In 2015, Saint Archer Brewing founder Josh Landan sold his then two-year-old company to MillerCoors (now doing business as Molson Coors Beverage Co.). Since then, the brand has remained in operation from its Miramar headquarters, adding a satellite taproom in Leucadia in 2018. A cornerstone of Molson Coors’ Tenth and Blake portfolio, the Big Beer company put big money behind the brand. In 2020, it launched an ad campaign that included a Super Bowl commercial for its “ultimate light beer”, Saint Archer Gold. The beer flopped and is no longer in production. In 2021, Saint Archer pivoted to producing canned ready-to-drink cocktails for broad distribution, while brewing small-batch beers for its San Diego taprooms. All the while, Saint Archer’s nationwide presence eroded as new products failed to stick with consumers. After six years, Molson Coors announced this morning that it is shutting down Saint Archer’s operations, removing product from the marketplace, and selling its pair of San Diego locations to Miramar-based Kings and Convicts Brewing.
“The Saint Archer team has built a distinct brand that has a very loyal following in Southern California. Unfortunately, the overall business has struggled to grow despite investing significant resources behind its production and commercialization,” said Paul Verdu, Vice President of Tenth and Blake, Molson Coors craft division. “We’ll maintain ownership of the Saint Archer brand as we determine the best long-term plan and remain focused on growing our regional breweries that continue outpacing home-market competitors.”
Located at 9550 Distribution Avenue, Saint Archer’s Miramar brewery totals 50,000 square feet. It is equipped with a 40-barrel brewhouse as well as a five-barrel pilot system and a cellar with fermenters of varying size topping out with a quartet of 400-barrel tanks. The Leucadia taproom, which is located at 978 North Coast Highway 101, comes in at 1,200 square feet. Both will be redesigned to convey the Kings and Convicts brand.
Most peoples’ introduction to Kings and Convicts came on December 3, 2019, when news broke that the small, then two-year-old Chicagoland-based operation had purchased one of San Diego’s oldest and largest beer-manufacturing interests, Ballast Point Brewing, from Big-Beer interest Constellation Brands. The latter had acquired the former for a record $1 billion in 2015, but after suffering major losses in the years that followed, opted to sell the Miramar-based operation to its current owners for an undisclosed amount that is believed to be a paltry percentage far lower than the jaw-dropping sum they’d paid for it.
Following news of the acquisition, a prominent question among beer-industry professionals and craft-beer fans alike was, “Who or what is Kings and Convicts?” More than two years after the acquisition, that query remains mostly unanswered, but Kings and Convicts CEO Brendan Watters and COO Chris Bradley say they are excited to now have a means by which to show people what the brand is all about, particularly San Diegans.
“We’re going to have taprooms here where people can come see us and try our beer on tap. They’ll see Kings and Convicts beer is clearly not Ballast Point. It’s very much ‘craft,’ but in a different vein,” says Watters. When asked what San Diegans will discover about Kings and Convicts’ overall brand, he paints the picture of a playfully rogue operation steeped with pub-inspired whimsy and communalism. “We’re more tongue-in-cheek. We take our beer seriously, but we’re not precious. We believe in storytelling and having fun, and we want to make sure that everything we do is about having beer with friends.”
The design conceptualization for Kings and Convicts’ pair of tasting rooms is in its earliest stages, but Watters says the plan is to reimagine Saint Archer’s public venues as fun places to convene with friends to drink and watch sports. The latter has been part of the brand’s DNA from day one, and in December, Kings and Convicts signed on as the official beer sponsor of local professional lacrosse team, the San Diego Seals.
Acquiring the former Saint Archer facility was an important step toward efficiently supplying the Seals’ home venue, Pechanga Arena, with beer. Watters says that, while roughly 200 barrels of Kings and Convicts beer have been brewed at Ballast Point’s facility to-date, they are not in need of the large batches produced by its 300- and 150-barrel brewhouse. The only other in-house option is the five-barrel system at Ballast Point’s Little Italy brewpub. Neither are well-suited for the company’s long-term plans, which led Watters to reach out to a contact at Saint Archer about the potential of contract-brewing at their brewery. Days after that initial conversation, Molson Coors came back asking if Kings and Convicts would be interested in purchasing its San Diego properties.
While inheriting an ideally sized brewhouse and cellar was appealing, so too was acquisition of Saint Archer’s canning line, a state-of-the-art system that is smaller than Ballast Point’s grand-scale packaging mechanism and built for easy interchangeability between different types and sizes of cans. But the assets presented in the Molson Coors acquisition go beyond machinery. Watters and Bradley will be presenting all members of Saint Archer’s operations and retail staff the opportunity to remain on board and become Kings and Convicts employees.
“We want to bring people from Saint Archer across to help us brew something a little different, something we can call Kings and Convicts. We’ll have some quality people coming on who have been doing a great job and running a good brewery and taproom already,” says Watters. “The people who will be coming to us from Molson Coors will be able to be gritty and rough-and-tumble again, and that’s going to be really fun to watch.”
In addition to Kings and Convicts beers, which will initially be available in kegs and self-distributed throughout San Diego County, the former Saint Archer facility will be used to brew smaller-scale Ballast Point beers. Watters says that from the moment he and Bradley acquired Ballast Point, they’ve wanted to go beyond producing core and mass-distribution beers by brewing more niche ales and lagers, the likes of which Ballast Point released when it operated out of its former Scripps Ranch brewery (which is now operated by hard-kombucha company JuneShine).
When asked why finding a base of operations for Kings and Convicts comes two years after the company’s move from Illinois to San Diego, Watters says it hasn’t been a focus. He and Bradley felt it was more important to restore Ballast Point to what it had been prior to the Constellation Brands acquisition; a legitimate craft brewery with a meaningful and heartfelt presence in its hometown. Now that they have made strides in that sense, they are ready to devote attention to Kings and Convicts.
“Focus was everything for us, as was making sure we could stop for a while and do this properly. We think it’s important to have a commitment to San Diego. This is our home now. We love this place and are happy to be able to put down roots in a beer sense,” says Watters. “With Ballast Point we felt a true need to look after and rehabilitate it; make sure people knew Ballast Point is all about San Diego. The beautiful thing about Kings and Convicts is that we can make mistakes and have fun without worrying so much.”
Watters says the deal to take over Saint Archer’s locations is expected to close within the next two weeks. When asked when brewing of Kings and Convicts beer will begin at the Miramar facility, he replies: “day one.”