

Ha, beers like Sculpin. Now that’s the definition of an easy decision for us. There are a few breweries where we have an open door policy, where if you walk in with a keg of anything from them, we will take it. You walk in with a keg of Sculpin and it’s going in the coldbox, no questions. Then there are the guys who are making awesome hoppy beers, Beachwood Brewing & BBQ, El Segundo Brewing Company — those are easy pick-ups too. The harder decisions are where loyalties might not sync up with what people want to drink in San Diego. Ian [Black] opened up here in San Diego after coming from the Toronado in San Francisco, so he’s got a lot of ties up there. So you take, for example, 21st Amendment’s IPAs, and put them up against San Diego IPAs, that’s where the difficult decisions come into play.



Then there are some decisions that, like it or not, are driven by — for lack of a better term — the “pay-to-play” mentality. Firestone Walker makes some awesome, limited beers like Parabola or if you look behind me, we have bottles of PNC in the cooler. Sometimes that might mean bringing in 10 kegs of Pivo — we don’t take those beers just to get the others, but if we have to have a pils or something on, then we are going to pick one that is a great beer in itself as well. Or Noble Ale Works, maybe we bring in a lot of the awesome hoppy beers that Evan [Price] brews up there [in Anaheim, CA], and that means we might get a couple extra kegs of Naughty Sauce [a highly sought-after Golden Coffee Milk Stout, served on Nitro]. At the end of the day, it’s still got to be about good beer. And, when it comes to buying beer, Ian has the final word and the buck stops there.