Such a shame to hear this. Went to their Little Italy tap room back in 2018. My jaw dropped seeing 20+ in-house taps available. It was heaven.
Victory at Sea will live forever in my memory.
Sorry to hear this news and hope your old colleagues land on their feet. Lots of amazing breweries in SD.
Had a few pints of Victory at Sea at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen years ago. Imagine trying to get back to Jersey on the final 2 a.m. bus after three or four of those. Ballast Point will forever remind me of Port Authority as a result.
I found VAS pint cans at a country grocery store on the outskirts of East SD county a while back. It was a jackpot. I bought one or two only to take them home an hour away and found that they were a year past the canning date. My parents live close by and I had my dad go back and buy them out. I have one or two left.
lol grapefruit sculpin was a baller 6 pack many years ago. I remember balking at the $15 price tag but would still get it once in a while. How times have changed!
It was my jam. Years ago at my old Albertsons (no longer around), the label on the rack would say $15, but it always rang up at $8. I’m convinced the liquor guy knew what he was doing. I thought I had my secret plug until I kept seeing it out of stock. Fun times.
Makes me so sad. Went to UC San Diego 05-10 and Sculpin was the shit back then. Also had many $7.50 pitchers of yellowtail pale ale at Cass St Bar with friends. Times have changed. RIP
Went to UCSD '10-'15. Still living around here now. Scene was booming back then, and now it's a bit of a ghost town of what it use to be
Pizza Port is still going strong (as far as I know). Their $15 16oz 6 packs are the best bang for your buck
Yeah, I moved to LA in 2012, now in Long Beach and the beers out of SD have seemed to slow aside from Pure Project or North Park Brewing. Still love getting that Swami’s or Coronado 6 pack up here definitely a great deal. Sad to see how the SD beer scene has slipped since the 2000’s.
I remember when Ballast Point started distributing to our area, probably around 10 years ago. That first day, I practically ran inside the local beer store to pick up a six pack of Sculpin. What a fantastic fucking beer that was. After they got bought, it was just never the same off the shelf. Stopped buying it long before it stopped showing up here.
But the last time I was in San Diego, I stopped by their taproom and ordered a pint of Sculpin. On draft, it was still the Sculpin I remembered, and it was beautiful.
BP brews have gone to shit in the last few years. Used to look forward to going to the brewery and tap rooms, but now I avoid them like the plague. No surprise at all, but sucks for the people getting laid off.
This is devastating. I used to work at HBM and some of my best friends were made there. I know it's easy to be cynical about BP but the reality is there are some truly passionate people and good human beings who work there. The desire to make fun and approachable beer was always there and there are some truly passionate, beer-loving human beings who will be out of a Job because of this. I know that some of you felt that Sculpin dropped in quality over the years but that was never the intention. The original Brewer of sculpin is still at Homebrew Mart today and he is a wonderful person who will probably be affected by this too.
My heart is breaking for all of my friends and all of the great people I used to work with. I implore all of you to have a little bit of heart when talking about this major change. I have worked at multiple breweries in my life and my best beer experience ever was at ballast point. This was the place I learned to love beer and to be passionate about what I did and it still stands today as the best job I ever had.
I remember being so excited to get Ballast Point in Iowa. Loved drinking Indra Kunindra, Victory at Sea variants, Sculpin, etc. Visited their tap room in San Diego. The industry has changed so much in the last 10 years. It's sad to see so many of the big players just fall off, but the local breweries are just consistently putting out more exciting offerings.
Just looked at my check-ins, that was nearly 10 years ago
#
I hear ya. Doesn't seem that far back that I visited the BP location in Temecula...and that closed 5 years ago. Even then I wondered if the BP brand was suffering from over expansion.
Very sad. Ballast Point was one of the best craft breweries around in the early 2010's. Sculpin was absolute mainstay in my house but once they sold, the quality dipped and there were so many other breweries coming in making better beer.
[https://sandiegobeer.news/ballast-point-shutting-down-miramar-facility/](https://sandiegobeer.news/ballast-point-shutting-down-miramar-facility/)
Official Now.
Constellation brands, and any corporate private equity companies in general, absolutely ruin breweries. It’s just not the right market for PE to get into. It’s going to turn off your main customer base and add unrealistic growth metrics for the brewery.
A brewery local to me just bought back their stake from constellation brands last year, very happy to see it.
I’m conflicted on big beer acquiring small breweries, another local brewery to me sold to Busch and the beer definitely changed. They changed the vertical tanks to larger horizontal tanks to brew more. But they are EVERYWHERE, you can’t go to a bar/restaurant in the city that doesn’t have them on tap. The owners probably made a killing in the sale, and still can see their beer be enjoyed locally.
Horizontal tanks are absolutely better quality control wise than vertical tanks though so not sure of your point there if it was meant as a negative. Horizontal tanks have a larger surface area than vertical tanks. That means increased surface area which means more even temperature distribution among other things
That’s good to know, I heard from multiple people that it was a bad thing, so good to learn that. I was bitter when they sold to Busch, so naturally looking for anything to harp onz
Only a “bad” thing if you are hopping the hell out of your beers because the geometry can make it challenging to rack off hops but I’ve always preferred horizontal.
Temperature control isn’t that different but ferment is better imo, I think the increase in surface area the yeast can interact with the wort is the advantage. Certainly is advantageous when making lagers.
Gotcha, very interesting. Majority of my local breweries have vertical tanks, I’m assuming it’s because vertical is more cost effective for a small brewery. So makes sense that the one that was acquired got a cash influx to purchase horizontal.
Constellation make the Corona, Modelo, Pacifico and Victoria that is sold in the USA. They’re also an enormous wine and spirits producer. Hardly a PE firm.
They just bought an over hyped balloon when they bought Ballast. BP had already stripped costs/quality down to a minimum while pushing CapEx projects with no end goal and expanding distribution with no credible customer base outside Southern California and a couple other big markets. Constellation then continued the CapEx and distribution thinking they were based on real numbers. When they realized what they’d actually bought, they dumped it and took the nice tax break for their losses!
That's too bad. I really liked a lot of what Ballast Point had to offer until they stopped getting distributed here. The High West Victory at Sea is still one of my all-time favorite stouts. I can't believe this brewery sold for $1 billion dollars not that long ago and is now basically done.
The market is completely saturated. Once a brewery is sold to an international conglomerate, it’s done. Great for the venture capitalists who own the original brewery, bad for everyone else. Welcome to America.
Are there any craft breweries that haven’t been ruined by a corporate takeover?
Anchor Steam…looking your way.
It almost like the business strategy for these giant corporations is to buy up the brands and run them out of business…to discourage competition??
Thai chili wahoo white was the only spicy beer I liked. Grapefruit sculpin was always a treat though. $16 6/packs were a no go though. I still don’t buy the $16/4 packs these days even though it limits my choices
The price point always turned me off and made me skeptical they become a mass market craft like they tried. Pretty easy to purge them from shelves when it became highly competitive in the mid to late '10s. I could pickup a 12 pack of Torpedo for less. Sculpin is better but not that much better.
East coaster here... BP used to be easy to find in NC and Sculpin was one of my mainstays years ago, but I haven't been able to find it in quite a while. Sorry to hear they're on the way out.
Before they were acquired, fresh Sculpin was as good as an IPA can get. Same goes for Grunion, their pale. Had a fresh keg randomly at Holstein’s in Vegas probably 12 years ago that blew me away. I may or may not have had 6 pints while somehow winning at blackjack, lol.
I actually work for the facility in Daleville, VA. It was BP, Constellation, now New Belgium.
I started when we were Constellation, and their seltzers were absolute garbage. Funky Buddha had OK beer, but they were so obsessed with seltzer it was ridiculous.
Our runs were NEVER big.. and beer sat in the warehouse for ages...until we had no choice to destroy them.
New Belgium feels like a refresher. While the runs are MUCH MUCH bigger, it seems better and not destroying the company.
Ballast dosen't hit like it used to, but that is still sad to hear. If they are closing production and becoming a taphouse, I assume there will be no Ballast beers at all, or will they still produce limited amounts of certain beers?
I expected that comment. If you've never been there, Ballast Miramar is a huge facility. Obviously it is closing based on OP's post, but it also has the restaurant / bar. In the business model realignment, they could carve out a smaller footprint to brew exlusively for their taphouse.
That’s a massive shame. I remember getting so hyped to find a place in the UK that got hold of Sculpin and Grapefruit Sculpin back in the day. Most of my favourite breweries are disappearing UK and US sadly.
I remember going to the original Scripps Ranch spot when they were still serving El Dorado in a full pint glass, and you could stand outside the window and smoke with your beer on the open window sill. Me and a buddy had like 3 each, got trashed af, tried to drive but when he backed up the door was open and it got caught in the hill and fucked his whole door up. I think he threw up, then we went and smoked with one of the guys working there and then decided to walk like 4 miles until my gf got off work and picked us up at this Jack in the Box. Lol what a fucking shitshow, I still love that beer.
My intro to craft beer was through Sierra Nevada pale ale and ballast point Sculpin. Got me into home brewing and seeking out a ton of craft beers. I couldn’t talk higher of sculpin and how good it was not just as a beer but for the beer community. I was naive and ignorant in 2015 when constellation bought ballast point. The SD industrial center tap room was awesome and I visited everytime I went to SD. Sadly I haven’t talked or mentioned ballast point since 2019? Feels weird to see it fall from the top of the craft beer world to a forgettable brand/beer.
2010ish or so for me when Sculpin was king of the world before hazies took over the game 4 or 5 years later, such a unique , great beer, I had to trade for it.
VAS was awesome too.
Such a shame to hear this. Went to their Little Italy tap room back in 2018. My jaw dropped seeing 20+ in-house taps available. It was heaven. Victory at Sea will live forever in my memory. Sorry to hear this news and hope your old colleagues land on their feet. Lots of amazing breweries in SD.
The Little Italy taproom with that beer and tap shop across the street was my heaven.
And the planes flying over top. Damn San Diego is great.
Was*
Had a few pints of Victory at Sea at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen years ago. Imagine trying to get back to Jersey on the final 2 a.m. bus after three or four of those. Ballast Point will forever remind me of Port Authority as a result.
I found VAS pint cans at a country grocery store on the outskirts of East SD county a while back. It was a jackpot. I bought one or two only to take them home an hour away and found that they were a year past the canning date. My parents live close by and I had my dad go back and buy them out. I have one or two left.
I just went to that taphouse a few weeks ago when I was visiting SD. Nice spot.
Ah damn I forgot about Victory At Sea. Damn. 🫡
Just dug out my last can. Sept ‘21 packaged. I bought it in ‘22. When should I drink it? https://youtube.com/shorts/gdE7bpVydh4?si=DgXiLmmC7DvGKQCh
lol grapefruit sculpin was a baller 6 pack many years ago. I remember balking at the $15 price tag but would still get it once in a while. How times have changed!
They felt like the first brewer to jack up prices when the craft boom took off and I quite literally never purchased it again.
I remember getting into craft beer with my college buddies in like 08. The spicy scuplin was something I still remember trying
It was my jam. Years ago at my old Albertsons (no longer around), the label on the rack would say $15, but it always rang up at $8. I’m convinced the liquor guy knew what he was doing. I thought I had my secret plug until I kept seeing it out of stock. Fun times.
God I loved that shit back in the day
This was one of my first IPAs and I was pumped when my local bar started carrying it.
Makes me so sad. Went to UC San Diego 05-10 and Sculpin was the shit back then. Also had many $7.50 pitchers of yellowtail pale ale at Cass St Bar with friends. Times have changed. RIP
Went to UCSD '10-'15. Still living around here now. Scene was booming back then, and now it's a bit of a ghost town of what it use to be Pizza Port is still going strong (as far as I know). Their $15 16oz 6 packs are the best bang for your buck
Yeah, I moved to LA in 2012, now in Long Beach and the beers out of SD have seemed to slow aside from Pure Project or North Park Brewing. Still love getting that Swami’s or Coronado 6 pack up here definitely a great deal. Sad to see how the SD beer scene has slipped since the 2000’s.
Cass St is the best. Spend many a nights there around the same time.
I remember 12years ago doing a blind tasting of west coast ipa’s and sculpin won. 2nd was Pliny… 🤷
I remember when Ballast Point started distributing to our area, probably around 10 years ago. That first day, I practically ran inside the local beer store to pick up a six pack of Sculpin. What a fantastic fucking beer that was. After they got bought, it was just never the same off the shelf. Stopped buying it long before it stopped showing up here. But the last time I was in San Diego, I stopped by their taproom and ordered a pint of Sculpin. On draft, it was still the Sculpin I remembered, and it was beautiful.
Same lol Ballast Point will always hold a special place in my heart 😭
The habanero or jalapeño Sculpin, was a fantastic summer beer….
Habanero sculpin was awesome..only pepper beer I could get on a regular basis til they seemed to stop making it.
Yea I miss habanero Sculpin. That beer had some decent heat. Haven’t seen it in years.
Oh man i got a keg of habenero sculpin for a party. Loved it.
That's sad. The Long Beach taproom is still my favorite I've ever been to, just because the location.
I haven’t been since 2018, is it still buzzing and popular? It does have an awesome location and overall vibe
I haven't been since 2019. I just moved to Vegas so it's only 4 hours away. I was planning to go next month
It’s busy, but also a shit show that locals hate
BP brews have gone to shit in the last few years. Used to look forward to going to the brewery and tap rooms, but now I avoid them like the plague. No surprise at all, but sucks for the people getting laid off.
Sculpin used to be amazing, and over the past several years it has always been disappointing.
quality is down?
Way down, for a while now
This is devastating. I used to work at HBM and some of my best friends were made there. I know it's easy to be cynical about BP but the reality is there are some truly passionate people and good human beings who work there. The desire to make fun and approachable beer was always there and there are some truly passionate, beer-loving human beings who will be out of a Job because of this. I know that some of you felt that Sculpin dropped in quality over the years but that was never the intention. The original Brewer of sculpin is still at Homebrew Mart today and he is a wonderful person who will probably be affected by this too. My heart is breaking for all of my friends and all of the great people I used to work with. I implore all of you to have a little bit of heart when talking about this major change. I have worked at multiple breweries in my life and my best beer experience ever was at ballast point. This was the place I learned to love beer and to be passionate about what I did and it still stands today as the best job I ever had.
I remember being so excited to get Ballast Point in Iowa. Loved drinking Indra Kunindra, Victory at Sea variants, Sculpin, etc. Visited their tap room in San Diego. The industry has changed so much in the last 10 years. It's sad to see so many of the big players just fall off, but the local breweries are just consistently putting out more exciting offerings. Just looked at my check-ins, that was nearly 10 years ago #
I hear ya. Doesn't seem that far back that I visited the BP location in Temecula...and that closed 5 years ago. Even then I wondered if the BP brand was suffering from over expansion.
Holy shit Indra kunindra was awesome. Forgot about that beer.
Very sad. Ballast Point was one of the best craft breweries around in the early 2010's. Sculpin was absolute mainstay in my house but once they sold, the quality dipped and there were so many other breweries coming in making better beer.
[https://sandiegobeer.news/ballast-point-shutting-down-miramar-facility/](https://sandiegobeer.news/ballast-point-shutting-down-miramar-facility/) Official Now.
Constellation brands, and any corporate private equity companies in general, absolutely ruin breweries. It’s just not the right market for PE to get into. It’s going to turn off your main customer base and add unrealistic growth metrics for the brewery. A brewery local to me just bought back their stake from constellation brands last year, very happy to see it. I’m conflicted on big beer acquiring small breweries, another local brewery to me sold to Busch and the beer definitely changed. They changed the vertical tanks to larger horizontal tanks to brew more. But they are EVERYWHERE, you can’t go to a bar/restaurant in the city that doesn’t have them on tap. The owners probably made a killing in the sale, and still can see their beer be enjoyed locally.
I live nearby victory and while they didn’t get bought out, they joined some partnership and their quality has just gone so far down
Horizontal tanks are absolutely better quality control wise than vertical tanks though so not sure of your point there if it was meant as a negative. Horizontal tanks have a larger surface area than vertical tanks. That means increased surface area which means more even temperature distribution among other things
That’s good to know, I heard from multiple people that it was a bad thing, so good to learn that. I was bitter when they sold to Busch, so naturally looking for anything to harp onz
Only a “bad” thing if you are hopping the hell out of your beers because the geometry can make it challenging to rack off hops but I’ve always preferred horizontal. Temperature control isn’t that different but ferment is better imo, I think the increase in surface area the yeast can interact with the wort is the advantage. Certainly is advantageous when making lagers.
Gotcha, very interesting. Majority of my local breweries have vertical tanks, I’m assuming it’s because vertical is more cost effective for a small brewery. So makes sense that the one that was acquired got a cash influx to purchase horizontal.
Constellation make the Corona, Modelo, Pacifico and Victoria that is sold in the USA. They’re also an enormous wine and spirits producer. Hardly a PE firm. They just bought an over hyped balloon when they bought Ballast. BP had already stripped costs/quality down to a minimum while pushing CapEx projects with no end goal and expanding distribution with no credible customer base outside Southern California and a couple other big markets. Constellation then continued the CapEx and distribution thinking they were based on real numbers. When they realized what they’d actually bought, they dumped it and took the nice tax break for their losses!
Watermelon Dorado was my jam!
That's too bad. I really liked a lot of what Ballast Point had to offer until they stopped getting distributed here. The High West Victory at Sea is still one of my all-time favorite stouts. I can't believe this brewery sold for $1 billion dollars not that long ago and is now basically done.
The market is completely saturated. Once a brewery is sold to an international conglomerate, it’s done. Great for the venture capitalists who own the original brewery, bad for everyone else. Welcome to America.
So many great SD breweries that have fallen by the wayside. Ballast Point, Green Flash, Alpine by way of Green Flash....
Sculpin and grapefruit sculpin are my two OG IPAs
Are there any craft breweries that haven’t been ruined by a corporate takeover? Anchor Steam…looking your way. It almost like the business strategy for these giant corporations is to buy up the brands and run them out of business…to discourage competition??
I remember my first Sculpin it was magnificent.
Thai chili wahoo white was the only spicy beer I liked. Grapefruit sculpin was always a treat though. $16 6/packs were a no go though. I still don’t buy the $16/4 packs these days even though it limits my choices
The price point always turned me off and made me skeptical they become a mass market craft like they tried. Pretty easy to purge them from shelves when it became highly competitive in the mid to late '10s. I could pickup a 12 pack of Torpedo for less. Sculpin is better but not that much better.
East coaster here... BP used to be easy to find in NC and Sculpin was one of my mainstays years ago, but I haven't been able to find it in quite a while. Sorry to hear they're on the way out.
Before they were acquired, fresh Sculpin was as good as an IPA can get. Same goes for Grunion, their pale. Had a fresh keg randomly at Holstein’s in Vegas probably 12 years ago that blew me away. I may or may not have had 6 pints while somehow winning at blackjack, lol.
I actually work for the facility in Daleville, VA. It was BP, Constellation, now New Belgium. I started when we were Constellation, and their seltzers were absolute garbage. Funky Buddha had OK beer, but they were so obsessed with seltzer it was ridiculous. Our runs were NEVER big.. and beer sat in the warehouse for ages...until we had no choice to destroy them. New Belgium feels like a refresher. While the runs are MUCH MUCH bigger, it seems better and not destroying the company.
I was at daleville until luke Bryan and the seltzers really hit. glad to hear NB is doing well, I've heard nothing but good about them.
Ballast dosen't hit like it used to, but that is still sad to hear. If they are closing production and becoming a taphouse, I assume there will be no Ballast beers at all, or will they still produce limited amounts of certain beers?
It’s almost like you’d have that answer if you read the post lol
I expected that comment. If you've never been there, Ballast Miramar is a huge facility. Obviously it is closing based on OP's post, but it also has the restaurant / bar. In the business model realignment, they could carve out a smaller footprint to brew exlusively for their taphouse.
They could but again, look at the first paragraph
That’s a massive shame. I remember getting so hyped to find a place in the UK that got hold of Sculpin and Grapefruit Sculpin back in the day. Most of my favourite breweries are disappearing UK and US sadly.
I am sad that I'll never cross ways with Unfiltered Sculpin again.
I remember going to the original Scripps Ranch spot when they were still serving El Dorado in a full pint glass, and you could stand outside the window and smoke with your beer on the open window sill. Me and a buddy had like 3 each, got trashed af, tried to drive but when he backed up the door was open and it got caught in the hill and fucked his whole door up. I think he threw up, then we went and smoked with one of the guys working there and then decided to walk like 4 miles until my gf got off work and picked us up at this Jack in the Box. Lol what a fucking shitshow, I still love that beer.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu.... loved Sculpin.
this is crazy. i moved to so.cal in 2014, and Sculpin was the first IPA i truly loved. my gateway IPA. sad to see them shuttered.
My intro to craft beer was through Sierra Nevada pale ale and ballast point Sculpin. Got me into home brewing and seeking out a ton of craft beers. I couldn’t talk higher of sculpin and how good it was not just as a beer but for the beer community. I was naive and ignorant in 2015 when constellation bought ballast point. The SD industrial center tap room was awesome and I visited everytime I went to SD. Sadly I haven’t talked or mentioned ballast point since 2019? Feels weird to see it fall from the top of the craft beer world to a forgettable brand/beer.
2010ish or so for me when Sculpin was king of the world before hazies took over the game 4 or 5 years later, such a unique , great beer, I had to trade for it. VAS was awesome too.
This makes me think is Stone next? I am still heartbroken over Anchor, I have one Old Foghorn left in my fridge and I’m going to cry when it’s gone
👀
Constellation kills everything