Yesterday, Ballast Point Brewing president Marty Birkel informed employees at the company’s Scripps Ranch brewery and tasting room that beer-production would soon cease. The brewing company—San Diego County’s largest—is moving forward with plans to relocate much of its production and bottling equipment to its pair of Miramar locations, its 107,000-square-foot headquarters and primary production brewery in on Carroll Way and cross-street production and warehouse facility on Trade Street.
An internal communique clearly stated that no employees will be terminated in conjunction with this development. Staff at Scripps Ranch will be transferred along with many of the apparatuses they’ve worked with for the past decade-plus. As Birkel puts it, “It’s an opportunity to take the best of what’s worked at Scripps and bring it to Miramar to continue to improve the quality of our beers.” Birkel says the company will relocate equipment from Scripps Ranch’s quality-assurance lab and use those items as the base for a second, larger lab at its HQ. Also coming over is Scripps’ kegging and bottling lines and metal shop. The latter will be installed at Trade Street, in the third of the building not being used for sour or barrel-aged beer production.
Ballast Point is looking to establish a brewing “campus” in Miramar. Birkel says he and his colleagues still need to figure out exactly what a brewing campus is and will entail and says Ballast Point will remain open to acquiring additional structures as future growth opportunities present themselves. When constructing the company’s East Coast brewery in Daleville, Virginia, the company was sure to select a site with plenty of options for appurtenant growth.
As far as the future of the Scripps Ranch facility, Birkel feels that, at around 24,000 square feet, it provides ample space as well as a proven, highly efficient brewhouse that has served Ballast Point well. The vast majority of the indoor fermentation tanks will remain in place, while most of the outdoor tanks will be relocated to Miramar, but the bones for brewing success will remain. This includes the patio-equipped tasting room, which will remain in operation under the Ballast Point flag until a new tenant takes over the space.
When asked about the ideal tenant, Birkel specifically noted the wealth of quality local breweries he felt were capable of making a go on a larger scale at Scripps Ranch. Ballast Point currently has a very short list of local breweries that could be good fits and is consulting with BP vice president and San Diego industry veteran Colby Chandler to identify other well-suited interests. The company also notes that, with so many ex-Ballast Point brewers making names for themselves and their new breweries, there are a number of Scripps Ranch facility alums who know its brewhouse backward and forward.
Birkel predicts all machinery and employees will be transferred from Scripps Ranch by summer. With much of Ballast Point’s specialty beers brewed in Scripps Ranch, he says it’s essential to have those capabilities operative at headquarters by then.
The Scripps Ranch facility opened in 2006. It was the second location for a then-small brewery, coming on as an offshoot from the business’ original location as an enclave to Linda Vista’s Home Brew Mart. Over the years, a tasting room was installed, then expanded, then expanded again to include a patio. Behind the scenes, brewing and cellar capacity increased, a distilling operation was added (that led to what is now Miramar’s Cutwater Spirits) along with a speakeasy. Though not as visible as Ballast Point’s other locations, it was arguably the most influential and important of them all from a historic perspective.