A proposal at The Keg

In 1993 Tim LaHay asked his sweetheart, Theresa, to marry him at The Keg in the Country. Two years later he got a job at that same Keg.

Hold onto that detail. The Barley Merchant, the taproom Tim and Theresa own today, sits “more or less in the same location as the old Keg In The Country,” What’s Brewing magazine reported when it opened in 2021.

Some people take a while to come home. Tim took about 26 years and one pandemic.

From a Big Mac to ’10K’ LaHay

Tim’s restaurant career started small. “I’ve been in the restaurant industry since I made my first Big Mac at the Aldergrove McD’s in 1989,” he wrote on LinkedIn in 2023. He spent years managing at The Keg and Sammy J’s, and later at Redwoods Golf Course.

Then craft beer got hold of him. After a road trip to Portland in 2016 he registered craftbeertourist.com, and its social media following grew into the tens of thousands, What’s Brewing says. In 2017 he launched the @BCCraftBreweries Instagram page, which quickly passed 10,000 followers.

That summer he used those brewery connections to raise more than $10,000 for the Canadian Red Cross wildfire relief fund in B.C. The magazine started calling him Tim “10K” LaHay.

A rejected lease, then COVID

In 2015 Tim and a future business partner from Sammy J’s met at the London Bull, a pub in that very building, to talk about opening a place of their own. In 2018 word came that the space might open up. Tim applied for the lease and got turned down, so he took a job opening a Trading Post Brewing eatery in Abbotsford instead.

In May 2019 another tip came in. The space was available after all. This time, What’s Brewing wrote, Tim wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The group was about to sign in March 2020 when the first COVID news broke. They held off. “There were some days that [we thought] our dream might not happen,” Tim told the Langley Advance Times in 2021.

Instead they kept visiting local breweries as they reopened. “We knew that we had to press on and do everything we could to bring The Barley Merchant to life,” he said. Work started that December, and the doors opened on July 25, 2021, a year later than planned.

All BC, all 50 taps

The rule behind the bar is simple. Every beer, cider, wine and spirit comes from British Columbia. The restaurant’s own motto is “We Champion BC.”

That’s a lot of choice. There are 50 taps, so a tasting flight is the easy way in. You don’t need to know beer styles, the restaurant says. Tell the staff what you like and they’ll steer you.

The kitchen makes its sauces, stocks and dips in-house, along with the sourdough, gnocchi and desserts. Google reviewers keep naming the baked brie and the pear and beet salad. One wrote that taproom food “can sometimes feel like an afterthought, but here they clearly take their menu seriously.”

Lifelong locals, and Business of the Year

The Barley Merchant is owned by Tim and Theresa, both lifelong Langley residents, along with two partners who are seasoned restaurateurs, the Langley Advance Times reported in 2021.

In October 2025 the Greater Langley Chamber of Commerce named The Barley Merchant Business of the Year at the Langley Business Excellence Awards.

Photos: The Barley Merchant.