Butcher’s Brewing, founded in 2011, has been guest-brewing at Bayhawk Ales in Irvine, California since its inception. However, with warehouses and offices located in San Diego, owner Rey Knight and his team searched for a suitable spot within county lines. In January 2013, Butcher’s bought Manzanita Brewing Company’s original Santee brewery. Today we talk with Frank Green III, sales manager at Butcher’s Brewing, about the brewery’s transitional phase.
What was included in your purchase of Manzanita’s original brewery?
We just purchased the assets/equipment, which included a 3 barrel direct fire system with the capacity for about 1400 barrels per year to start. We also bought the tasting room fixtures and furniture. The tasting room will be revamped to include 15 taps, all with Butcher’s Brewing and Mucho Aloha Beers.
What needs to happen before the brewery and tasting room are both up and running?
This is going to be fairly turn key for us. Basically a little polish and getting a hold of our licenses from the ABC and TTB. We will be painting the tasting room and we will also make a few minor changes to the layout. We are hoping to open no later than the end of March.
There’s an image of a pig’s skull accompanied by the words “Golgotha Imperial Stout” on your website, with the caption “Artist Series Coming Soon” — can you tell us more about this beer and series?
The Golgatha is going to be a big beer. We are really excited about releasing the Artist series (there will be a porter, nut brown and honey ale in addition to the imperial stout), however, our “Cut” series will be in the forefront once we start brewing in Santee. You can see all of the beers in that series on our website right now.
Butcher’s Brewing is split between the Butcher’s brand and the SoCal/Hawaiian-influenced Mucho Aloha brand. Why the distinction?
We get this question a lot. When we started, our goal was to put out the Mucho Aloha beers for the surf community. We wanted these beers to be playful and approachable, which I think has happened quite nicely. Since we were able to can the HPA (Hawaiian Style Pale Ale), it gave us an opportunity to get that into even more people’s hands, including shipping the beer as far away as Japan. The Butcher’s Brewing line of beers is really what we want to focus our serious craftsmanship on. Since the public has only been privy to the Free Range IPA we put out, we are extremely excited to share the other beers under the brewery name.
What will make this brewery stand out from the others?
When this question is asked of any brewery it’s easy to say that the answer is commonly “we will be making the best beer in San Diego”. I think most breweries, and there are a lot of them here, think that way. You should think that way; why wouldn’t you? You have to believe in what you are doing and more importantly what you’re brewing. Outside of that shared narrative, we are so pleased to have a physical location. We feel now that we do, we can start providing San Diego with some of the more unique beers in town. Rey will be able to do a lot of small batch beers and try a lot of different things without having to brew a ton of one style. We won’t be doing this alone and this is where we hope to gain distinction. One of the things that Rey and I have been talking about is the opportunity to source locally from farmers and deal with people on a closer, more personal level. Thanks to having a smaller 3 barrel system, one of the things we plan to do is bring in friends and local bar owners to do one-off collaborations with locally-sourced ingredients. This gives business owners an opportunity not only to sell beer but take part in producing it as well.