Region & History

Anyone who drives out to the Stone Brewing campus in Escondido is standing in front of the brewery that has shaped San Diego's image as a beer city more than any other. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner founded Stone in 1996. The brewery made its name with bitter, heavily hopped ales.

How did the West Coast IPA come about? There's no single inventor. The style grew out of American craft beer in the 1990s, as brewers along the Pacific coast added more and more hops to pale, dry beers. San Diego, alongside Northern California, is considered one of its birthplaces. The name itself isn't a protected term.

The city had forerunners even earlier. Karl Strauss opened a brewpub downtown in 1989 — a restaurant with its own brewery. AleSmith followed in 1995, then Ballast Point and Stone in 1996. The Lost Abbey brewery and the Port Brewing label were founded in San Marcos in 2006 under Tomme Arthur, and Modern Times launched in 2013.

After that, ownership took center stage. Constellation Brands bought Ballast Point in 2015 for roughly one billion US dollars, and in 2019 Kings & Convicts took the brand back over. In 2024, Ballast Point gave up its own brewery and has since had its beer contract-brewed elsewhere. Stone went to Sapporo in 2022 for about 165 million US dollars; in April 2026, Sapporo sold the brand to Firestone Walker and Duvel Moortgat USA, and production now takes place mostly outside San Diego.

This has consequences for the word craft. The Brewers Association requires that less than 25 percent of a brewery be owned by a company that is itself not craft. Ballast Point no longer met that standard under Constellation. In 2018, San Diego County counted 155 licensed craft breweries, more than any other county in the US.