Coronado Brewing in Bay Park

 This month’s review shifts to one of San Diego’s oldest and largest brewers, Coronado Brewing, founded in 1996.  While the original brew pub is still located in Coronado, the brewery opened a larger production facility in Bay Park at 1205 Knoxville St. in 2012.  I talked with Ryan Brooks, the brewmaster, and Aidan Kennedy, Marketing Coordinator about the challenges of brewing in the larger facility and what Coronado is doing.  Aidan said that the Bay Park facility has a 4 vessel 30 barrel brewing system and produced 41,000 barrels of beer last year, putting them in the mid-size brewery classification for which they were 2014 Champions in that category at the World Beer Cup.  Ryan said that new recipes get tested out at the smaller brew pub in Coronado before they are produced for bottling in Bay Park.  Recipes don’t necessarily scale up proportionally, so further experimentation is required to get the taste just right for the bigger batches.  Coronado has seven core beers that are always being brewed and put in cans, bottles, and kegs.  Some beers that were once experimental make it into the core lineup, Stingray Imperial IPA, for one.

Ryan has been working for Coronado for five years, with prior experience at Black Market brewing in Temecula and in Australia.  Often inspiration for a new beer style comes from a new yeast that becomes available.  Other times the lineup is due to seasonal conditions.  The current 18 beers on tap are heavy on IPA varieties because production was ramped up for San Diego Beer Week, and Coronado is known for that style.  The next production batch will use a Danish yeast strain to produce a series of lagers, from basic to dark amber.  A new hop variety may inspire a new recipe as well, Polaris IPA in the current lineup, for instance.  Ryan will also work with the yeast labs to get a mix of yeasts formulated for a specific style.

The tasting room is set in the middle of the large brewing facility but is set somewhat apart.  Wood bars, tables, and chairs give a bit of old school ambience to the tasting room.  College hoops were featured on a couple of large screens, but it was not the focus of the tasting room.  Coronado is dog-friendly, but there was only one pup in the room when I visited.  In addition to beer; shirts, glasses, and other swag is on sale.  Food trucks are scheduled during the week around 4:00 p.m. You can’t miss the three banners from the 2014 World Beer Cup over the walkway to the food truck area.

I sampled some excellent, hoppy beers.  Seacoast Pilsner, a core beer, is a very drinkable Pilsner with good malt flavor, and much improved since my last tasting.  I next tried Berried at Sea, a fruity ale with raspberry dominating and just a little sour. These first two would be delicious on hot summer days.  The Belgian Strong Dark was both rich and spicy, with mild chocolate notes not normally seen in this spicy style; it was very good.  My first IPA, North Island, was well carbonated, and had a full mouth feel with complex floral hopping.  This is the sort of excellent IPA Coronado is known for.  Stingray IPA, also in the core lineup, is a strong citrusy and tropical Imperial IPA.  I serve Stingray when I have out of town business guests.  Polaris IPA was an amazing experience; the intensity of the Polaris hops was a real treat.  This is the sort of experiment that advances the art of beer making.  Finally, I finished with Snowy Plover, a winter IPA.  While not for everyone, I enjoyed the mix of dark malts perfectly balanced against piney hops.

Coronado continues its over 20 year tradition of excellence right in our own back yard.  They have successfully scaled up production while continuing to experiment in the art and craft of beer making.

Ryan Brooks, Brewmaster at Coronado Brewing and the tools of his trade.

This article was originally published in the Clairemont Times on page 13..

Quantum Brewing – Stepping Up The Energy

This month I made a trip to another brewery that has recently changed ownership, Quantum Brewing, located at 5375 Kearny Villa Rd.  Martin Beaulieu purchased Quantum three months ago and set about improving the quality of the beer.  Martin is both head brewer and owner; we talked and sampled beers during a recent visit.  He has a PhD in biochemistry, so he is right at home discussing the nuances of the beer making process.  He is about 50% complete with his primary goal of improving Quantum’s beers, estimating that he needs 3 more months to get all of the recipes where he wants them.  Despite being a nanobrewery with only a 3 barrel capacity, he has twelve beers on tap.  The good news is that Quantum is selling all the beer it makes; the bad news is that Martin can’t produce enough to meet demand.  He hopes to expand in the near future.

Quantum brewing is located in a strip mall with plenty of nearby eateries. If you like to eat good food with your beer, Anny’s Fine Burgers and Filippi’s Pizza are two of great places next door.  Like many San Diego tasting rooms, Quantum encourages customers to bring in food.  The tasting room features a spacious interior with pleasant ambience and a big screen TV showing sports while 90s music was playing during my visit.  Also featured in the tasting room are the Quantum ale glasses with their trademark atom logo that are popular with some the geek-set at my day job.

While I sampled more beers than space permits me to describe, they were small tasters, so that I could enjoy all twelve beers on tap.  Like the old Alpine board, Quantum has their IPAs listed on the left and all other beers on the right.  Martin said that the non-IPA lineup is selling better.  I started with Hadron Collider, a Bavarian Wheat Ale which has a banana base and lots of malt.  The banana isn’t overpowering, and the mouth feel is very rich on this great beer. This was a great way to start the tasting, and Martin is justifiably proud of this recipe. 650 Nanometer (the wavelength of red light) was the offering in the Irish Red category, and the most popular ale.  While far more hop forward than a standard amber, it still has the characteristic caramel finish.  This is an excellent beer in this style. I also tried a Habanero Pale Ale, Planck’s Pepper.  The habanero was not overpowering, leaving just a little tang on the back of the tongue and the throat going down.  Another popular beer is the Singularity Stout, an Oatmeal Stout.  This was super smooth and creamy, not at all bitter, with both chocolate and vanilla notes.  A customer also drinking it remarked that he could bathe in it.

Switching over to IPAs, I started with the Chain Reaction Session IPA and was amazed.  Filled with grapefruit and other citrus flavors, but balanced with some sweetness, this could almost be a shandy, without the annoying characteristics that come from polluting your beer with sweetened juice.  This beer stood out against other San Diego session IPAs that I have had in the past.   Anti-matter IPA was more of a standard West Coast IPA, hop forward with reasonable alcohol content at 7% ABV.  However, it wasn’t too bitter, so I was really impressed and the balance between the Cascade and Chinook hops kept the flavor right between citrus and piney.  I finished off sampling the Yellowcake Imperial IPA.  This was the most complex beer on offer, lots of character, thick with bitter hop flavors, and a little more on the citrus side.

Quantum Brewing has great variety and excellence.  Martin Beaulieu’s work to produce a variety of high quality beers is really paying off.  I look forward to another trip, this time with a some local dinner to go with Quantum’s beer

Martin Beaulieu at the tap line.

This post was originally published in the Clairemont Times.