We’re moving into a huge, state-of-the-art, expensive facility. You know what we ought to do? Build a really nice-looking tasting room that we can use for a few months, then completely tear down when the real one’s ready.
I doubt this was exactly how the conceptual conversation for AleSmith Brewing Company’s (9990 Empire Street/AleSmith Court, Miramar) new Observation Room went, but this is the plan they’re going with. In the midst of a move from a 20,000-square-foot collection of small business suites to a single building offering more than 100,000-square-feet, AleSmith has moved most of its operation to the newer location. All of the beer is being brewed there and all of the employees, save for tasting room personnel at the original location, have been transferred over while their former home base is converted for use by Denmark’s Mikkeller as part of an upcoming partnership with AleSmith.
So great was the desire of the AleSmith crew to let fans in on the goings-on at their new facility, that they spent more than a month constructing a tasting room located just beyond the building’s front door. Roughly 1,000-square-feet, the space is simple, but clean and contemporarily stylish. The color palate stays true to AleSmith’s gunmetal and burnt orange motif, while a long steel bar-top supported by used oak barrels drives home the craftsmanship thematic. (If that doesn’t do it for you, there’s an anvil at the end of the bar.) Used cooperage has also been converted to belly bars.
The entire space is reminiscent of the original tasting room (following its facelift a few years ago), especially with all of AleSmith’s core beers on tap. Those brews (plus the company’s recently released Barrel-Aged Wee Heavy Scotch Ale) are being dispensed from kegerators that will likely find a home on the mezzanine level of the eventual tasting room once the Observation Room is demolished. That’s right…demolished. As nice as it is, this space is only temporary, a point driven home by artist’s renderings of the future tasting room and “Tony Gwynn Pavilion” as well as a painting of AleSmith’s logo accompanied by the words “future home of” directly above the bar.
Affording customers a more in-depth view of the progress being made at the site is a large, wall-mounted flat-screen television running a loop of video taken of new equipment in action juxtaposed by photos from the company’s first two decades in business. Eventually, they hope to have a live feed of the construction piped in, but even in its current state, the Observation Room comes across as a heartfelt gift to the people who have gotten AleSmith to this point in its evolution.