Cycling enthusiast and brewery owner Rawley Macias was riding high this January. After 18 months of searching for a new, larger home for his business, Rouleur Brewing, he had secured a building that suited his needs in Carlsbad. It was mere miles from his current facility, a space he leased from H.G. Fenton Company as part of the local developer’s Brewery Igniter program. Then the pandemic hit San Diego County, and everything changed. Forced closures of food and beverage establishments prompted the SBA lender Macias was working with to halt nearly all loans to hospitality businesses, leaving Rouleur immobilized. But not for long.
Macias surveyed his options, focusing on the Carlsbad Brewery Igniter campus. Rouleur debuted at that locale in April 2017, alongside operation Wiseguy Brewing. Initial challenges caused the father-son team behind Wiseguy to withdraw from the campus September of that same year. The suite was taken over by Papa Marce’s Cerveceria in August 2018. That operation went out of business this February. Since then, the space has been vacant. With the low likelihood of H.G. Fenton being able to find a tenant for that suite, Macias pitched the developer a plan where he would get out of his Brewery Igniter agreement and switch to a traditional long-term lease. As part of that plan, he would take over the suite next door, effectively doubling the square footage from a production and retail standpoint. H.G. Fenton accepted his terms and now, Rouleur’s growth will take place where the business began.
Rouleur’s original suite is 2,097 square feet, 450 of which is devoted to the tasting room. The newly acquired suite is 2,200 square feet with roughly the same retail space in a different configuration. In late 2019, Macias started renting an adjacent suite totaling 1,750 square feet, which is utilized for cold storage, dry storage and office space. With all three sites contiguous, Rouleur now comes in at 6,000 square feet with enough production space to fit its brewhouse, 14 tanks and a canning line.
The wall between the suites’ abutting tasting rooms came down in late June. The plan is extend Rouleur’s existing bar, and replace a large window with a roll-up door to further brighten and open up the space. Once that’s complete, the expanded tasting room, which will come in at roughly 1,000 square feet, will debut to the public on July 18. This should prove particularly advantageous for the business given current social-distancing mandates. Rouleur has relied heavily on a temporary 200-square-foot outdoor patio (a fixture Macias hopes to keep in place following the pandemic) to serve as many people as possible while abiding by State regulations. Doubling its retail space will further assist in serving more people and doing so safely.
As part of the lease renegotiations, Macias is purchasing the brewery and cellar equipment he’s used to produce his beers. Those apparatuses have also been used to contract brew beers for San Marcos’ Port Brewing and The Lost Abbey as well as a side project involving those entities’ co-owner and director of brewery operations Tomme Arthur, Arizona’s Motosonora Brewing, which opened in March. These contract relationships have helped the brewery to grow and maximize revenue in an increasingly challenging market. The lease renegotiation should go a long way to furthering Rouleur’s success as it saved Macias from having to go a route which would have required him to take on a large amount of debt.
Rouleur Brewing is located at 5840 El Camino Real in Carlsbad