There’s a stretch of trail just outside of Penticton, British Columbia, that follows the old Kettle Valley Railway, the KVR, winding through some of the most breathtaking Okanagan scenery you’ll ever lay eyes on. Cyclists ride it. Hikers walk it. Runners…well, they run it. Follow it just fifteen minutes from town and you’ll arrive somewhere that feels less like a brewery and more like a dream someone refused to stop having.
That place is Abandoned Rail Brewing and the story of how it came to be is equal parts bold vision, a dash of chainsaw therapy, no short amount of patience, and an unwavering love for the Okanagan.
Where It All Began
In 2013, Scott and Nicole were living in Langley and it was there that something unexpected started to happen. Craft breweries were popping up across the Lower Mainland. Liquor laws had changed, and with them, a whole new culture of flavour and community was emerging. For Scott, it was a revelation.
“I never actually liked beer until craft beer came along,” he admits with a laugh. “It was the same with coffee. Someone handed me a pour-over at work and I thought: oh. This is what coffee is supposed to taste like. Craft beer opened my eyes the same way.”
Around that same time, Scott’s childhood friend Peter had returned to BC after completing his Brewmaster certification in Germany, a country that takes its beer as seriously as the Canadians take their poutine. Peter had landed at Steel & Oak Brewing in New Westminster, and Scott would visit the brewery during construction, watching and supporting his friend lay the trench drains, troubleshoot the tanks, and bring a vision to life from the ground up.
“I got to see it all firsthand,” says Scott. “The whole process. Watching it come together like that, seeing what others were building, it really stuck with me.”
Peter spent two years at Steel & Oak before doing something quintessentially adventurous: he bought a van and spent a year driving around BC. His plan was to find a piece of land, plant himself in central BC, and build something small and meaningful on it, a tiny brewery of his own. Life had other ideas. But the seed had been planted.
It was around 2017 that the three of them, Scott, Nicole, and Peter, started talking seriously about doing something together. “We took a trip to Haida Gwaii,” Scott recalls, “and that’s really where we made it official. We sat together and said, okay. Let’s actually do this.”
Falling in Love with the Okanagan
The Okanagan had long held a special place for Scott and Nicole. They got married on God’s Mountain above Skaha Lake, with Joy Road Catering, the beloved Penticton business that was later sold and transformed into what is now Kin & Folk. That connection between the two didn’t end there, either. The two businesses have since collaborated on Farm Folk, a crisp, crushable German Lager brewed to pair with Kin & Folk’s fine dining menu, and one very much worth ordering on your next visit. They loved the wine country, the warmth, the pace of life, and the way the valley felt in summer. The craft beer scene was growing fast, and the whole region had an energy that felt like the early chapters of something great.
“We really wanted people to feel the Okanagan when they walked in,” says Scott. “Most breweries are in cities. We knew we had an opportunity to do something really different, to build a place that felt like it belonged to the land.”
In 2018, they found the property. It sat directly on the KVR trail, surrounded by orchard and Christmas trees, with a main house, a guest house, and a trail store that had been doing U-Pick fruit and seasonal tree sales. The City of Penticton had never dealt with an agricultural brewery before, but Scott picked up the phone.
The previous entrance to the trail store
“We called the City and walked them through what we were thinking,” he says. “They were receptive. It was new territory for everyone, but they were willing to work with us.”
They bought the property and got to work, or rather, they got to waiting, which is often what the early stages of a dream look like.
What Actually Makes an Agricultural Brewery
Abandoned Rail isn’t just a brewery that happens to be in the countryside. It is, by legal definition, an agricultural brewery, the only one in the Okanagan, and one of only four or five in all of British Columbia when they opened.
To qualify, the property must be on Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) zoning. If it’s over two hectares, the owners must actively grow at least two hectares of a primary farm product. That product has to be grain, specifically barley, rye, or wheat because those are the ingredients that carry sufficient weight to meet the Agricultural Land Commission’s requirements. Hops alone don’t qualify.
“It has to be the primary ingredient by weight,” Scott explains. “Water doesn’t count. So it comes down to barley, rye, or wheat. That’s the crop that makes an agricultural brewery what it is.”
Abandoned Rail now grows two hectares of barley, roughly five acres, right on the property. In a good year, that produces approximately seven metric tons of grain, which translates to an estimated 28,000 litres of beer. The fields are visible from the tasting room windows. Guests can see the ingredient before it becomes the pint in their hand.
There’s more to it than aesthetics, though. The barley has to be malted before it can be used in brewing, a process that activates the enzymes needed to convert the grain’s starches into fermentable sugars. Most BC malthouses have minimum order quantities that are simply too large to place, so in their early years, the team cleaned and processed their own grain, a labour of love that speaks to the level of care woven into every batch they produce.
“It’s not necessarily cheaper to grow our own,” Scott is quick to point out. “There’s the labour, the equipment, the malting process. But that’s not the point. The point is what it means, to the beer, and to the experience people have when they’re here.”
Half of the barley used at Abandoned Rail must, by ALC rules, come from BC. The team sources supplemental grain from the Peace River region of northern BC, keeping the supply chain as local as the grain growing outside their door.
The Chainsaw Years
None of this came easily. The story of how the barley fields came to exist is one that doesn’t make the Instagram grid, but probably should.
In their first year on the property, Scott and Nicole ran the trail store and attempted to save a cherry block that had been part of the orchard. They applied to the Agricultural Land Commission to keep some of the fruit trees while also establishing the brewery. The ALC said no: to qualify, the two hectares had to be dedicated to barley. No exceptions.
So in Year Two, Scott and Nicole cleared two hectares of established orchard and Christmas trees. By themselves.
Installing irrigation, Cherry trees had to be removed.
“I did it with a chainsaw,” he jokes, as though this is a perfectly normal thing a person does. “Nicole moved the wood to the side of the property.”
First trial of growing barley - done old school so they dried like this
After clearing, they cut the roots, installed an irrigation system (Peter and Scott ran half of it themselves), and planted their first barley crop. The City of Penticton required them to complete a full harvest before they could break ground on the brewery itself.
Nicole, working away harvesting the Barley "they see me rollin'"
They purchased an old Enderby combine, the kind of machine that tells you exactly how serious you are about what you’re building, and harvested their first crop. Ground was broken on the brewery in February 2021. The first batch of beer was brewed in November of that year. The tasting room opened in March 2022.
From vision to pint glass: nearly four years of permits, cleared orchards, grain, and patience was required.
Three People, One Vision
What makes Abandoned Rail work, really work, is the way each of its three founders brought something irreplaceable to the table.
Scott, Nicole & Peter
Peter is the Brewmaster. Trained in Germany, shaped by years of hands-on experience, he designed the manufacturing space with expansion in mind, working directly with the brewery manufacturer to ensure the brew house, tanks, and infrastructure were built to his exacting standards. The beers at Abandoned Rail are European-inspired, a nod to his training and to Scott’s own German heritage (his great-grandparents immigrated from Germany to Ontario, a lineage that feels quietly appropriate for a brewery that takes its craft this seriously).
Scott handled everything else that doesn’t happen in a brew kettle. The zoning, the permits, the ALC applications, the building designers, the general contractors. Every piece of red tape that stood between a dream and a functioning business, Scott untangled it.
Nicole focused her energy on what the overall ARBC experience would feel like to the people coming to the brewery. Whether guests were arriving by foot, by bike, or by car along the stunning winding roads of the Naramata Bench or the KVR trail, she thought carefully about every moment after they arrived: sitting outside in the sun, playing lawn games, watching the kids take a turn down the mini slide, pulling out a board game, settling onto the patio or under the covered area, or finding a spot inside the brewery itself. She collaborated with Jenn, owner of another local Penticton gem, the well-known Wayne & Freda, to shape a tasting room that felt alive and intentional from every angle.
“We wanted it to feel agricultural but also genuinely beautiful,” says Scott. “Windows everywhere. Views of the fields. Great beer, great food, but in a setting that actually reflects where you are.”
Come As You Are
Abandoned Rail is dog-friendly. It’s family-friendly. It sits on one of the most beloved multi-use trails in the province, which means you can bike there, run there, or hike there and reward yourself with something cold and well-made at the end of it.
The tasting room holds a Rainbow Certification, reflecting a genuine commitment to being a welcoming space for people of all backgrounds. There’s a code of conduct on the wall, and it’s a topic of real conversation in team meetings. Inclusivity isn’t a checkbox here; it’s a value that gets practised. The team also works with organizations like Open Door Group to support people with barriers to employment in finding meaningful work, and they don’t make a performance of it. It’s simply part of how they believe a business should be run.
“We want people to come here and truly feel welcome,” says Scott. “In the space, with each other, in the Okanagan. That matters to us.”
The Risk Worth Taking
There’s a version of this story where Scott and Nicole stay in Langley, where Peter’s van keeps driving and doesn’t stop, where the KVR trail stays a trail and nothing more. It’s easy to imagine, because the other version, the real one, required so much: a leap of faith, countless hours of behind the scenes thought, effort, sweat, conversations, and decisions that most people will never see, all of it in service of turning a vision into something you can actually walk into, sit down inside of, and raise a glass to.
They did it. The result is something rare, a business that feels like it was born from the land it sits on, built by people who genuinely love what they’re making and who they’re making it for.
If you’ve ever had a dream that felt too big or too complicated or too uncertain to pursue, spend an afternoon at Abandoned Rail. Walk the fields. Watch the KVR trail carry people in from every direction. Order something cold and beautifully crafted.
Then ask yourself what you’re waiting for.
Story by Dean Douglas (Douglas Marketing) in collaboration with Scott, Nicole & Peter at Abandoned Rail Brewing Company.