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.