San Diego Breweries - part 1

Thorn Street Tap List

In the months since we opened Hawksbill Brewing, I’ve had a couple of road trips.  Now that I own a brewery, I’m taking the time to check out the local action in the places I visit.  Although I didn’t post on my May trip to Columbus, Ohio, there are 34 breweries there, and I went to four.

That’s an abundance of breweries, but it doesn’t compare to what’s happening in towns on the West Coast.  The industry continues to explode there, and even the brewery visits Mary and I made during our last Northern California vacation couldn’t prepare me for what I found in San Diego.  According to this list from San Diego.org, there are 140 breweries in San Diego county, give or take!

I knew that my friends Mark and Nancy had a couple of breweries within an easy walk of their place.  In fact, there was one right next door – Thorn St. Brewery, so after our catch-up conversation and the tour of their new place, we took a walk over to check the place out.  Dogs are welcome in a lot of these places, so we took Dax with us – he’s a good boy and knows the ropes.

As we arrived, there was a food truck outside, so we grabbed a bite and went in to find a place to sit, ending up in the back room where the brewery infrastructure is.  We paused to check out the offerings and put together a flight of eight to share – enough time has passed that I can’t remember all the selections, but I’m pretty sure the three below were included (descriptions from the brewery’s page):

• Cocomotive Coconut Porter – This robust porter tastes like a fresh macaroon dipped in a delicious malty beer.  The base recipe is a smooth strong porter, slightly less roasty than a stout but with plenty of chocolate overtones.  Organic coconut is oven roasted and steeped in the finished beer.
• Red Headed Hop Child – This west coast style is a complex blend of rich toasted malts whose sweetness pairs well with the citrus, pine, and tropical notes from the Centennial and Simcoe hops.
• Thorn Street Pale Ale – A sessionable classic American Pale Ale that strikes a balance between its 2-row barley and caramel malts with the bitterness of the super high alpha acid Warrior hop.  Late addition of Cascade and an additional Cascade dry hop rounds it out very nicely.

Mark and Nancy live in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego.  It seemed to have been developed as an early 20^th Century suburb, with many bungalow-style homes, some California contemporaries, garden apartments, and in-fills.  With so many breweries in town, it was an easy walk through the neighborhood to Modern Times North Park tasting room, where we enjoyed the scene and more beers (I'm pretty sure I had the Farmhouse Saison), before calling it an evening.

There’s one final takeaway from the too-short visit to North Park:  a few thoughts about neighborhood brewing from the Thorn St. web site.  They describe North Park as a neighborhood where “…folks pride themselves on walking or riding their bike to get locally produced food, where people devote large parts of their property to growing their own edibles, where people love gardening, fishing, and of course, brewing their own beers…Reduce your carbon footprint, eat local, buy local, produce something local, be self-sufficient as much as you can, smile, and please try to leave the world a little better than you found it…”

That’s not too far from what we’re trying to do at Hawksbill Brewing, come to think of it.