While most breweries are focused on weathering the pandemic, there are still beer-making interests that are looking to grow their footprint. Those are the types of operations Joe Deutsch and the team behind Co-Lab Vista sought out when pitching their concept for a shared, collective space for craft beverage makers. Deutsch and company secured a building next door to Vista’s Indian Joe Brewing last year, then set out to find tenants to occupy suites that would all include customer interfaces and could be customized to fit additional needs such as manufacturing or warehousing. A trio of beer interests signed on and, though COVID-19 has slowed most projects, construction on the Co-Lab facility has chugged along, enough that it should be completed by next month and, if all goes to plan, brewery tenants should be operating out of the facility by January 2021.
Of those tenants, two have local ties. The most familiar to San Diegans will be Breakwater Brewing, an award-winning brewpub which has operated in Oceanside since 2008. Acquiring a second space will represent the largest expansion for the 12-year-old business. They will be neighbors with Barrel and Stave, a spin-off operation of sorts from the co-owner of San Marcos’ award-winning Wild Barrel Brewing, Chris White (not to be confused with the White Labs founder of the same name), which will be headed by decorated homebrewer Chris Banker, who will brew commercial beers with homebrewers that will be made available at the Co-Lab space. Barrel and Stave also has an established brick-and-mortar “Pour House” venue in Fullerton. Last but not least will be Laguna Beach Beer Co., a six-year-old brewery headed by a Beachwood Brewing alum, which is looking to expand beyond Orange County. A winery will occupy the facility’s fourth and final craftsman suite.
Co-Lab Vista will have a 10-barrel, three-vessel, direct-fire system on-site for its tenants to utilize, while a projected 60 barrels’ worth of fermentation vessels will be split among the brewery suites. Each of the above tenants will share space along a long, continuous bar, and a food vendor will operate out of a 700-square-foot kitchen and serve guests occupying the venue’s outdoor patio as well as its two-story communal interior.
“This is our proof-of-concept location to evaluate and fine-tune the idea,” says Deutsch. “If successful, we’ll be doing many others, although, this would be the smallest by far. We’re about 11,500 square feet in Vista, and we’ll be targeting closer to 20,000-square-foot sites in the future.”
It’s a bullish outlook in an age of uncertainty. Even so, Deutsch acknowledges that things haven’t gone as smoothly as he and his team had expected when drawing up the Co-Lab concept. After being shut down by the government, then allowed to open, then shut down again, some would-be tenants’ confidence waned, and a scheduled restaurant tenant bowed out. Despite that, the Co-Lab team forged forward, and, in the end, its brewery tenants stayed aboard.
While the pandemic has squashed present opportunities, Deutsch believes Co-Lab’s business model will pay off once the pandemic is past, setting up tenants to better compete once life gets back to some sense of normalcy.
“We are a totally new and fresh concept for people looking for something new and fun. We expect each of our tenants to have their own unique customer draw. Putting them all under one roof should provide an even greater gravitational draw from enthusiasts and the curious,” says Deutsch. “And we believe our model, at a minimum, will allow all of our partners to sell twice as much for half the cost. We fully expect our brewers to sell seven barrels per capacity seat per year at taproom prices. They could well do more.”
Co-Lab is located at 2129 Industrial Court in Vista