Today, downtown Chula Vista boasts three local brewery venues—Chula Vista Brewery, Groundswell Brewing, Thr3e Punk Ales Brewing—on a single block. It’s impressive, as is the growth in the number of craft-beer producers, retailers and consumers in the county’s second-largest municipality. Much of that has to do with the high visibility of its downtown beer businesses as well as breweries and brewpubs in the densely populated Eastlake and Otay Ranch communities. But before any of them were even a twinkle in their founders’ eyes, there was Chula Vista’s first modern-era craft-beer producer, Bay Bridge Brewing.
Founded in 2006 by homebrewers Jim Shirey and Doug Chase, the business flew largely under the radar, starting out by selling its beer to a short list of South Bay draft accounts, including restaurants and yacht clubs. The duo produced its straightforward array of ales—blonde, wheat, amber, hoppy—using a 15-barrel brewhouse obtained from La Jolla’s defunct Sports City Cafe and Brewery. That vessel was later used to supply house beers to The Brew House at Eastlake, which Shirey and Chase opened in strip mall in in its eponymous neighborhood in 2007.
Though that business shuttered in 2012 (it has since been taken over by Chula Vista Brewery and reopened under that company’s flag in 2021), it provided the business partners their first direct interface with the people drinking their beer. Until then, their base of operations had been closed to the public. Following their return to production brewing, with on-site tasting rooms having become the norm for local breweries, they decided to add one, as well.
Being Chula Vista’s first—and only—beermaking interest meant cutting through strand after strand of governmental red tape, but Shirey and Chase persisted, and by the summer of 2015, they had a fully permitted tasting room in their off-Broadway cul-de-sac facility going by the business’ original name.
Bay Bridge went on to draw an impressive collection of regulars behind a beer menu that resisted change, addition or adjuncts or infusion of modern-day influences such as haze, kettle-souring or adjuncts. Shirey and Chase preferred to stick to their tried-and-true recipes while offering patrons entertainment options. Live music was a weekend staple, as were comedy nights. Bay Bridge led with the latter more than any other local brewery, but it was no joke when its founders took to social media to announce that Sunday, November 27 would be the company’s last day in operation. After more than a decade-and-a-half of working together, Shirey and Chase are calling it a career.
Though they were easily the quietest of Chula Vista’s now plentiful cadre of brewery owners (in addition to the aforementioned operations, Novo Brazil Brewing has grown to become the municipality’s largest craft-beer interest, while Barrio Logan-based Attitude Brewing and Miramar’s Little Miss Brewing have opened tasting rooms in downtown Chula Vista and Eastlake, respectively), the departing duo left their mark, making it easier for those who would follow to do business in a community that has come to be very proud of its local beermaking institutions.