Though a last bastion of quirk versus a hotbed of commerce, Ocean Beach now rivals most San Diego communities when it comes to craft-beer. The out-there community is now home to two brewing facilities, satellite tasting rooms owned by five local brewing companies, and a restaurant sporting a tasting room supplied by an out-of-town brewery (Santa Clara’s Golden State Brewery). That’s a lot of beer, especially for such a small neighborhood. Four of those satellite operations are situated on one block (and it’ll be five once Little Miss Brewing goes live later this year). But of them all, the space best-suited for its OB environs is the one that officially opens to the public this Friday, January 27—Kilowatt Beer Company (1875 Cable Street, Ocean Beach).
In bringing the second-coming of his Kearny Mesa-based interest to Ocean Beach, owners Steve Kozyk and Rachel Fischer aimed to celebrate the community’s artistic side in tandem with their own. Kozyk is a lighting aficionado and black-light artist whose mastery of illumination transformed his original tasting room into as much a feast for the visual senses as a place to grab a cold one. That was his MO when pondering a second-location, and taking over a 1,800-square-foot motorcycle-repair shop a half-block off Newport Avenue provided him a large—and rather perfect—canvass with which to work.
Upon approach from any direction, patrons will spy multiple artistic touches, the most prominent of which is a host of murals from multiple artists painted on the exterior walls. Out front, Kilowatt’s light-bulb logo casts a rainbow array of beams onto a motorcycle rider, an iconic holdover that has graced the wall bordering the business’ front patio for years. Kozyk and Fischer kept it as a nod to neighbors who begged them to not to paint over it. Meandering down the alley on the building’s south-side, one is treated to murals of a titanic wave, flora sprouting ingredients used in the brewing of Kilowatt’s beers (e.g., hops and cacao pods), and UFOs scouring the earth for hops to fuel the powers of mythical goddess “Kohatu the Hop Abductor”. (Check with Kozyk for the full-story on that mysterious character.)
Like a number of the artistic touches at “Kilowatt West”, the ingredient mural is a nod to famed black-light artist, Clint Cary, AKA: The Space Man of Ocean Beach. In addition to being a progenitor in his area of artistic specialization, Cary, an OB resident, was famous for his claiming to have been abducted by aliens in the mid-‘40s. Kozyk has scored some of Cary’s original pieces on lease from his estate, and plans to have them locked up but in full view in the main sampling space in the near-future. That area consists of an L-shaped bar with 24 taps arranged in a wavy pattern against a steel sheet engineered to change colors on command. Bright green, orange and teal are painted on walls which will soon showcase a regularly changing assortment of art. Kozyk initiated such an art program at his original brewery, but found it challenging. Given the number of local artists who call OB home, he is confident it will be easier to curate sufficient creative stock there. That goes for contracting local graffiti-artists to have their creative way with Kilowatt West’s bathrooms, and securing pieces to grace a black-light lounge in the back-portion of the venue. That area will include a “life-size” Lite-Brite setup that’s six-feet-by-five-feet and uses plastic water-bottles filled with colored H2O as pegs and a design painted in clear black-light paint running the length of the back hallway.
The front of the building will soon sport a large bulb-lit carnival-meets-old-Vegas metal Kilowatt sign Kozyk has outfitted with LED technology. Even without that component, the front-patio is well-branded thanks to fencing plasma-cut to show-off elaborate Kilowatt-artwork hand-drawn by Kozyk’s mother, an artist in her own right. Taped lighting will allow that sign to shine brightly in an array of hues. That same color-control will extend to the Kilowatt sign and the lighting on the patio itself.
And for those who’ve frequented Kilowatt’s original tasting-room and missed the presence of a VW bug coated in Kilowatt-themed paintings (another product of Mother Kozyk’s creativity), it figures to find a home in OB. Could there be a more fitting mascot of sorts? Kozyk says it’s another example of something he and Fischer felt was of the utmost importance in coming to OB—“bringing something vastly unique to a vastly unique community.”
Additional reporting by Katie Conner