The pandemic has been a mixed bag for Grant Tondro. While making a go of the restaurants in the 3 Local Brothers (3LB) portfolio (Urge Gastropub, Urge Common House and The Barrel Room) was a constant, ever-changing challenge in which survival qualifies as winning, the group’s brewing arm, Mason Ale Works, thrived in 2020. The company expanded its distribution from four states to 12 and finished the year up from 2019. In fact, Tondro had to enter into contract-brewing agreements with three local breweries just to keep up with demand. It’s been enough to convince the longtime restaurateur that it’s time for a change, one which will see him step back from the eateries he helped build so he can plant both feet firmly in the brewing industry and head a large—and rapidly enlarging—brewing syndicate that will distribute nationwide as part of an entity called Tableside Partners.
“As you can imagine, 2020 was a challenging year, but as tough as it was for us on the restaurant side, our brewery side did well,” says Tondro. “I love our restaurants and have poured a lot of myself into them, but with the brewery succeeding in 2020, I felt I was best utilized in the brewery.” Tondro says his passion has been more on the brewing side of things for some time, but it wasn’t until he was approached last year by Tableside that he considered turning most of his attention to beer manufacturing.
Based in Orange County, Tableside was founded in 2019 by Randy Teffeteller, a veteran of several industries, including hospitality, but the company’s roots trace back to 1999 with the founding of the original TAPS Fish House and Brewery. Now a chain of brewpubs with locations in Brea, Corona and Irvine TAPS has won more than 100 brewing awards over its 21-year history, including high-profile medals at the Great American Beer Festival, where it has been named Brewpub of the Year three times.
In 2018, aiming to streamline operations and significantly increase overall production while upping the company’s market presence by leaning on its award-winning reputation, TAPS founder Joe Manzella set out to build a large brewery at which to produce beer for all of its locations. A 20,000-square-foot facility in Tustin was selected, followed by construction of a $3 million state-of-the-art brewery, complete with a four-vessel Prospero brewing system. Brewing staff from the pubs were relocated and continued to work under Manzella, who is now a Strategic Partner with TableSide.
Even with greatly increased manufacturing capabilities, the makers of traditional, unadulterated European styles remained in their comfort zone despite industry trends that saw consumer interest and purchasing habits skewing heavily toward modern American styles such as hazy IPAs and high-alcohol pastry stouts. Due in part to a lack of demand for those staid styles, the new facility was not being utilized in a way that came anywhere maximizing its potential.
Contrarily, since Mason’s debut in 2015, Tondro and his team have made a point of staying on top of such trends and brewing en vogue styles of beer. On top of the hazy IPAs the San Marcos-based company produces under the Mason brand, he has partnered with factions such as Las Vegas-based lifestyle brand Beer Zombies and the owner of Oceanside’s Horus Aged Ales, Kyle Harrop, to create even more New England-style IPAs under collaborative sub-brands Beer Zombies Brewing and Ferrous Falcon. Fueled by fandom for the partners involved, style affection, and small-batch and “limited” status, those beers tend to sell out very quickly and have been key to Mason’s success even in a year that has proven so difficult for other similarly positioned craft breweries.
TableSide is a strong restaurant partner, but there was an opportunity for our company to work with them and give Mason an amazing chance at even bigger growth. They had a huge, underutilized facility and we were contract brewing with multiple breweries just to keep up, so in December we decided to work together and align the companies.”
Grant Tondro, Co-founder, Mason Ale Works
TableSide, which has grown its portfolio to include 17 restaurants and is now spearheading operations for the 3LB restaurants, while Tondro is set to serve as Vice President of Global Brewery Operations. Working with Mason Director of Brewery Operations James Owens, he will oversee brewing at his existing facility in San Marcos, TAPS’ Corona brewpub and the Tustin production facility. The latter just had three 120-barrel tanks installed to raise its cellar capacity to 1,000 barrels. That brings the company’s total cellar capacity to 1,825 barrels. To put it in perspective, Tondro’s tanks added up to a grand sum of 60 barrels when Mason first launched in Oceanside.
The Tustin brewery is now producing all of the beer that had been contract brewed and is fueling Mason’s growth as well as those of TAPS, Beer Zombies and Ferrous Falcon, along with Bespoke and Dagger, a new brand being launched this year centering around TAPS’ Remy line of barrel-aged beers and base beers contract-brewed for the aforementioned Horus. But they won’t stop there. There are deals in the works for additional breweries to work with TableSide to grow as part of their portfolio.
Also signing up to work with Tableside’s yet-to-be-named collective brewing faction is Scripps Ranch’s Newtopia Cyder. One of the first operational changes for Newtopia has been the hiring of Tyler Lynch to oversee cider production. Lynch recently finished up a multi-year stint as Head of Production at Superstition Meadery in Prescott, Arizona, which also has an award-winning line of ciders to its name.
Tondro points out that there are a lot of strategic advantages to working together with Newtopia and hopes additional breweries will join the collective in the future.
“I’ve known Newtopia owner Rick Moreno for a long time and they have very unique hard-cider offerings,” says Tondro. “We work really well together and by allowing us to help with sales and operations, we’ll be able to offer them resources that smaller companies don’t have, including distribution. As soon as we can start producing more of their ciders, we’ll start distributing them through our network.”
That network figures to include 28 states by summer. Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin launched in April, followed by Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts in May, with North Carolina and Tennessee figuring to activate in June, plus Georgia and Texas in July. That’s a lot of territory to cover and based on the current growth curve, more than the current production infrastructure can support. So, a new brewery is being eyed in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The 10,000-square-foot facility would be sited within a Tableside-run restaurant with a potential cellar up to 500-barrels. It would serve as a production hub within two-day transit of Midwest and Eastern states, while the Tustin brewery would be the primary supplier of the Western U.S.
“The growth this year has been a lot of fun, and we can’t wait to take on the projects coming up,” says Tondro. ” It’s going to be a busy summer!”