After 2,262 days of consecutive, non-stop service at its brewery and tasting room in San Marcos, Wild Barrel Brewing will be closing its doors at that location as well as its satellite venue in Temecula, following the company’s day of business on Sunday, December 10. The decision to close the six-year-old beer interest was made following a year-and-a-half of operating in a financial deficit despite multiple attempts to get out of the red. Those efforts were hampered by rising costs of goods, utilities and rent, factors that ultimately led to the business’ demise.
“It has simply come to the point where it is no longer viable for us to stay open,” says Wild Barrel co-founder and CEO Bill Sysak, adding that he and his partners faced more than the above challenges over a far lengthier timespan. “When we opened, we were very lucky that people liked our products, especially our Vice line of fruited Berliner weisses. Most new breweries have a honeymoon period where people come out in big numbers. We were lucky in that the honeymoon didn’t die off for us for more than two years, but then came the pandemic.”
As it did for every brewery in San Diego County, COVID-19 and its associated governmental closures significantly changed the playing field, eliminating on-site sales overnight and creating uncertainty for months and years to come. Sysak and his partners pivoted time and time again, adjusting to changing market conditions and keeping the business open, but Wild Barrel’s tasting rooms – including the aforementioned Temecula taproom, which opened just a month before COVID stay-at-home orders went into effect – never again saw their numbers return to anything close to what they had been prior to the pandemic.
“Even though it was small, the Temecula tasting room was a test to see if we could manage an off-site location,” says Sysak. “From there, we planned to open multiple tasting rooms in San Diego and Orange County, but the lockdown put the kibosh on that.”
Wild Barrel also delved deeper into distribution, finding pandemic-era success in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. From there, ownership sought to expand domestic reach and sales by opening up distribution in other U.S. states, but ultimately the increased costs of widespread distribution – shipping, fuel, packaging materials – rendered the model infeasible.
Back at home, lower patronage and rising rent created a losing equation where on-premise sales were concerned. Sysak says Wild Barrel’s rent has essentially doubled since the company opened its doors in 2017. Such was also the case for the business it shared its building with, SoCal Axe. The recreational axe-throwing concern has since relocated and reopened in a building within Jacked Up Brewery’s three-structure campus in Escondido.
Wild Barrel was founded by a formidable trio that included Sysak, entrepreneur Chris White (not to be confused with the White Labs owner of the same name) and brewer Bill Sobieski. Sysak is a famous beer expert and educator with an online following that was bolstered by his work as Craft Beer Ambassador for Stone Brewing from 2009 to 2016. White is the owner of several other businesses, including Vista’s Barrel & Stave Brewing and its parent company, Barrel & Stave Pour House. Sobieski was a well-known homebrewer who made the jump to the pro ranks and worked for numerous Southern California breweries before joining the Wild Barrel team.
Together, the trio created a concept built to speak to craft-drinker tastes of the time, offering scads of fruited kettle-sour ales, IPAs, coffee beers, and eventually barrel-aged sours, strong ales and pastry beers. The latter were the domain of Barrel Director Preston Weesner, an oak-aged sour expert renowned for his work at Portland, Oregon’s Cascade Brewing. When Sobieski left the business in 2022 (he now works with Santa Ana-based beverage-equipment traders, Seven Beverages), Weesner stepped in to assume Director of Brewing Operations responsibilities, as well.
When asked about personal highlights from his tenure at Wild Barrel, Sysak cites donating beer to multiple charitable causes, helping pet-rescue organizations achieve their goals and continuing with his beer-education efforts, be it at on-site food-pairing events or conducting classes as an instructor for San Diego State University’s Business of Craft Beer certificate program at the San Marcos tasting room.
A big accomplishment for all of us partners was using our Vice series to introduce the masses to Berliner weisse – this approachable sour beer – and get them to a point where they could come back the next time and try one of Preston’s barrel-aged sours, and actually be able to drink it versus running away because it was so extreme. Coming up with this great gateway sour was a really big achievement.”
Bill Sysak, Co-founder & CEO, Wild Barrel Brewing
Due to the prohibitive cost of submitting beers to most major professional brewing competitions, Wild Barrel rarely entered its products. That makes it all the more impressive that, of the three years they sent beer to the Great American Beer Festival (the country’s largest and most prestigious annual beer-making competition), the non-fruited version of the company’s Vice took gold in both 2020 and 2021.
Sysak and his partners would like nothing more than to see Wild Barrel’s tasting room packed as it was pre-pandemic over the next week. To help facilitate that level of patronage, the brewery will offer various discounts on its beers, including canned specialties as well as to-go draft beer packaged in crowlers and kegs. Both of the brewery’s tasting rooms will be open regular hours from now through Sunday.
Wild Barrel Brewing is located at 692 Rancheros Drive in San Marcos, and its satellite tasting room is located at 41493 Margarita Road, Suite G106, in Temecula