There may be no entrepreneurs better-suited to bring National City its very first local brewing company than the team behind Embarcadero Brewing (340 West 26th Street, Suite D, National City). A familial quartet of Hispanic military veterans who all hail from the South Bay, they bet big on beer back in early 2014 when they opened a homebrew supply shop, SoCal Brew Shop. Now they’re ready to double-down by getting into production and opening a tasting room. They know their surroundings and the tastes of their neighbors, ditto the predilections of the many Tijuana-based homebrew patrons they regularly service. Now, all they need is a final influx of capital, something they are hoping to achieve via a crowd-funding campaign currently underway.
Much of the Embarcadero teams funds were expended in their mission to bring a brewing interest to National City. The municipality lacked an ordinance to address a brewery facility, so City government tasked the quartet—Gustavo and Jorge Molina, Arturo and Marco Pena—with completing a conditional use permit (CUP), a task they describe as “arduous” and consumptive from both a time and money standpoint. But it was worth it. The National City Planning Commission passed the CUP last May, giving the Embarcadero team the green light to begin the process to obtain its ABC license.
In addition to feeling a deep-seeded connection to National City, these aspiring brewery owners have paid attention to the burgeoning beer scene in the South Bay. They realize that the surrounding coastal cities of Coronado, Chula Vista and Imperial Beach are all home to brewery-owned venues and feel placing one in National City will provide “the necessary handshake between the South Bay and the north.”
Despite having hoops to jump through before reaching brewery status, the Embarcadero crew has already served beer to the public at last year’s Best Coast Beer Fest. Their offerings that day were Fiesta IPA, an old-school India pale ale served with lime and a touch of sea salt, and a blonde ale sporting slices of organic strawberries. And while some purists may raise an eyebrow at the untraditional nature of those beers (or at least how they’re garnished), the beers tapped out and, “normal” or not, could do a decent job of converting a municipal population mostly unfamiliar with craft beer.
Embarcadero’s portfolio will consist of IPAs of varying strengths, a Vienna lager, brown and red ales. Again, not your everyday San Diego line-up, but the Embarcadero team is confident in its knowledge of local palates and ability to appeal to them. The plan is to contract brew at Chula Vista’s Bay Bridge Brewing, initially packaging exclusively in kegs with a plan to start bottling soon after. But first, they need to open. Should they meet their crowdfunding goals, they hope to open sometime this summer.