Tasting notes, fast facts, and expert reviews on every brewery in the San Diego region
By Bruce Glassman
By Bruce Glassman
Stepping into Home Brew Mart is like stepping into a monument to San Diego Craft Beer. For a vast array of pro brewers in town, this is the place where it all began. In fact, HBM’s recently retired brew house has been placed on exhibit at the San Diego History Center.
Home Brew Mart is, first and foremost, a home brew supply store with a brewing facility in back. It does happen to have, however, some of the best and most interesting beer in San Diego on tap. The tasting area, recently remodeled and expanded, has become a very nice place to hang out.
The beers at HBM are constantly rotating and changing. This is the place where wunderkind Specialty Brewer Colby Chandler has traditionally experimented with exciting variations on the Ballast Point core beers while he also brewed small pilot batches of new—sometimes mind-blowing—creations that incorporate herbs, spices, fruits, and other unique ingredients. Colby now brews pilot batches at the new Ballast location (in Little Italy) but talented brewer Aaron Justus carries on the noble tradition at Home Brew Mart.
San Diego is all about great beer—and there’s an awful lot of it! We currently have more than 120 working brewery locations in our county, with an estimated 30-40 more in the planning stages. That’s a lot of breweries to sort through. So where to begin? Well, the answer is right here. If you want to plan any kind of brewery experience, The San Diego Brewery Guide is your most essential tool. Not only does it list the location and key information about every working brew house that’s open to the public, it also allows you to search for breweries that meet your specific criteria. Do you only want breweries in a specific neighborhood? No problem. Only want places that have patios for dogs? You got it. Do you want to keep your search limited to small or medium-sized breweries? Yup, we got that.
With so many breweries to choose from, we hope you’ll keep coming back to consult The San Diego Brewery Guide on a regular basis. Our ultimate goal is to make it easy for you to plan the perfect day or weekend of brewery tours and tastings in San Diego—and to do it time and time again. If you haven’t already, you’ll see that there’s nothing better than enjoying a great brewery-fresh beer right where it’s made.
So get out there and explore! Sip. Savor. Socialize. And get ready to be awed by some of the best brews to be found anywhere on the planet. Enjoy!
- Bruce Glassman
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