A balmy breeze with a slight undercurrent of chill is blowing in off the Pacific while the setting sun turns the sky a soft orange in San Diego’s Little Italy. The scents of garlic and lemon zest linger in the air as laughter and conversation echo from the neighborhood’s restaurants and bars. Suddenly an odd image comes into view: A wagon-like contraption with bike pedals fitted for a party of 12 slowly trundles through, powered by revelers on a rolling tour of the breweries that line the city’s streets. At each brewery on each subsequent block, participants dizzily dismount from their pedal-driven wagon, put a $10 bill on the bar and drive brewers’ profits a bit higher with every sip of sour or quaff of floral IPA.
Where a city like New York has a deli or pizzeria on every other corner, San Diego has a craft brewery. A few hundred miles north in Chico, Calif., at Sierra Nevada Brewing, is where craft brewing as we know it got its commercial start in 1979, but the industry has matured in this Southern California paradise. Tasting rooms with bountiful rotating drafts abound, and craft beer has joined surfing and San Diego’s zoo as one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions. But San Diego’s craft brewing industry extends well beyond tourism, generating about $1 billion of revenue for the local economy every year. Beyond the suds and the suntanned drinkers, there is a massive economic engine, almost 30 years in the making, built around beer in San Diego.
San Diego’s craft beer movement began when Karl Strauss Brewing opened its first brewpub on Columbia Street in 1989. “Back then San Diego was a beer wasteland,” recalls cofounder Matt Rattner. “The city was dominated by domestic light beers. Local breweries didn’t exist, and no one was using the term ‘craft.’”
Karl Strauss, boasting a long bar that’s mobbed most days with a lunch crowd enjoying a cold one with a burger and fries, helped introduce San Diegans to craft beer. “They’d never experienced fresh, flavorful beer brewed locally,” says Rattner. “We had a lot of educating to do, but there was immediate demand for better beer.”
By the early-to-mid-1990s, a handful of other breweries, including Pizza Port, Coronado Brewing, Home Brew Mart and Stone Brewing, had entered the scene. These early breweries established the quintessential San Diego craft beer style—big brews with aggressive hop profiles, fresh aromas and a finish with just the right bite of bitterness. They also became the core of the local brewing industry.
The breweries were bolstered by an earlier, grassroots phenomenon: the rise of a passionate and diverse home-brew community. California in the 1970s had lots of free-spirited residents who liked to brew their own beer, and San Diego, with its outdoorsy surfer culture, was a locus for such DIYers. But federal law mandated that anyone who brewed beer had to pay taxes on their product. The home brewers managed to organize sufficiently to convince California senator Alan Cranston, a Democrat, to insert an amendment into a tax bill—the now beloved-among-home-brewers HR 1337—that eliminated the tax for any household brewing 200 gallons or less. On October 14, 1978, president Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law, and a home-brewing ecosystem, rife with clubs, competitions and certified judges, sprang up in San Diego in short order.
The home-brew groups are San Diego’s brewing farm teams. They incubate and nurture the talents of the city’s most promising brewers, many of whom go on to open their own professional operations. “A key factor behind our early success was the high density of home brewers in San Diego—they got what we were doing immediately,” Rattner says.
