In a county with more than 200 brewery-owned venues, a first-of-its-kind beer concept is rare. However, that’s exactly what’s on tap for Vista in the form of a craft-beverage collective that will house multiple breweries under one roof.
Called Co-Lab Vista, the collective will see three breweries, a winery, and an on-site food vendor sharing an indoor-outdoor tasting room where guests will have access to all of their wares. But it’s more than a sampling space. Brewing, winemaking, barrel-aging and cooking will all take place in-house, with the brewery tenants sharing production equipment and cellar space.
The $5 million project is being spearheaded by real-estate developer Joe Deutsch (pictured above with son Joseph Deutsch) and backed by a group of Orange County-based investors.
After spending the past four years educating himself on the challenges brewery owners face entering the industry and expanding, Deutsch developed a model where small businesses would be able to pool resources, share equipment and expenses, and present their products in a communal venue. In addition to cost savings, a primary goal of Co-Lab Vista — as with any hospitality-business collective — is to attract consumers with the convenience of having multiple beverage manufacturers in a single venue.
“The customer experience is the real driver for us. Customers want choice and authentic experiences,” says Deutsch. “At Co-Lab, the public can discuss the products directly with the producers, learn how they are made, and actually watch the process in action. Here, there’ll be an intimacy between the producer and consumer that is unavailable in a non-production format.”
Scheduled to debut in early November, Co-Lab Vista is located in a 12,500-square-foot space toward the west end of an expansive strip of commercial buildings on Industrial Court. Visible from State Route 78, it’s a high-profile site that will be occupied by established operations, Breakwater Brewing and Laguna Beach Beer Co., along with newcomer Barrel and Stave Brewing. The facility will serve a different purpose for each of those interests.
In the case of Breakwater Brewing, the 13-year-old, award-winning Oceanside brewpub will be adding a second location with greater production capacity while hoping to expand awareness of its brand inland. Breakwater currently brews seven-barrel batches, but the 20-barrel fermenters it will have at its disposal at Co-Lab will allow the company to triple production, and at a reasonable price.
“We are a small independent brewery without a lot of capital to work with, so combining the resources of multiple breweries and sharing costs with them made Co-Lab enticing,” says Breakwater owner Jason Ignaciak. “We plan to brew more beer, distribute it to more bars and restaurants, and start canning as soon as possible. Our current setup doesn’t allow us to can beers, so this will be a huge step for us.”
Co-Lab will also usher in a new era for Barrel and Stave. The business was born as a craft-beer “Pour House” in Fullerton by Chris White, who is also the co-founder of San Marcos’s Wild Barrel Brewing. In transitioning Barrel and Stave from bars (including a second Pour House, which opened in Old Town Vista in February) to beermaking, White is bringing on local, award-winning homebrewer Chris Banker to head brewery operations.
While its first location is in San Diego County, this will be Laguna Beach Beer’s fourth venue overall, joining a trio of spots in Orange County. Rather than expand brewing operations to Vista, the company will continue to brew out of its production facility in Rancho Santa Margarita, while barrel-aging its beers at Co-Lab and attempting to reach a new southerly clientele.
“We have a solid, growing barrel library in Vista, including a number of imperial stouts in various spirit barrels, a few different batches of our English barley wine in some extremely cool single-barrel Blanton, Bib, and Tucker whiskey barrels, and a wild-beer program that’s resting in a fleet of French-oak wine barrels,” says Laguna Beach Beer Director of Operations Christian Emsiek.
The breweries will share the Co-Lab space with a startup wine interest, Deutsch Cellars (operated by the aforementioned Deutsch’s son, Joseph), and Los Angeles-born mobile food vendor concept, Baby’s Badass Burgers, which will operate a brick-and-mortar kitchen. Visitors to Co-Lab’s tasting room will be able to order its tenants’ beverages from a contiguous bar spanning 100 feet and split into four sections, each sporting an aesthetic developed by the occupants.
The ground level of Co-Lab’s tasting room comes in at 2,500 square feet and is supplemented by a 2,000-square-foot mezzanine (which can be reserved for private parties), making for a total seating capacity of 350. While a formal, 800-square-foot outdoor patio is in the works, a “COVID lot” that combines planned patio and parking-lot space is being set up to seat up to 200 guests at a time in a manner complying with pandemic best practices.
To date, the only San Diego County project similar to Co-Lab is North Park’s five-year-old Brewery Igniter facility. Constructed in a former gentleman’s club on El Cajon Boulevard by local developer H.G. Fenton, the 6,000-square-foot building is split into three separate brewing facilities. Each lease-to-brew suite includes its own, customizable tasting room and public entrance, but there is no on-site food vendor or communal public space, and parking is limited.
The North Park Brewery Igniter has been a takeoff space for the likes of current tenant Pariah Brewing, as well as Eppig Brewing and JuneShine Hard Kombucha. The latter operations have moved on, while Pariah’s ownership made the recent decision to shift operations to a larger facility in Baltimore and keep the Brewery Igniter suite (the only one of the three that’s currently occupied and operative) for small-batch brewing and a bi-coastal presence.
The Co-Lab team hopes having interconnected tenants locked in for the long-term (including one providing a dedicated food option) in a much more spacious environment offering multiple seating options will lead to a more consistent, enduring outcome than that of Brewery Igniter, which has struggled to maintain occupancy at its locations.
Another plus for the Co-Lab team and its tenants is Vista’s city government. More than a decade ago, while most municipal governments were weighing craft breweries’ pluses and minuses — and it was still illegal to brew beer in some such communities — the city of Vista saw potential and seized on it. Director of Economic Development Kevin Ham and his colleagues worked closely with their local breweries to understand the challenges they faced and help fix them. The result has been a hand-in-hand approach to relax outdated regulations and cultivate an environment in which brewing companies and the city thrive in terms of economics, job creation, and tourism.
“I’ve developed dozens of projects in several states over the past 40-plus years and created developments in very friendly municipalities as well as utterly miserable environments,” says Deutsch. “No prior experience matches what we’ve had with the city of Vista. They are off-the-chart accommodating and helpful.”
The timing for Co-Lab seems particularly favorable with the rising popularity of collectives of all kinds, particularly in the hospitality industry where food halls, public markets, and other shared food-and-beverage venues are proving attractive to entrepreneurs and consumers alike.
“What better way to try multiple breweries and beers than having them all in one location?” says Ignaciak, citing several advantages. ”There’s no driving around town, no need to pay for multiple Ubers to go to different locations. Between three breweries, a winery, and a restaurant, there should be something for everyone to enjoy.”
This article originally appeared in the Business section of the Tuesday, September 7, 2021 edition of The San Diego Union-Tribune