New Brew Odyssey: San Diego, or Agree to Disagree

 Last week, Scott Lawrence and I traveled to San Diego to look at brewing systems from Premier Stainless for Breakside Brewery. We spent a few hours chatting with the owner and employees at Premier before moving on to an important secondary goal of our trip: scoping out the San Diego beer scene.

San Diego is often cited as one of America’s best beer cities; Men’s Journal even named it as America’s best city for beer last October, a title that many Portlanders would dispute. So, it was with eager anticipation—and a certain eye toward comparison between San Diego and Beervana—that we undertook the second part of our journey.

I’ll get the simple travelogue out of the way first, and then move on to some broader observations and questions about San Diego’s beer culture. Leaving Premier, Scott and I headed straight for Port Brewing/The Lost Abbey, which is also located in San Marcos. Port is one of the most celebrated, award-winning breweries in the US, and for good reason—all of their brews are clean and aggressively flavored. We met brewer Mike Rodriguez as well as the bottling crew who was working on the final cases of Avant Garde, Lost Abbey’s interpretation of a French biere de garde. The Port/Lost Abbey brewers regaled us with numerous tasters of their beers including Santa’s Little Helper, Summer Pale Ale, Mongo IPA, Carnevale, Bourbon-Barrel Aged Ten Commandments, and Devotion. Interestingly, Port/Lost Abbey was the only brewery we visited producing any significant volume of beer that was not exclusively American in style.

From there, we headed south to Ballast Point, another well-reputed San Diego brewery that has its origins in a homebrew store. We toured the brewery and chatted with the brewers while sampling many of their brews. The famous Sculpin IPA, unfortunately, was not on tap, nor were some of their barrel-aged IPAs that have earned them much acclaim. Crestfallen, we headed back north to meet one of Scott’s friends at Stone World Bistro and Gardens. There, we found all of the usual suspects from Stone on tap as well as many other excellent brews. The food prices left us scratching our heads--$14 for mac and cheese, but the bistro/gardens were beautiful.

We finished our San Diego tour with stops at two of the Pizza Port brewpubs. Pizza Port has won the award for Small Brewpub of the Year numerous times, and the two locations we visited (one in Carlsbad, the other in Solana Beach) showed why. Out of a miniscule brewery, they’re able to keep over fifteen excellent house beers on tap. The Carlsbad location was packed to the brim, exuding almost a Chuck-E-Cheese feel given all of the pizza, arcade games, and ankle biters about. Their house version of the Wipeout IPA was especially fresh and was one of the tastiest, stickiest, fruitiest California IPAs I’ve tasted. They also had a well balanced brown on tap that proved that these hop lovers are not just one trick ponies. And at the Solana Beach location, later in the evening, we encountered a beer called Jules Winnfield (names after Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction). The bartender described it as a hoppy imperial stout, but there is no doubt in my mind that this beer is an ‘imperial’ Cascadian dark ale. Needless to say, I did not suggest that the San Diegans change their style classification. By the time we left the next morning, neither Scott nor I could have looked at another beer.

Admittedly, our trip was limited in scope and time, so there is much more of the San Diego beer scene to taken in before drawing serious conclusion about what the city’s vanguard beer trends are. That said, there were a few aspects of San Diego beer culture and brewing that jumped out early on, perhaps only as a point of divergence from Portland.

San Diego brewers have embraced the hop as ardently as their Northwest counterparts, and the San Diego-style IPA really does have a unique profile that I don’t find in examples from Portland brewers. Absent in San Diego IPAs is a lot of the harshness, astringency, and woody flavors I associate with (good) Northwest IPAs. Instead, they milk their Cascades, Amarillos, and Simcoes as much as they can, getting a sticky, resinous hop flavor in the beer. In fact, many of the San Diego IPAs and double IPAs I tasted come off as far less bitter than Northwest IPAs as well. I suspect that the California brewers are using a smaller bittering charge of hops early on during the boil, hitting the mid-boil additions heavily, and favoring big dry hopping additions as well. Perhaps it was the lack of bite, but the San Diego IPAs also seemed to have a little more malt sweetness. Of the IPAs made in Portland, Alameda’s Yellow Dog Imperial IPA probably comes the closest to emulating the California style; by contrast, other excellent Northwest IPAs, such as Pelican’s India Pelican Ale or Hopworks IPA, are far dryer and more bitter.

Second, San Diegans do indeed lay claim to as many or more breweries in the metro area as Portland. But they are spread out over the seven hundred square miles of the entire metro area, and the density of breweries is far less than in Beervana (only 145.4 square miles in total). The trip from Ballast Point to Stone, for example takes thirty minutes in no traffic. And, many of these breweries and brewpubs are found in industrial parks, a phenomenon that lines up with much of the country’s brewery architecture but not Portland’s. The phenomenon of the neighborhood brewpub is a far rarer phenomenon in San Diego.

Again, these are merely initial observations. My whirlwind tour ended leaving me desirous of another reason to travel to San Diego to explore their beer scene further; I’m sure it will happen at some point. Any beer-loving Portlander would do him/herself well by scheduling a beer trip there of their own.