Vancouver's Breweries: What Changed And What Closed

The Vancouver brewery map of the last two years has moved more than the one before it, and the honest way to describe the pattern is that this province's craft brewing reached a peak of openings and then went through a shakeout. Industry reporting put the number of British Columbia craft breweries closing in 2025 at about 25, against a previous pace of three or four a year, and a handful of the casualties were in Metro Vancouver. Naming them precisely matters more than naming many of them, because a list of taprooms goes stale within months and a false name on a list outlives the article.

The Three Pressures Behind The 2025 Shakeout

• Central City Brewers, the Surrey brewery behind Red Racer, changed hands rather than shutting, entering creditor protection in November 2024 and being bought by the Mark Anthony Group in February 2025.
• Other Metro Vancouver closings from the 2025 wave include Studio Brewing in Burnaby and ABC in New Westminster, with Boardwalk in Port Coquitlam also reported closed.
• The clearest reason a brewery closes is the rent, because a 35 per cent increase at Vancouver Island Brewing's Government Street site ended production in Victoria in 2024.
• A single-room taproom is a hospitality business first, and a brewery that also sells into liquor stores and restaurants gains a second revenue stream that carries a margin cost.

The Businesses That Actually Changed Hands Or Shut

Four changes in the Vancouver area are documented well enough to state without hedging, and they cover three different kinds of ending. Central City Brewers and Distillers, the Surrey brewery behind Red Racer, entered creditor protection in November 2024 and was bought by the Mark Anthony Group, with the purchase completing in February 2025. That is an ownership change rather than a shutdown, and it is the clearest example in the province of a small brewery becoming part of a much larger operation. What the site is doing now is a separate question that public sources do not clearly answer, so it is better left open than filled in.

House of Funk, in North Vancouver's Shipyards, closed in September 2025 after a year in which it had changed its name in an attempt to stay afloat. Its former website now redirects to an unrelated coffee business, which is worth knowing because a redirect reads very much like a reopening if you do not know the history. Bridge Brewing is still operating, but it consolidated into three North Vancouver locations, and the downtown and Marine Drive rooms it once ran are gone. Stanley Park Brewing is still brewing, and its current location is out at the park itself, with the downtown Georgia Street room no longer appearing among its sites.

Two more Metro Vancouver closures from the 2025 wave are Studio Brewing in Burnaby and ABC in New Westminster, with Boardwalk in Port Coquitlam also reported closed. And a pub rather than a brewery is worth a mention because it gets miscounted: Mahony's renamed itself Mahony's Tavern in 2021, its Stamps Landing room closed around the middle of 2025, and there is no good evidence it ever brewed its own beer.

The Ones Still Pouring

The other side of the ledger matters just as much, because a story about decline that ignores the survivors is as misleading as one that invents taprooms. Steamworks Brewing is the largest operation in the city and has expanded to four sites, covering Gastown, Burnaby, Mount Pleasant and Horseshoe Bay. Parallel 49 is still trading in East Vancouver as an independent, and although an undated commercial buyout listing circulates for the business, there is no confirmed sale. Storm Brewing, Bomber Brewing, Luppolo Brewing, 33 Acres, R&B Brewing and Brewhall are all operating, and Luppolo moved from Alexander Street to Venables Street in Strathcona. Terminal City is still on Clark Drive.

Two names that turn up in older Vancouver lists deserve clearing out. Dageraad Brewing in Burnaby makes beers in trappist styles, and the distinction matters: no Canadian brewery, Dageraad included, is a member of the International Trappist Association, and only genuine abbey-affiliated breweries qualify. Several Vancouver names that circulate on aggregator sites, including Bandy Brewing, Coalition Brewing, Cambie Brewing and Green College Beer, returned nothing when checked and are not real Vancouver businesses. A Red Cap Brewery is sometimes listed for the city in the 1990s, and no evidence for one has ever been found.

Why The Churn Looked The Way It Did

The mechanics behind the 2025 wave are ordinary and worth understanding, because they explain why some names survive and others do not. A taproom is a hospitality business first. It carries rent, staffing and food costs against a product that cannot be price-hoped the way a coffee can, and when a lease comes up for renewal the number on the renewal notice decides the outcome. Vancouver Island Brewing gave the province the clearest example of this in 2024, when a rent increase of roughly 35 per cent at its Government Street site in Victoria ended the brewery there, with the taproom closing in September and production ceasing in November. Nothing about its beer was the problem.

The second pressure is distribution. A brewery with one room has one revenue stream, and it rises and falls with the weather and with the neighbourhood. A brewery that also sells into liquor stores and restaurants has a second stream, but it has to survive the margin between taproom pricing and wholesale, and it has to build a brand that travels before it can take that step. Breweries that tried to skip the first stage and go straight to retail have generally had a harder time than the ones that spent years building a room first, which is one reason the long-running operations in the city are the long-running ones. The third pressure is simply that the openings had gone too fast, and a cohort that starts in the same year tends to end in the same year.

None of this is a verdict on the beer. Several of the breweries that closed were making genuinely interesting work, and a brewery that shuts is a business outcome rather than a judgement on its malt. What the churn does change is the habit of trusting a list, which is why the BC Ale Trail brewery directory is more useful than any article's list, and why checking a brewery's own site before driving to it is the sensible default.

The Vancouver Craft Beer Movement: Where It Came From

Vancouver's modern brewing scene does not start with a wave of taprooms in the 2010s. It starts in 1982 in West Vancouver, when John Mitchell and Frank Appleton opened Horseshoe Bay Brewing, generally credited as Canada's first microbrewery, and then in May 1984 on Catherine Street in Victoria, where Mitchell, architect Paul Hadfield and Raymond Ginnever opened Spinnakers as the country's first brewpub. The rule change that made both possible came first, and the next three decades of Vancouver brewing grew out of that sequence rather than out of any single moment in the city.

How Vancouver Brewing Actually Started

• The law changed first, because a provincial rule stopped a brewer from owning a licensed premises, and Mitchell lobbied the liquor board and the minister until brewing and selling could happen under one roof.
• Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver in 1982 is generally credited as the first microbrewery, and Shaftebury on the East Side followed in the mid 1980s with Mitchell as its first brewer.
• The 1990s turned the East Side into the centre of gravity, with Yaletown, Storm on Commercial Drive and Steamworks in Gastown all opening within a few years of each other.
• Several popular claims will not hold up, because there is no evidence a Red Cap Brewery ever operated in the city and Swans was a Victoria brewery, not a Vancouver one.

The Law Changed Before The Beer Did

The scene that people date to the 1980s was actually made possible by a regulatory fight in the late 1970s. A strike at the country's large brewers cut off supply and left a shortage, and when the province's Expo 86 organizing committee went looking for something to draw visitors, the idea of a brewpub took hold. The obstacle was provincial law that stopped a brewer from owning a licensed premises, which meant a brewery could make beer and a pub could sell it, but no single business could do both. Mitchell, working with Dave Patrick of Troller's, spent time on liquor board administrator Alan Gould and on minister Peter Hyndman, and the restriction that had kept brewing and drinking apart was dismantled. Without that change, every brewpub in the country would have been impossible.

A second federal change followed, in the years just before Spinnakers opened, allowing beer to be brewed and sold under one roof. The brewpub as a Canadian business model dates to that window, and Victoria, not Vancouver, holds the claim. If you are looking for the origin of the Vancouver scene specifically, though, the relevant line runs north from there, and the person connecting the two is Mitchell.

Horseshoe Bay And The First Wave

Horseshoe Bay Brewing opened in West Vancouver in 1982 with Mitchell as founder and Appleton alongside him, and it is the brewery most histories treat as the country's first. That is a reasonable reading of the record, though a handful of breweries describe themselves as first in the same self-declared way, so the honest phrasing is that it is generally credited rather than definitively proven. Shaftebury Brewing followed in the mid 1980s in East Vancouver, founded by Tim Wittig and Paul Beaton with Mitchell as its first brewer, and it is usually called the East Side's first microbrewery. Its founding year is given variously as 1986, 1987 and 1988, which is a fair illustration of how well this period is documented.

Granville Island Brewing arrived in Vancouver in 1984, founded by Mitch Taylor, and it matters less for being first than for what it proved about scale. It was built to produce and distribute rather than to pour in one room, which showed early on that a Vancouver brewery could think beyond a single bar. The company later moved off the island entirely, and the site it anchored has become a collection of places serving other people's beer.

The 1990s And The East Side

The 1990s brought a dense cluster of openings, and the East Side of Vancouver became the centre of gravity. Yaletown Brewing Company opened on Mainland Street in 1994 and is described by the city's own press as Vancouver's first brewpub, though Sailor Hagar's in North Vancouver, which also opened in 1994, is described the same way for Metro Vancouver. Rather than settle that, it is enough to say the two were the same year and both mattered. Storm Brewing opened on Commercial Drive in 1994, founded by James Walton, and has stayed at the same address through everything that followed, including a brief licensing-related closure in 2024 and a reopening. Steamworks came along in 1995 in Gastown, founded by Eli Gershkovitch, who built the operation around the building's own steam supply, a piece of local industrial history turned into a brewing constraint and then into a brand.

R&B Brewing started on East Fourth Avenue in 1997, and Dix, a barbecue restaurant that brewed on Beatty Street from 1998, turned out to matter as a talent incubator rather than as a lasting business. Dix closed in 2010 and its equipment went to Brassneck, so the lineage of people trained in Vancouver runs through a venue that no longer exists, which is a useful thing to know when reading brewery histories that stop at the opening dates.

What The Record Gets Wrong

A few claims about Vancouver's brewing past circulate widely and cannot be supported. There is no evidence a Red Cap Brewery ever operated in the city. Swans Brewery was in Victoria from 1989 and was founded by a developer named Michael Williams, so any Vancouver version of that story is a conflation with Mitchell's actual first brewery. And several published timelines call Granville Island Brewing Canada's first microbrewery, which conflicts with the better-sourced Horseshoe Bay. None of this matters much to a drinker today, but it does matter if you are trying to date a bottle or trace where a brewer learned the trade, which is the reason to get the sequence right.

What Came After The First Decades

By the time the province-wide directory was assembled, the BC Ale Trail was listing more than 180 breweries across British Columbia, roughly 200 directory entries in total, with about 21 tagged to Vancouver. The site is backed by the BC Craft Brewers Guild and Destination BC, though it does not name a founder or a founding year for itself, so any account of who started it should be treated cautiously. What is clear is the scale of what came out of the 1980s: a handful of brewpubs in two cities became a province with breweries in most of its communities, and a good many of them trace directly back to people who brewed in Vancouver or Victoria in the 1990s.

The BC Ale Trail history runs through this period in more detail, and the region's own style is a separate question, covered elsewhere on this site. What belongs here is the shape of the beginning, which was a legal change, two breweries in quick succession, and a city that had a working industrial waterfront to brew beside.