Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Beeramar's exhibit A
Alesmith hammers out a new scale of operation
A new, high capacity brewhouse for AleSmith.
Monday June 8th, AleSmith social media announced the opening of the Observation Room, a modest tasting room located at the front entrance of its new, even-bigger-than-it-sounds 105,000-square-foot headquarters. The low-key announcement belies the vastness of the new brewery and packaging plant, which is grand enough to warrant its eponymous address: 9990 AleSmith Court, Miramar.
Even the city acknowledged the grandiosity of the new joint.
With signage and frontage in oompa-loompa orange — are you getting it?
The Observation Room itself is relatively small, not much larger than the tasting room at AleSmith's original Cabot Drive address. That location — only a few blocks east — will remain open and continue to pour for several months. "Until Mikkel moves in," says a rep for AleSmith, referring to the planned partnership at that location between AleSmith owner Peter Zien and Mikkel Borg Bjergsø of the Mikeller beer label. No timetable for that has yet been released.
Ironically, the Observation Room may wind up closing before it happens. Though by outward appearance a finished room, the structure's not permanent. It's "just a temporary tasting room to get people acquainted with the new location," says the rep, and will be dismantled when construction finishes on a more ambitious tasting room being built behind the impermanent walls. Plans for that include far more seating and an outdoor drinking space, plus a wraparound bar fed by glycol chilled lines that flow into "beer towers" — specially built columns meant to expedite service by giving servers unrestricted 360-degree access to 12 tap handles each — 60 taps total.
Actually, the future former home of the new AleSmith tasting room.
Also behind the short-term walls sits AleSmith's new Steinecker German brew system and 240 barrel tanks so massive they wouldn't fit through the warehouse bays. Instead, part of the roof was removed so the tanks could be lowered in. A keg-lined path leading from the Observation Room will soon give visitors a glimpse of the system, as well as the brewer’s growing accumulation of barrels. "We'll be adding more cooperage," says the rep, "and hopefully hit 50,000 in the next couple years."
This tour will also be an interim offering. "The tours are going to get way more interactive." Says the rep, "People are going to get closer to the beer and how it's made. We want to show off, of course, that Steinecker German brew system, it's one of the best systems out there you can find." It's been running throughout the spring and will boost AleSmith's production to 25 thousand barrels this year, up from 15 thousand in 2014.
Much of this increase will flow through the new bottling plant house in a second enormous warehouse space deeper in the building. The rep says the new system is faster and much more advanced than their old ad-hoc system, which required lengthy man-hours to finish the decades-old brewery's 750ml bottle offerings: "For all those years, every Speedway, Horny Devil, Old Numbskull — every foil was hand-wrapped."
The bottling system has also allowed AleSmith to release its first six-packs, featuring 12-ounce bottles of the .394 Pale Ale brewed in collaboration with Padres great Tony Gwynn. The rep says more six-pack offerings are "hopefully" on the horizon, and teased the idea of upcoming special releases commemorating 20 years since the brewery's 1995 founding.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Beeramar's exhibit A
Alesmith hammers out a new scale of operation
Beeramar's exhibit A
Alesmith hammers out a new scale of operation
A new, high capacity brewhouse for AleSmith.
Monday June 8th, AleSmith social media announced the opening of the Observation Room, a modest tasting room located at the front entrance of its new, even-bigger-than-it-sounds 105,000-square-foot headquarters. The low-key announcement belies the vastness of the new brewery and packaging plant, which is grand enough to warrant its eponymous address: 9990 AleSmith Court, Miramar.
Even the city acknowledged the grandiosity of the new joint.
With signage and frontage in oompa-loompa orange — are you getting it?
The Observation Room itself is relatively small, not much larger than the tasting room at AleSmith's original Cabot Drive address. That location — only a few blocks east — will remain open and continue to pour for several months. "Until Mikkel moves in," says a rep for AleSmith, referring to the planned partnership at that location between AleSmith owner Peter Zien and Mikkel Borg Bjergsø of the Mikeller beer label. No timetable for that has yet been released.
Ironically, the Observation Room may wind up closing before it happens. Though by outward appearance a finished room, the structure's not permanent. It's "just a temporary tasting room to get people acquainted with the new location," says the rep, and will be dismantled when construction finishes on a more ambitious tasting room being built behind the impermanent walls. Plans for that include far more seating and an outdoor drinking space, plus a wraparound bar fed by glycol chilled lines that flow into "beer towers" — specially built columns meant to expedite service by giving servers unrestricted 360-degree access to 12 tap handles each — 60 taps total.
Actually, the future former home of the new AleSmith tasting room.
Also behind the short-term walls sits AleSmith's new Steinecker German brew system and 240 barrel tanks so massive they wouldn't fit through the warehouse bays. Instead, part of the roof was removed so the tanks could be lowered in. A keg-lined path leading from the Observation Room will soon give visitors a glimpse of the system, as well as the brewer’s growing accumulation of barrels. "We'll be adding more cooperage," says the rep, "and hopefully hit 50,000 in the next couple years."
This tour will also be an interim offering. "The tours are going to get way more interactive." Says the rep, "People are going to get closer to the beer and how it's made. We want to show off, of course, that Steinecker German brew system, it's one of the best systems out there you can find." It's been running throughout the spring and will boost AleSmith's production to 25 thousand barrels this year, up from 15 thousand in 2014.
Much of this increase will flow through the new bottling plant house in a second enormous warehouse space deeper in the building. The rep says the new system is faster and much more advanced than their old ad-hoc system, which required lengthy man-hours to finish the decades-old brewery's 750ml bottle offerings: "For all those years, every Speedway, Horny Devil, Old Numbskull — every foil was hand-wrapped."
The bottling system has also allowed AleSmith to release its first six-packs, featuring 12-ounce bottles of the .394 Pale Ale brewed in collaboration with Padres great Tony Gwynn. The rep says more six-pack offerings are "hopefully" on the horizon, and teased the idea of upcoming special releases commemorating 20 years since the brewery's 1995 founding.
Comments