INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE

JL: Who are some other local brewers you respect?

TA: The guys at Craftsman have been doing it for a really long time up in L.A. Those guys have really flown under the proverbial radar because they’re not very big, they’re not very aggressive about marketing, advertising or sales. They have a very organic feel about what they do. They’ve been around about 13 years. They’ve been plugging along for a long time and they’ve made some real unique beers along the way that didn’t really speak to the culture of L.A. drinking. They made things that spoke to the things they wanted to make, even if it meant selling less beer if they had dumbed things down.

Down in San Diego, I really respect what Pat [McIlhenney] has been doing at Alpine. In San Diego there’s a lot of hoppy IPAs, double IPAs. His beers still stand out and really resonate with the consumers. They’re really hard to come by because they really don’t distribute widely. When you do find his beers, they’re always of the highest quality.

JL: What are your impressions of the L.A. beer scene and how have they changed since you started brewing?

TA: For so long I did a lot of brewing on the pub side in San Diego. I never really came up to Los Angeles to investigate and see what was going on here, but there wasn’t much ten years ago in terms of places pouring great beers. There were pockets of places. Lucky Baldwin’s has been pouring great beer for awhile. You’re starting to see some of the same things that have happened in San Diego, invigorating neighborhood bars and city places…In San Diego we don’t have a lot of them in downtown San Diego, but you’re starting to see a density of bars along 30th Street. That’s truly in San Diego proper. When you start to have those connections and have four or five bars in a targeted area, it allows for better beer drinking to be done in a safer environment. You can cab, you can walk, you can bus. In that way you start to get the synergistic effect of everybody being close by. You can say tonight I know Blue Palms is out of this Stone beer, but I know Verdugo got a keg and we can go have it there. That’s pretty impressive. I’m starting to see in L.A., start to connect the dots and have places close together. That’s one of the problems in San Diego. We’ve always had too much distance between places to hit them all the same time. Nothing’s more frustrating as a drinker than to have to get in the car and deal with traffic. You want to go from one great beer bar to the next. Places like San Francisco, Portland, even Seattle and other cities, there is some other close proximity. You can hit three great beer bars in a ten minute area. We’re starting to see more of that in San Diego. Hopefully that will catch on up here a bit more.

JL: Where do you like to drink in San Diego?

TA: My favorite place to drink is certainly O’Brien’s. Toronado too, but it’s quite a ways from my house, so I don’t get to drink there much. Churchill’s is the closest pub to my house, and the Stone beer gardens are right around the corner, but for me, we have so many great beers at the brewery. We typically have 15 great beers on tap, I don’t have to go far, and if I want something a little more eclectic, and if I want to hang out in a bar, I go to O’Brien’s.

JL: If you could only drink one more glass of beer, what would it be?

TA: Probably a glass of our Cuvee. I think our Cuvee for me personally has so many fractions of the timeline in it. It has my love of Belgian beers, it has my discovery of what wild and microbial things can do to beers in barrel aging. It has a fruit component. It has some raisins. It has fractions of a lot of things we do in other beers that all kind of kind of get tied together. If I could get one last beer from us, that would be it because of what that beer stands for, what it means to me. We’ve been making that for 10 years, and when we came out with it, there was nothing like that being brewed, at least in this country. It’s a shockingly bracing beer in the way it’s put together, but at the same time it has a lot of finesse. I like sour beers.