Green Flash today named its new CEO, Michael Taylor, a beer industry veteran with 14 years experience with Anheuser-Busch.

“His talent, experience and leadership are the perfect fit,” said Mike Hinkley, the Mira Mesa brewery’s founder, “and I look forward to working with him.”

Yet the new CEO’s experience has rattled San Diego’s fiercely independent craft beer community. As Anheuser-Busch’s vice president for mergers and acquisitions, Taylor oversaw the purchases of Golden Road, Goose Island, 10 Barrel and a half dozen other craft breweries.

“If you have a skill set that you’ve honed over the years,” said Gustavo Quintero, an advisory board member for San Diego State University’s Business of Craft Beer program, “you’re not going to abandon that for no reason.”


Selling Green Flash to an outside party is not his mission in San Diego, Taylor said — at least not now.

“I can’t speak for A-B and what A-B wants,” he said “I have not had any M and A discussions with the current ownership team. My role is really organic growth within the organization itself. And we’ve got a lot to do for quite awhile.”

San Diego’s beer industry was built by local, independent players who had to fight international brewing corporations like Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors and others for shelf space, tap handles and — some argue — their very existence.

To see a homegrown San Diego brewery led by an Anheuser-Busch alum, especially one who helped convert numerous independent breweries into links in A-B’s chain, makes Quintero question Green Flash’s direction.


Still, he agreed that this embattled Mira Mesa brewery needs a reboot.

“Right now, they are probably bordering on irrelevance,” Quintero said. “During all this turmoil they haven’t done a good job of damage control, of getting the message out about who they are and who they want to be.”

Founded in 2002 by Mike and Lisa Hinkley, Green Flash won fans with West Coast IPA, Le Freak and other award-winning beers. Its lineup grew even stronger in 2015, when it bought Alpine Beer, whose hop-forward beers have an international following.

By 2016, this was San Diego County’s third largest brewery, trailing only Ballast Point and Stone, with sales in all 50 states.


This spring, though, Hinkley’s dreams of a national craft beer empire collapsed under mounting debt.

Within a week, Hinkley shuttered his East Coast brewery in Virginia; closed a barrel-aging operation in Poway; and then, unable to make payments on a $20 million loan, saw his company’s assets seized and sold to a new band of investors, led by venture capitalist Richard Lobo.

Two days after Lobo’s group took control, Well Fargo sued Green Flash for $279,494.77 plus interest and court costs, alleging the company had failed to make payments on a line of credit it opened in 2013.

The steady drumbeat of bad news cast a pall over the brewery.


“The biggest issue we have is consumer perception and, to some degree, retailer perception,” Taylor said. “The single biggest thing is people think that this means the beer is going away — and that’s just not the case.”

Taylor acknowledged that the brewery recently lost some retail accounts, but chalked that up to business as usual.

“The beer industry in general has lost some placements,” he said. “The best breweries in the country struggle every day to maintain that value, maintain that position.”

Green Flash’s challenge is to increase its visibility in San Diego— “you have to win in your backyard” — and produce innovative beers, Taylor said. Early this year, the brewery cut back its distribution network to eight states, but the CEO pledged that Green Flash will hold that line.


“We’re not going to pull back in any other states,” he said.

Taylor is the second new face at Green Flash with ties to Anheuser-Busch’s mergers and acquisitions department. Joshua Yelsey, one of the five principals on Lobo’s team, also served as head of finance for A-B’s Goose Island, Blue Point and other properties.

Lobo insists there is no plan to sell the brewery. During a recent tour of the Mira Mesa headquarters, he noted that Green Flash is investing a new canning line and other capital improvements.

“I want to be clear that the new ownership has absolutely no plans and zero intention to sell the business to anyone at any point in the near future,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We invested in the business because we believe that Green Flash and Alpine are iconic brands here on the West Coast and that the business has tremendous opportunity to grow within its core markets.”


Instead, Taylor said, local beer fans should look for a stronger Green Flash, with a marketing campaign led by a familiar face: Hinkley.

“His title will always be ‘founder,’” Taylor said. “He’s going to report to me and be working sales, marketing, all the commercial end of the business.”