Brothers Kyle and Kevin Conover have run Pacific Beach’s TapRoom for ten years. Today and tomorrow they’re hosting a big celebration complete with Pliny the Younger tappings, a massive specialty beer list with more than 100 offerings, Swell and Mostra coffee pouring stations, plus sales of a one-off canned AleSmith Speedway Stout variation called “Boxcar.”
Can you tell us about some beers you’ve been proud to pour?
We’ve had some previous anniversary beers go on to be successful, which is cool. Belching Beaver’s Mexican chocolate peanut butter stout, made for our eighth anniversary, became Viva La Beaver; Modern Times’ TapRoom 7 Deadly Sins evolved into Monsters’ Park; and brewer Kevin Buckley, while he was at Latitude 33, brewed Coconuts on Rye for our sixth anniversary. That beer is now The Patsy at his new spot Barley Forge in Costa Mesa. Also, for a time we had a house pale ale brewed by Coronado, and before that, Alpine.
Why open in PB?
10 years ago we wanted to give people the opportunity to drink craft beer who might not normally be drinking it. Back then it was us and Liar’s Club in Mission Beach selling craft beer. We get a lot of tourists and it’s great to show them a part of San Diego’s culture and community. We are proud that we were one of the first affiliate members of the San Diego Brewers Guild.
How did Boxcar come about?
We approached AleSmith about a year ago as one of their long-standing local accounts. Their Anvil ESB was one of the first beers to get us into craft beer, and for 10 years now we’ve had an average of five AleSmith beers on tap at all times. It was fun collaborating with Peter and their brewers on the recipe.
What we ended up with was an imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels for about a year with Madagascar vanilla beans, Brazil Forastero cocoa nibs, hatch and mulato chilis, and a blend of Columbian and Burundi coffee locally roasted by Swell Coffee. We’re excited to have enough to put on tap for about two years straight, and we’ll be selling individual cans in small cardboard “boxcars.”
As a side note, we actually got into beer through homebrewing and using AleSmith beers as examples of beers we’d like to make. We used to brew with Peter Perrecone, who’s now at Belching Beaver.
What’s next?
We’re actually working on a second location, this one in University Heights at the intersection of Florida St. and El Cajon Blvd. That project is a couple years down the line, but we’re really looking forward to it.