DURING a recent trip to San Diego, it took a while for me to fully appreciate the extent of the city’s beer obsession. There was the unexpectedly extensive tap list at the popular new ramen shop Underbelly, and the beer chitchat at the shoe store where I picked up some sandals. Then I tried to rent a surfboard in La Jolla and mentioned the reason for my trip, the sales guy handed me a slip of paper scrawled with the Web address for his beer review blog. Beer, it seems, has become as much a part of the San Diego identity as surf and sun.

There are over 50 breweries in the county. There are San Diego brewery maps and coffee table books and a smartphone app called Taphunter that updates users on which beers are on tap at area bars and restaurants. Bus tours survey area breweries. And, at the biggest scale, there is the sprawling annual San Diego Beer Week, which will have its fourth incarnation this year from Nov. 2 to 11.

But the heart of the San Diego beer scene lies in its craft beer enthusiasts, who wear idiosyncrasy as a badge of honor. As a relative newcomer to serious beer tastings, I started off my trip at the Bottlecraft Beer Shop & Tasting Room, in San Diego’s Little Italy. The bright and airy store, opened last June, sells some 500 brands of beers from near and far away. Brian Jensen, the owner and a young graduate of the French Culinary Institute’s sommelier program, takes special pleasure in educating beer drinkers. “I’d like people to be thinking more about it rather than just chugging beer,” he said. “It’s very much like wine.” He gave me some basics on how to taste beer, using a four-glass flight of brews from the excellent San Diego-based Ballast Point Brewery to illustrate his lesson.

When I asked Mr. Jensen what makes San Diego’s beer scene remarkable, he mentioned the area’s strong home brewing culture. “Every brewer still holds true to home brew roots,” he said. (Ballast Point itself began in 1996 as a spinoff of the vibrant Home Brew Mart, a store dedicated to the process.) The professional craft brewing business has been booming for a couple of decades as well: the oldest post-Prohibition craft brewery in the county is Karl Strauss Brewing Company, founded in 1989 by Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner. The pair drew on the expertise of Karl Strauss, a distant cousin of Mr. Cramer’s who fled Nazi Germany after graduating from a prestigious Bavarian brewing program; he eventually became the head of brewing at Pabst and died in 2006. Though the American standard for beer in the 1980s was light and mild, Mr. Cramer believed the country was ready for more personality in its beverages. “If we could get this style of beer into people’s mouths,” he said, “we could create converts.”