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FeedSurf, Sand and Suds
Photo by Tim Mantoani
Once your eyes adjust, you just might be surprised at what you don’t see. Absent are the mass-produced domestic beers and the Mexican brands typically found at beach bars. In their stead is a healthy offering of stouts, Belgian-style ales and refreshingly bitter double India Pale Ales. Even more surprising: Of the 25 beers on tap at The Liar’s Club, nearly three-quarters are crafted in San Diego.
Whether you know it or not, San Diego has become a bona fide beer town.
For the better part of the past two decades, the term “microbrew” has been equated with dank and drizzly Northwest locales like Portland or Seattle. To beer snobs/aficionados, San Diego had long been considered a suds wasteland —a sunny tourist town that served up Corona and not much else.
But one of the original big names in the San Diego beer community, Karl Strauss Brewing Company, opened the downtown doors of its first brewpub in 1989 and two years later began distributing its wares locally. About a year later, Pizza Port Solana Beach installed a seven- barrel system and began doling out handcrafted beer to thirsty North County patrons. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, though, that a local beer scene began to take shape, through the birth of Stone Brewing Company, Ballast Point Brewing Company, Oggi’s and AleSmith Brewing Company. In recent years, Coronado Brewing Company, as well as Green Flash Brewing Company and its partner, ReaperAle, have gained popularity both in bottles and on tap throughout the county.
Tom Nickel was the head brewer at Oggi’s for more than seven years. Currently, he’s proprietor of O’Brien’s, a Kearny Mesa watering hole that, along with The Liar’s Club and the San Diego Brewing Company, is one of the top bars in Southern California to tap into quality, local beers. Looking back to the burgeoning scene a decade ago, Nickel recalls, “For two or three years, nobody really noticed. By 2000, I felt people were finally starting to take notice of San Diego beers on more of a national stage. When it comes to our recognition, you can’t underestimate the power of the beer Web sites.”
Indeed, a quick tour of RateBeer.com and BeerAdvocate.com, two of the preeminent destinations for beer enthusiasts, shows San Diego beers are ranked among the best in the country. Based on user reviews on RateBeer.com, the city can claim four of the top 10 beers in the country and, according to another poll, is home to three of the top breweries in the world (AleSmith, Stone and Pizza Port Solana Beach).
There are also forums on these sites that allow folks to set up trades for beer not available in their area, much the same way Deadheads traded cassettes of live concerts back in the day. For example, an East Coaster who can’t readily buy Ballast Point or AleSmith can have them shipped from a San Diegan in return for craft beers not available out here, like Dogfish Head or Weyerbacher. (Disclaimer: Check state shipping laws before sending alcohol.)
“A cool thing right now about the San Diego brewing scene is that there is a little bit of an underground to it,” says Tomme Arthur, head brewer at Pizza Port Solana Beach and director of brewery operations for Port Brewing. “A lot of people outside the area know how great a beer Pure Hoppiness [from Alpine Beer Company] is and how great some of the other smaller producers are, while they’re not even relatively that wellknown here. San Diego has a cachet; it’s like a Napa or a Sonoma. You can say your beer is San Diego–produced, and that carries some weight in the beer world these days.”
The accolades are not just coming from Joe Six Pack sitting at a home computer. At the 2005 Great American Beer Festival in Denver, a three-day beer Olympics of sorts, San Diego brews took home 15 medals in a competition that featured 2,358 beers from 461 breweries.
O WHAT HAPPENED in the past decade to turn the tide of the local brewing scene?
“We’ve got the positive version of ‘the perfect storm’ in craft brewing in San Diego,” says Greg Koch, chairman and CEO of Stone Brewing. “We’ve got several brewers who are very good at what they do—they’ve got the talent—and who are also following their own muse. It’s created this environment that’s quite unique.”
Another unique aspect is the cama raderie exhibited throughout the local industry. In a world where Bud Light and Miller Lite take potshots at one another through television marketing campaigns, San Diego brewers have formed a community based on nurturing, rather than cutthroat competitiveness.
“You don’t see that in a lot of places; everybody is helping everybody right now,” Arthur says. “The whole city came on strong because everyone got behind each other. You’re starting to see other regions out there look at our example and say, ‘Wow, look what they’ve been able to accomplish. Ten years ago there was practically no good beer made in that region, and now there are a couple of worldclass breweries.’ ”
Matt Akin is a brewer at AleSmith, a four-man operation that produces only 1,000 barrels a year, yet whose beers are consistently lauded as among the best in the world. “We all know how difficult it is to do this—how unbelievably expensive and time-consuming this life is, so we work together pretty well,” he says.
“If there’s a problem in one of the breweries, the rest of us are going to know about it right away. You take care of each other. We’re all in it because we love to make this great beer.”
Back at Stone, Koch adds, “I’ve got to treat it as a business. I want it to be sustainable. I’m not coming in here to make a lot of money—that was never our intent. The intent was to be a profitable business so that the next year our doors would still be open.”
Mission accomplished. In fact, Stone recently opened some new doors in the form of a from-the-ground-up, $12 million, 58,000-square-foot facility in Escondido, complete with a bistro and beer garden. On its way to becoming arguably the brand most synonymous with San Diego brewing, Stone outgrew its San Marcos facility, where they peaked at a production of 36,000 barrels of beer a year. The new site has the capability to someday produce 250,000 barrels annually, and has a large cold-storage warehouse to help with the distribution arm of the company. (Stone distributes other local craft beers as well as some imports.) The new digs will come in handy as the company continues to grow; Stone is now available in 19 states and Washington, D.C., though there’s a reason even casual beer drinkers might never have heard the name.
“I’m not a fan of advertising for noncommodity- level stuff,” says Koch. “You have commodity-level cheese, and on the packaging it says, ‘Now made with real milk!’—as if somebody forgot along the way that’s how cheese is made. And then there’s the super-artisanal, really funky but incredible-tasting cheeses. If they ever put an ad in a magazine or on TV they’d be wasting their money, because people who make advertising- based cheese decisions don’t want a cheese that tastes like that. They want generic crap.
“The same thing goes for beer. The people who are interested in more flavor and character in their beer are eventually going to find us.”
Another person noting a connection between beer and cheese, though in a less theoretical sense, is Brian O’Loughlin, owner of The Vine restaurant in Ocean Beach. A diamond in the rough on the O.B. culinary scene, The Vine is ostensibly a wine bar. But don’t let the name fool you. While he estimates wine still outsells beer by about a twoto- one ratio, O’Loughlin stocks up to 90 brews, from Belgian Trappist Ales to local offerings from AleSmith, Stone, Ballast Point and oth ers. (Alpine’s Pure Hoppiness is the top seller here.)
Deviating from the time-worn tradition of pairing wine with food, O’Loughlin has orchestrated several beer dinners, uniting different courses with a selection of beers from a particular brewery. Stone, AleSmith and Avery Brewing from Boulder, Colorado, have all been featured.
“They’ve grown up a bit since we started doing them,” O’Loughlin says. “The first one was a little bit of food with a ton of beer, and,” he adds with a smile, “we learned a valuable lesson from that one.”
Putting a dish like coriander-crusted ahi tuna next to an AleSmith Horny Devil, a Belgian-style ale made with actual coriander seeds, not only makes sense, it works wonders. “Beer can pair better with food than wine can because sometimes wine is very specific,” he says. “With beer, you could have one dish and four different beers that go great with it.
“People want to get together and learn more, and a dinner is a great way to meet brewers and have them explain how and why they make the beers. Besides, beer dinners are a lot more laughs than wine dinners.”
To some, extolling the virtues of the craft brews in San Diego is like preaching to the choir. But if your taste runs from Bud to Bud Light, now is as good a time as any to take the leap. The next time you’re at a bar or restaurant, ask if they serve any local beers. Try one or two, if so. You, and the brewers you’ll be supporting, will be glad you did.
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