California’s Beachwood Brewing Company will soon be slinging its own cocktails along with its brews.
The Huntington Beach-based brewery opened Beach Brewing & Distilling last month, a brewery, distillery and tasting room in Long Beach’s Bixby Knolls neighborhood. The facility features 24 taps, and in 2023 will house the company’s first handcrafted spirits program.
The Bixby Knolls location is Beachwood’s fourth brick-and-mortar location, but its first dedicated to craft spirits, including vodkas, gins and rums.
“It seems like the natural progression,” Beachwood co-founder Gabe Gordon told Brewbound. “All of us in the brewing industry eventually end up enjoying cocktails. And then from there, it’s kind of like, ‘Man, we could do this.’”
The “skill sets” required for brewing are similar to what’s needed to be a “good distiller,” according to Gordon. In essence, it’s “just the concentration and refinement of beer or wine,” and Beachwood sees distilling as another way to bring its craft care and “nerdy” knowledge to consumers.
“We are very good at brewing, and we are very good at blending,” Gordon said. “And we are very good at infusions of other ingredients, like fruits and spices and herbs and all those things that we add into our beers at the Blendery, and all the experimental stuff we do.”
The Blendery is Beachwood’s small batch production facility and tasting room in downtown Long Beach. Opened in 2014, the location houses the brewery’s “geeky quest” to “recreate the Lambic-style beers of Belgium,” with modern ingredients, according to its website. Beachwood originally planned to start its distilling project at the Blendery, but the COVID-19 pandemic slowed production onsite.
“From a beer standpoint, we sell a lot of Blendery beer in draft, and it’s quite expensive,” Gordon said. “During COVID, the places that were doing to-go beer that were able to stay open – all the bars and restaurants that were buying beer so they could sell it to-go – really expensive sour beer in a crowler was probably not high on their list. They needed beer that everybody wants, so they were buying a lot of IPA, a lot of lager, a lot of blonde ale.”
The slowed business, along with the ability to put the Blendery’s sour barrels “to sleep,” made the location open for a new project like the distillery. But when on-premise business returned, the Blendery started getting “busier and busier,” and a transition to distilled spirits would have “hampered” the facility’s ability to make beer, Gordon said.
Then, “out of nowhere,” Beachwood received a tip on a turnkey location that could meet its needs. The landlord of a Huntington Beach facility called Gordon and told him his tenant – a five-barrel brewery and taproom – was not renewing its lease, and the location was available.
The new tasting room is open and serving beer. Beachwood plans to receive its distilling license from the state in the next three to four months, and can then begin trialing its spirits production.
“California is not a place where you can necessarily practice distilling art without going to jail,” Gordon said. “So we’re sort of stuck in a holding pattern on that.”
Beachwood will also make its own mixers onsite, including tonics, ginger beers and bitters. Doing otherwise “wouldn’t have been in line with [Beachwood’s] core values,” or Gordon’s experience as a chef, in which you make “everything you can” that’s served to a consumer, down to grinding spices, he said.
Distilling operations will be enough to support a “killer cocktail program” at whichever Beachwood locations the brewery wants in the future, with a few bottles for purchase.
“[The project] was always meant to be an in-house program,” Gordon said. “Not to sit there and try and compete with St. George gin on the shelves at Total Wine.”
Beachwood is not staying idle while it waits on its distilling license. The brewery has two additional brick-and-mortar locations opening in the next few months, including an outdoor tasting room in Long Beach, which has been in planning since 2019.
The other new location will be a beer and pizza joint in Huntington Beach.
“I don’t know the last time I was this excited about something we’re doing from our culinary standpoint in a really long time,” Gordon said “I’m so excited to get this place open and I’m really looking to make mind-blowing pizza.”
Beachwood is approaching the new concept with a similar strategy to its distillery plans, with everything made in-house, including growing its own yeast strain at The Blendery, milling its own flour, and building its own water profile for the pizza dough.
“It really will be our own pizza; literally every aspect of it will be homegrown,” Gordon said.
“I feel like we’ve always been really good at being the nerdy brand that you can nerd out on,” he continued. “And then you can also come in and be like, ‘My favorite pizza is frozen pizza from a store,’ and we’re all good with that, too.”
The location will also help open up production capacity for the brewery’s other locations, which are already “maxed out.” The brewery is set to produce nearly 11,000 barrels this year, with the help of a new tank which increased capacity +7%, a Beachwood spokesperson told Brewbound. In 2021, the brewery produced an estimated 7,500 barrels, according to the Brewers Association.
Beachwood now distributes its offerings primarily in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties, with “some distribution” in Riverside, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and “periodical” shipments to Northern California, Colorado, Oregon, Illinois and Washington. according to the spokesperson. This year, the brewery also launched in Arizona and New York.
Gordon credits Beachwood’s survival during the pandemic to the company’s ability to be “nimble,” and the “hard work and dedication” of the company’s team. The company had its own canning line in place to transition operations during on-premise shutdowns, and when taprooms reopened, the “vast majority” of employees returned.
“There are plenty of people looking for work in the hospitality industry, if you provide them with a nice place to work,” Gordon said. “That’s what we currently try and do, and we will continue to try and do make it as nice of a place for people who work in the hospitality industry as possible.”
Godon said for the first time “in a long time” he can walk into any of Beachwood’s locations “and just high five everybody.”
“I don’t want to sit here and go ‘everything is perfect,’” he added. “There are a ton of headwinds that I’m extremely nervous about.
“As an industry, we’re all going to face these headwinds together, and there are a lot of really smart people – not only at my company, but a lot of other companies – who are going to come up with really innovative solutions,” he continued. “And because our industry is friendly and collaborative, we will be able to share those things with each other and will come through it in some way, shape or form.”