The City of Encinitas has traditionally (and frustratingly) been slow to embrace members of San Diego’s craft-brewing industry. While Highway 101 boasts a wealth of bars and restaurants serving alcoholic beverages, Encinitas is one of only four municipalities in the county without a brewhouse. It should be noted that two of them—Lemon Grove and National City—have breweries in-progress that will change that.
Though consumers won’t find ales and lagers crafted within the city limits, Encinitas did recently welcome its third brewery-owned tasting room to town. That sampling venue is owned by Saint Archer Brewing and located in the northerly Leucadia community.
Coming in at 1,200-square-feet, the interior space is designed to simultaneously match the community’s coastal culture as well as Saint Archer’s action-sports thematic. The company was originally founded with investments from numerous professional surf, skate and snowboard athletes (it was later sold to MillerCoors in 2015).
Photographs of the coastline and related iconography are intermingled with sports-and-recreation shots and bric-a-brac ranging from tools and a record album to a miniature trident. Edison bulbs encased in glass spheres light a bar equipped with 30 taps serving Saint Archer standards and seasonals, as well as barrel-aged offerings from its Tusk and Grain line.
Saint Archer’s Encinitas tasting room is open daily from 12 to 9 p.m. and located at 978 North Coast Highway 101. It joins the preexisting Culture Brewing tasting room on Coast Highway, as well as The Lost Abbey‘s Confessional in Cardiff on the list of brewery-owned spots in Encinitas. Modern Times Beer will join that list when its (non-brewpub) eatery “The Far West Lounge” opens later this year.