It’s a Tuesday afternoon and Bill Shuffelt is raising a fresh-from-the-tank sample of Run Wild IPA to his lips. He pauses to give it a sniff, then sips. It tastes good, but more importantly, it tastes familiar and consistent with what his company’s top-selling non-alcoholic beer has tasted like for the past seven years. This is significant, as it’s the first batch of Run Wild – or of any of Athletic Brewing’s liquid wares – that’s been brewed and cellared in the company’s new West Coast headquarters. Soon, the hoppy brew will be the first to be canned during the maiden voyage of Athletic’s new packaging line. That mechanically complex behemoth is larger than most of the county’s brewing facilities on its own, and a cornerstone of the new facility, which will greatly increase the capabilities of what is already the country’s largest producer of non-alcoholic beers.
It was June 2024 when Athletic acquired Ballast Point Brewing’s 107,000-square-foot headquarters in Miramar. (Ballast Point still operates a large bar and restaurant that is connected to the south end of the brewery.) Since then, the company has been hard at work adapting the Carroll Way space – the largest beermaking facility in San Diego County in terms of capacity – for production of non-alcoholic beverages. (In addition to beer, Athletic also produces hop-infused sparkling water). This required decommissioning and replacement of four miles of piping, laying of 300 yards of fresh concrete and installation of more than 100 shipping containers’ worth of new brewery, cellar and packaging-line equipment. In all, it took more than 12,000 labor hours – roughly 5,000 of which were spent on welding alone – but after 15 months, Athletic’s new home base is fully operational.
“Given the square-footage of the facility and its proximity to our original Miramar brewery, campusing up in San Diego was an appealing option,” says Shuffelt. “We have a terrific team of 100 on the West Coast, there’s such an amazing beer community, we like doing business here and the City of San Diego has been great to work with – even during COVID. It might have been cheaper to do business elsewhere, but we wanted to reinvest in the area and do it here.”
Athletic was launched in Stratford, Connecticut in 2018 by Shuffelt and his business partner, Chief Operations Officer John Walker. It was 2020 when the company established a West Coast presence, taking over Ballast Point’s former R&D brewery on Trade Street, which is located across the street from Athletic’s new San Diego HQ. That 80,000-square-foot site served them well and has since been maxed-out as far as space and its 150,000-barrel annual brewing capacity.
“During construction, we’ve shifted some of our West Coast production to the East Coast. We’ll be evening that out and will brew significantly more in San Diego in 2026,” says Shuffelt. “We generally don’t forecast, but I’d bet next year we brew twice as much in San Diego as we have in any other year here.”
Companywide, Athletic produced nearly 400,000 total barrels of beer in 2024. With the addition of the Carroll Way facility, it will be able to brew and package upwards of 1.2 million barrels per year. Shuffelt says he hopes to enjoy many years at the new brewery before reaching its production ceiling and having to shift focus to constructing another facility. That said, he and his team are well versed in that area.
“We’ve gotten good at scaling infrastructure with demand, having built four breweries in seven years,” says Shuffelt. After onlining Athletic’s original brewery and its Trade Street facility, the company constructed a second, larger production center in Milford, Connecticut in 2022. “We’ve learned lessons with each building and have a pretty good playbook. We’ve gotten better and better at brewhouse layouts that are customized for what we do, packaging line efficiencies, and quality labs that help our teams push into new R&D and NA beer frontiers.”
In putting lessons learned to use when conceptualizing and configuring the new West Coast HQ, Shuffelt leaned on a pair of knowledgeable industry veterans. The first is Senior Operations Director Chris Kallam, a Ballast Point expat who started work at the Carroll Way facility when it opened in 2014, and began his tenure with Athletic as Trade Street’s Brewery Operations Manager in 2020. After being promoted to Director of Operations in 2021, he moved to the East Coast, where he played a major role in the construction of the company’s second East Coast brewery, spending three years there before moving back to San Diego to take on the update of his old stomping grounds. In doing so, he teamed with Facilities Manager Steve Machado. Together, they have overseen every aspect of the Carroll Way project, most notably installation of the packaging line.
“We’re excited to take this place through to its next chapter,” says Kallam. “To have an appreciative consumer base that allows us to grow and work with such a fantastic piece of technology is very cool.”
So, too, are that packaging line’s capabilities. The setup at Athletic’s Trade Street facility pumps out a maximum of 220 cans a minute. It’s an impressive figure that is dwarfed by the new packaging line’s ability to fill and seal 1,200 cans per minute. Add on a sizable 1,800-square-foot pasteurizer that can hold as many as 1,500 cases (36,000 cans of beer) at a time, and the line should have no trouble keeping up with the Carroll Way facility’s pair of 300- and 150-barrel brewhouses, which are supported by 750,000 barrels’ worth of on-site cellar-tank capacity.
Now that Athletic’s new HQ is online, the company is in the process of scaling its staffing to meet future demand. The company plans to bring on a significant number of new employees, adding more shifts covering more days of the week. Bolstering the company’s West Coast sales and marketing teams will also be a focus. Even ahead of those hirings, Shuffelt is pleased with the performance of his existing Miramar team – the majority of which have moved from Trade Street to Carroll Way – and the work they’ve done to make the facility their own.
“It really is an Athletic space now,” says Shuffelt. And that extends beyond manufacturing figures and into the company’s multifaceted sustainability initiatives. The company has achieved Certified B Corporation status from nonprofit network B Lab, in large part for its efforts in the areas of water quality, utilization and reuse, as well as environmental preservation and renewable energy. According to Athletic’s 2024 Impact Report, over 80% of its brewery electricity was derived from renewable resources. On the East Coast, Athletic transitioned to purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates for all of its electricity use, and Shufelt says his team will ensure the Carroll Way facility upholds the company’s commitment to sustainability.
Athletic Brewing’s new headquarters is located at 9045 Carroll Way in Miramar, and its original brewery is located at 7606 Trade Street