited about something — whether that’s a cocktail, or a great non-alcoholic drink — we want to make it.”

It’s not a departure from craft. It’s an expansion of it.

“We’re not trying to be a luxury house,” he says. “But LVMH is actually an interesting model: a big company made of a lot of smaller, independent brands. That’s the idea — except our version is craft.”

Field House is no longer just Field House. It’s the Good Life Brand Collective, with Field House as the first chapter.

But the growth isn’t about becoming a giant brewery. Their approach is intentional: grow by multiplying small things, not scaling one thing to enormous size.

“We don’t want to be the big brewery with the big plant,” Vanderheide says. “We want to be a big company made of small things — small brands, small spaces, small teams that add up to something bigger.”

Community at scale: the next decade

The next five years will see Field House expand deeper into B.C., into Alberta (with a new Calgary location), and eventually into Ontario. But the way they plan to grow is unusual for the industry.

Instead of building one massive production facility and dominating shelves, the plan is to open small, community-rooted spaces that feel local — even if the parent company is bigger than the sign on the door.

Calgary will get its own “small Field House,” not a copy-paste of Abbotsford. Just as Abbotsford was designed to feel like a modern farmhouse, and Chilliwack was designed to feel “micro-urban,” future locations will reflect their surroundings.

“We want to feel small in every market we enter,” Vanderheide says. “But when you add all those small pieces together, it becomes something big.”

He points to Lululemon as a model — a global brand with a hyperlocal community strategy.

“They do community at scale,” he says. “That’s what we want to do in craft beverage.”

The idea isn’t just to sell drinks. It’s to create hospitality spaces where people feel at home — whether that home is in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Calgary, or beyond.

Inviting the community to invest in the future

One of the most intriguing markers of Field House’s next chapter is its FrontFundr campaign, a way for regular people to invest directly in the company.

“For years, people have asked if they can invest in Field House,” Vanderheide says. “We just never had the mechanism. Now we do.”

The raise isn’t about survival — the company is healthy. Instead, it’s about speed and opportunity.

“There are partnerships and chances that show up and disappear fast,” he says. “Having community investors helps us move quickly when the right things come up.”

It also deepens the connection between Field House and the people who helped build it from day one.

“We want our fans to be part of this journey,” Vanderheide says. “That’s the heart of it.”

A decade in, still the Valley’s brewery

For all the national ambitions and new brands, the core of Field House still exists in a simple moment: someone stepping out of the rain into the Abbotsford tasting room and feeling instantly at home.

That feeling is by design.

“We built the brewery we imagined people would want to come to,” Vanderheide says. “And it turned out they did.”

As Field House enters its second decade, that home-based hospitality — the fireplace, the textures, the patina, the welcome — remains the anchor.

Everything else that comes next, whether it’s in Calgary or Toronto or somewhere else entirely, will be built on that foundation: a big company made of small things, shaped by a philosophy that started in a leaky garage on Railway Street and grew into a vision of community at scale.

“Even now,” Vanderheide says, “when someone recognizes our beer in Vancouver, we still feel like the little brewery from Abbotsford.”

Maybe that’s the secret. Maybe that’s the brand.

And maybe that’s why, no matter how far Field House travels, Abbotsford will always be the place that shaped it — the house it returns to, and the home it’s still building upon.