Belching Beaver Brewery’s growth has been some of the fastest and most obvious of any local brewing company. What started as a single, Vista-based brewery operation has come to include (in order of construction) a North Park tasting room, Oceanside production brewery, Vista indoor-outdoor brewpub and, as of last month, a second satellite tasting room in Ocean Beach. It’s a lot of properties to manage. Might there be some sort of potential consolidation in the works…or perhaps even more expansion. A recent conversation with Belching Beaver owner Tom Vogel confirms that anything is possible, but nothing has been decided.
Even with two brewhouses in Vista—a 15-barrel system at the original headquarters plus a 10-barrel system at the brewpub—and 60,000 annual production capacity at its current Oceanside base of operations, Vogel would like to add a small production facility to his empire. This one would be outside San Diego, within Los Angeles’ budding beer-scene. He would also like to see a tasting room or two connecting the dots from SD to LA in Orange County.
Belching Beaver is currently scouting both LA and the OC for potential sites. Vogel is currently focusing on Tustin and Huntington Beach on the tasting-room front, and sees Culver City as an advantageous spot for a production facility. He actually attempted to sign a lease on a space within that community, but parking issues squashed the deal. Should a brewery be installed in LA, it will be much smaller than Belching Beaver’s others, likely a system coming in at under 5,000 barrels in batch-size.
