Comstock's magazine 1117 - November 2017 | Page 38

n TASTE
BREWED TO THE CORE
Breweries and beer bars are migrating to the grid after years on the outskirts
BY Daniel Barnes PHOTOS: Ryan Angel Meza
W
Midtown has upped its
beer game with the re-
cent opening of Capital
Hop Shop.
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comstocksmag.com | November 201 7
hen Glynn Phillips purchased Ru-
bicon Brewing Company in 2005, it
was one of only five breweries oper-
ating in the Sacramento area. Fast forward
12 tumultuous years, and the total number
of area breweries is approaching 60, with
over a dozen new ones set to open later this
year and in early 2018.
Still, even as Sacramento craft beer
exploded, the scene on the central city’s
grid was slower to evolve. New breweries
began embracing the tasting room model
over the Rubicon-style brewpub model,
eschewing foot traffic concerns by open-
ing in low-overhead industrial areas and
nondescript business parks. Food trucks
replaced kitchens, and doors that swing
open were replaced by doors that roll up.
As for beer bars, a few key players raised
the craft beer game on the grid — Midtown
Biergarten, for example, which opened on
K Street in 2014 — but most top perform-
ers chose to operate outside of downtown
and Midtown. A long-running law against
selling single bottles on the grid, originally
intended to discourage drinking in public,
ultimately discouraged businesses from
duplicating the beer bar/bottle shop hy-
brid popularized by Pangaea, Final Gravity
and others.
But that tide is starting to turn, as lo-
cal beer all-stars and upstarts alike are
migrating back to the grid, while even
out-of-town breweries such as Field-
work and Anheuser InBev-owned Golden
Road search for a slice of Sacramento’s
muscular market share. The recent “cash
flow”-related closure of Rubicon inspired
apocalyptic talk about brewery oversat-
uration and a bursting “craft beer bub-