VanCity Drinks

VanCity Drink Specials is the comprehensive guide to the Vancouver drinking scene. From daily drink specials and Happy Hours, to full coverage of special events and provocative journalistic series, VanCity Drink Specials provides an insiders take on the best ways to enjoy Vancouvers vibrant craft beer and cocktail culture. Through meticulous hands-on research, our team has mapped out all of the citys bars and restaurants and curated a detailed guide to the best deals and finest establishments, helping anyone from the discerning bar fly to the uninitiated out-of-towner get the most of their Vancouver experience at the best possible value.

The VanCity Drink Specials App is designed to put the expansive knowledge of our team of researchers at the immediate disposal of our users, right in the palms of their hands. Complete with an interactive, customisable map, the VCDS App helps users find the best deals wherever they are in the city, making you feel like an experienced local, even if youre new in town. Additional features that highlight Vancouvers most popular specials, as well as links to informative and entertaining articles about our teams favorite spots, ensure that App users will stay up on all the latest trends in one of the worlds most attractive cities.

VanCity Drink Specials began as a response to an often asked but rarely answered question: Where can I get a cheap drink in Vancouver? As a kid from the burbs making the undergrad commute out to the University of British Columbia every day, VanCity Drink Specials co-founder Wes Berger (aka Wes the Waiter) found himself asking this question a lot, for as anyone who’s been to this city knows, Vancouver can be a very expensive place to go out for a drink. As he slowly learned the landscape of Vancouver’s bar and restaurant scene, Wes discovered that while some places charged an arm and a leg for a burger and a beer, many fine establishments boasted excellent drink specials on great drinks every night of the week. The only thing missing, it seemed, was some sort of guide to these drink specials, a website, perhaps, that would catalog all the specials at all the bars around the city, making it possible for someone to find the best deal, wherever they happened to be. To Wes’ amazement, no one had stepped up to take on this important task, and with that, the idea for VanCity Drink Specials was born.

The biggest obstacle to creating a comprehensive database of all of Vancouver’s daily drink specials was finding a way to gather all the information and to ensure that it was kept accurate and up-to-date. After a few failed solo attempts, Wes realized that the job before him was too big for one man, and it was at that time that fellow co-founders Ben McRae (aka Ben tha Bartender) and Mack McGill entered the picture, thus forming the partnership that saw VanCity Drink Specials through its first crucial years of development. With this team in place, and with the help of several dedicated ‘auxillary researchers’, Ben and Wes made their way through all the different neighbourhoods of Vancouver – from Kitsilano and Commercial Drive to Gastown and Main Street – gathering specials from over 100 bars and sharing their exploits through fun blog posts that highlighted the exciting drinking culture of a notoriously ‘no-fun’ city. Over a period of months, the information from these pub-crawls/research missions was consolidated and condensed by Mack, VCDS’s resident web-master, who gradually built up the specials lists into a database that now includes over 1,500 specials a week, and now VanCity Drink Specials is proud to be Vancouver’s go-to source for information about the drinking scene, from specials to events and everything in between. With the recent additions of Media Director Matthew “International” Bossons and App and Database Developer Varun Jain, the VCDS team is primed for future and looking forward to what’s sure to be an exciting time for company.