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
The engineer's secret beers
Deft Brewing rolls out the barrel with atypical offerings
A new brewery just west of Morena Boulevard
Just across the 5 freeway from the southeast corner of Mission Bay, Morena district beer company Deft Brewing opened in October. It offers traditional, pan-European beer styles made and served inside a corrugated metal hut previously used to build small watercraft.
Cofounder and head brewer Mo Nuspl has lived in the vicinity for over a decade. He envisions Deft as a neighborhood brewery serving a community he views as experiencing a renaissance due to a recent influx of young families.
Nuspl is undergoing a bit of a renaissance himself. A mechanical engineer by trade, he's spent the past quarter century moving up through that field into management, acquiring an MBA along the way. While a lot of that experience has helped him establish the new business with a DIY mentality, he says it's making beer that has really allowed another side of his personality to emerge.
"I've got the left-brain, analytical, engineering thing going," Nuspl explains, "but I have this artsy right-brain side that's been waiting to bust out."
The longtime homebrewer got more serious about his hobby four years ago, joining the QUAFF homebrewers club, relishing the opportunity to learn and receive feedback from an award-winning population of local brewers.
Now that Deft has opened, Nuspl is finding his customers to be the source of his inspiration as he tends bar for the first time. "I'm absolutely loving it!" he says. "You get a lot of really good feedback. It's not all, ‘Way to go' — some of it is constructive criticism, too."
Some of his feedback has involved a beer he doesn't serve: Deft has yet to produce San Diego's craft-beer staple, the West Coast–style IPA. Instead, Nuspl offers the much maltier and far less bitter English version.
"We're taking a little bit of a risk," he acknowledges. "It's inevitable we'll have some West Coast IPAs, but we really want to stick to this approach of having more traditional European styles, in some cases introducing people to styles they’ve never seen before."
Traditional European beer styles fill the Deft Brewing menu
Deft's tasting-room menu lists the national origin of each beer style served, along with thorough tasting notes and suggested food pairings. While styles including a German kolsch, Irish red ale, and Belgian witbier will be familiar to most casual beer drinkers, some may prove less familiar even to beer enthusiasts: for example, the 7.5 percent ABV sticke (or secret) version of a German altbier.
"The story is, some brewers would brew a special batch where they'd throw in some extra malt," Nuspl explains. Because the higher-alcohol beer violated strict German beer regulations, the brewers would stash it out of sight. "That was their secret version for family and friends."
Nuspl says Deft can afford to test-market such beer styles because they're starting small, brewing on a mere two-barrel brewhouse. While he and partner Kevin Malik have mapped out room to eventually grow into a ten-barrel brewery, for now their aspirations are relatively modest: to make beer that tastes great to its neighborhood clientele.
"We may not be the next Ballast," Nuspl says, but, “We'd be happy to be one of Bay Park's go-to destinations."
Here's something you might be interested in.
The engineer's secret beers
Deft Brewing rolls out the barrel with atypical offerings
The engineer's secret beers
Deft Brewing rolls out the barrel with atypical offerings
A new brewery just west of Morena Boulevard
Just across the 5 freeway from the southeast corner of Mission Bay, Morena district beer company Deft Brewing opened in October. It offers traditional, pan-European beer styles made and served inside a corrugated metal hut previously used to build small watercraft.
Cofounder and head brewer Mo Nuspl has lived in the vicinity for over a decade. He envisions Deft as a neighborhood brewery serving a community he views as experiencing a renaissance due to a recent influx of young families.
Nuspl is undergoing a bit of a renaissance himself. A mechanical engineer by trade, he's spent the past quarter century moving up through that field into management, acquiring an MBA along the way. While a lot of that experience has helped him establish the new business with a DIY mentality, he says it's making beer that has really allowed another side of his personality to emerge.
"I've got the left-brain, analytical, engineering thing going," Nuspl explains, "but I have this artsy right-brain side that's been waiting to bust out."
The longtime homebrewer got more serious about his hobby four years ago, joining the QUAFF homebrewers club, relishing the opportunity to learn and receive feedback from an award-winning population of local brewers.
Now that Deft has opened, Nuspl is finding his customers to be the source of his inspiration as he tends bar for the first time. "I'm absolutely loving it!" he says. "You get a lot of really good feedback. It's not all, ‘Way to go' — some of it is constructive criticism, too."
Some of his feedback has involved a beer he doesn't serve: Deft has yet to produce San Diego's craft-beer staple, the West Coast–style IPA. Instead, Nuspl offers the much maltier and far less bitter English version.
"We're taking a little bit of a risk," he acknowledges. "It's inevitable we'll have some West Coast IPAs, but we really want to stick to this approach of having more traditional European styles, in some cases introducing people to styles they’ve never seen before."
Traditional European beer styles fill the Deft Brewing menu
Deft's tasting-room menu lists the national origin of each beer style served, along with thorough tasting notes and suggested food pairings. While styles including a German kolsch, Irish red ale, and Belgian witbier will be familiar to most casual beer drinkers, some may prove less familiar even to beer enthusiasts: for example, the 7.5 percent ABV sticke (or secret) version of a German altbier.
"The story is, some brewers would brew a special batch where they'd throw in some extra malt," Nuspl explains. Because the higher-alcohol beer violated strict German beer regulations, the brewers would stash it out of sight. "That was their secret version for family and friends."
Nuspl says Deft can afford to test-market such beer styles because they're starting small, brewing on a mere two-barrel brewhouse. While he and partner Kevin Malik have mapped out room to eventually grow into a ten-barrel brewery, for now their aspirations are relatively modest: to make beer that tastes great to its neighborhood clientele.
"We may not be the next Ballast," Nuspl says, but, “We'd be happy to be one of Bay Park's go-to destinations."
Comments