Follow Sean Inman to the best in craft beer
There are some new breweries coming to the L.A. area in 2018 headlined (IMHO) by the Chinatown brewery / taproom of Highland Park Brewery.
But there are more in the pipeline that I will be visiting and reviewing, such as….
…and these are just a sample. There might be more in places as far flung as Pasadena, two new ones in Monrovia, literally right next to each other. One in Burbank, at least one in Long Beach.
Each LABW9 year that Tomm Carroll hosts his “So You want to Open a Brewery” event, I look over the list of invitees to see which new breweries are coming down the pike. Because I keep my ear to the ground, I usually have heard of most. But this year, there were three that I had not heard about! And number one on the list, I had heard the name, but it was from Tomm himself!
Surprisingly, Torrance and Burbank are not on the list. Make note of the following, you might see them pouring at #LABW10.
Burnin’ Daylights Brewing (Lomita) – Brendan Lake
Common Space Brewing (Hawthorne) – Brent Knapp
Tortugo Brewing (Inglewood) – Joe Kovach
Two Coasts Brewing (Gardena) – Jan Dreier
Looks like the greater L.A. craft beer map is filling in a little more.
Out in Covina, Arrow Lodge Brewing (formerly Barley Lodge) is up and going….
Beers that seem to be getting name checked most are the Pale To the King, Happy Cal Milk Stout Stout and the intriguing Lavender Vanilla Cream Ale
Next up is Sour Cellars, way out in Rancho Cucamonga. Still not as far as Hangar 24 though.
The all sour brewery opened up just as 2016 ticked away for good. They are “specializing in newly isolated wild yeast strains.” Maybe a Cucamonga Quake Coolship is in the future.
This blog doesn’t cover the Anaheim beer sceneas much as it probably should. (There will be Terreux coverage coming next month.) When I saw THIS post, I knew that I needed to brew it forward with special emphasis on the newbies that will be opening to make Anaheim a true beer destination: Unsung Brewing Co. & Silo Brewing + an outpost of Karl Strauss Brewing Co. too.
Between the dawn of craft beer with New Albion and Anchor way back in the day and the year 2012, California achieved the number 300 in breweries operating in the state.
Between 2012 and now (which is just 3 some odd years if my basic math is correct) another 300 were born.
You can read more about it HERE but one amazing take away is that in the year 2014. Each week in California, all 52 of them, two breweries opened.
Usually, I have no shortage of rants to get me frothing at the mouth like Cujo or if I am feeling more upbeat, kudos to hand out.
But it has been a relatively quiet month. Yes, there was the Firestone Walker convergence with Duvel but as I thought would happen, the collective goodwill of those two companies pretty much doused any incipient interwebs displeasure.
That means I can take the time to dig into the numbers from the Brewer’s Association that recently arrived in my inbox.
Here are the Three Big Numbers:
1.6 million more barrels sold so far this year versus this point in 2014.
699 more breweries now than last year.
1,755 breweries in the planning stages.
Now let’s do some comparin’ and contrastin’. The 1.6 million barrel growth is impressive compared to the 2011 to 2012 and the 2012 to 2013 increases and is only .2 behind both of those jumps combined but it falls a distant second behind the 2013 to 2014 time frame which saw a huge 3.3 million bump with a gain of 502 new breweries.
That 1.6 number seems even paltrier because this was the biggest jump in the brewery count in the last five years. If the trend from last year had held, you would have expected barrels sold to go up from 3.3. Which tells us that the new 699 are/were producing at a much smaller pace. More Nano’s and garage projects in the mix? Or were there more larger facilities that came on-line last year compared to this year.
There were 1,929 breweries in planning which yielded the new 699. My simple math skills kick out a percentage of openings rate of 36% which if that holds means that at this time next year there should be another 631 breweries around putting the total well over 4K and triggering another round of bubble talk once it hits 4,000 mark. Even if the pace of new breweries is cut in half, it will still crawl over the 4,000 total by this time next year.
What does this all mean? It means more choices and more competition for tap handle space and it means that rotating taps aren’t going away soon. With that choice comes a corresponding duty to be more selective. Even my picky self has started running into not so good beer and I have to come out and say it. No more generic 2.5 star ratings on Untappd. It also means that publicans have to be honest too. If the new brewery isn’t up to snuff, they shouldn’t be on tap. If they are, it better be on discount. Which leads us to the brewers. I know it is financially horrible and damaging to the psyche to dump a bad beer. But I do not want to go to your brewery and hear that a beer was a failed experiment and won’t be brewed again. Morbid curiosity may get me to order it but it would be much better for the brewery and it’s possible long term customers to use it as an educational tool and give away tasters of it to say, compare and contrast to another beer.
Craft beer will continue to grow even if those three things do not happen. But that trajectory will not be fueled by the mediocre to bad beer makers. Nope. Remember that craft beer started as a REACTION to bland and flavorless corn water masquerading as beer. New brewers may not have to react to Bud-Miller-Coors, they may react against bad craft beer.
I’m start to get happy about the increasing rate of brewery openings in the greater L.A. / SoCal area and then I read an article like this ONE from the New School Blog that covers the Portland area.
Touting three new openings coming soon. (I particularly like the name Culmination for a brewery)
Now I feel like we are back to being months and years behind Portland’s beer scene. Aaargh!
The BrewDogs are at it again. But this time it isn’t a beer made with the bacon and bike power. Not. It is EMpowering new breweries to succeed. Here is the lowdown from the “lowdown” section of their website…..
“Our mission has always been to make other people as passionate about great craft beer as we are. Not just BrewDog beer, but all great craft beer. More people brewing, serving and drinking craft beer from a range of killer breweries can only be a good thing, and that is what we try to achieve across our entire business from our brewery to our bars and our bottle shops.
With this overarching ambition in mind, we are delighted to announce the new BrewDog Development Fund. This fund will see us allocate up to £100,000 of our profits each year as well as loads of our time to help other new craft breweries start up and get established. It was only seven years ago that Martin and myself (James) set up BrewDog with some second hand tanks, a small bank loan and a big mission, and now we want to encourage others to do the same.
As well as providing capital to our new BrewDog Development Fund partners, we will also help them grow by:
· Showcasing their beers in our bars both domestically and internationally
· Providing advice and ongoing support (we know a little bit about growing a brewery)
· Helping with the sourcing of ingredients and brewing materials
· Assisting with equipment purchases
· Offering access to our state of the art laboratory for beer analysis
· Helping them grow sales by introducing them to our international sales network
As part of this initiative we are insanely excited to announce that our first two official partners in the BrewDog Development Fund are the phenomenal Brew by Numbers brewery based in London and CAP, based in Stockholm, Sweden.”
This is a logical extension of what craft breweries are already doing. Whether it is giving free advice, helping out with supplies or letting people brew with their equipment and it is one of the reasons why I am still jazzed about this business after 5+ years of writing about it.
The L.A. Beer Bloggers headed deep into the valley to visit two breweries. (And was given tastings from three in total!)
One recently opened and one about to. Our first stop was Robert Cortez’s Pac City Brewing. The developing 8one8 Brewing was also in attendance. Then we headed over to the soon to open MacLeod Ale Brewing.
You will find the summary on Food GPS today. To whet the whistle, some photographs from the day….
If you have any doubt that the City of Los Angeles and all the cities surrounding said metropolis could use more breweries, then read THIS.
Denver is obviously a big beer town but one could say they have plenty of beer to go around. But possibly doubling (almost) their brewery count in the span of a year? That is crazy.
Next Great American Beer Festival that I go to, I will probably not even set foot into the convention center. Too many other places to go to!
