Getting to the Breweries along Symes Road

There are currently three microbreweries in close proximity along Symes Road in the Junction area: Shacklands, Rainhard, and Junction Brewing. This location is fairly easy to drive to, and a massive pain if you're on the TTC. Since I'm reviewing all three breweries at once, I thought I'd throw up a page on how to get there.

Catch the westbound St. Clair streetcar (aka "LRT") - I got it at St. Clair station, but you can also get it at St. Clair West station, or any of the many major streets it crosses that have buses. Ride it out to the end of the line - Gunn's Loop, a couple blocks west of Keele. This is a tedious ride: even though the streetcar has its own right-of-way, it seems to proceed at a stately maximum speed of 30 km/h ... with fairly frequent stops.

From Gunn's Loop, walk west along St. Clair or preferably one of the several parallel residential back streets to Symes Road, where you'll turn right and walk to where the road ends. At this point, you'll be facing a big wall, but there are a couple pedestrian cut-throughs to get us to the industrial section of Symes that we want. As soon as you step through the wall, you'll see Shacklands, and Rainhard will be visible perhaps 50 metres further along.

Junction is actually the tricky one: where Symes intersects Glen Scarlett Road, there's a rather nice old building, and if you look closely you should find pointers to Junction Brewing, which is at the farthest and least visible from the street back corner of the building.

That this is the best way out there by TTC was, unfortunately, confirmed by both the TTC trip planner and one of the Rainhard employees.

map of the area between Gunn's Loop and Symes Road