Cedar Cottage Brewery

Status: CLOSED / PRODUCTION MOVED. Ownership as recorded: Historical operator/ownership unresolved; physical brewing moved to Stanley Park Brewery site. Address: Southeast corner Kingsway and Knight Streets, Vancouver, BC (site now associated with King Edward Village). Cedar Cottage is preserved as its own physical brewery site. The City Archives says brewing operations moved to the Stanley Park Brewery after about a year; that movement is not treated as proof that Cedar Cottage and Stanley Park were the same legal company. [Canada Pass 102] CHECKED 2026-09-24: accounts disagree on the founding — 1901 by George Raywood at 1404 Kingsway, later 'Benson's', or 1902 by John Benson — and neither could be read directly (the City of Vancouver Archives refused robots). The Royal Brewing Co. Ltd's move to the Stanley Park site is on the Stanley Park record. UNKNOWN which founding is right.

A summary written during research. The sourced facts are in the sections below.

1. 1902
   Benson's company buys George Raywood's Cedar Cottage

   Benson, interviewed by city archivist J. S. Matthews on 24 July 1944: "Our first brewery business was started out at what was the Cedar Cottage; ...the old Cedar Cottage up on what was then Westminster Road, now Kingsway. We bought the building from George Raywood and started a brewery. We got our water from a well" (British Columbia History, 2013). That settles the two accounts: Raywood owned the building, Benson's company started the brewery — "right on the boundary at Knight and Westminster Rd." A photograph of the brewery in 1902 is reproduced in a 1957 Mount Pleasant memoir.

2. 1908
   To Stanley Park as the Royal Brewing Company

   "instead of selling the property and the business, Foubert leased the brewery to the Royal Brewing Company Ltd." — Benson's company, which moved its brewing to the Stanley Park brewery on Chilco Street (stanley-park-brewery-historic-chilco-street-brewery, TB-YYNAD5PF). The date of the move: UNKNOWN exactly; a 1944 photograph shows the Cedar Cottage building still standing.

3. 1903
   Brewing moved to the Stanley Park Brewery (about 1903)

   City of Vancouver Archives: after about a year, its brewing moved to the Stanley Park Brewery. What's Brewing (2018) places the move just after a 1903 lawsuit. The year is approximate.