Santa Barbara Loves Beer
Toasting Our Seaside Suds with the First-Ever Santa Barbara Brewery Guide
By Matt Kettmann | Published April 4, 2019
Like many communities across today’s United States, Santa Barbara County is awash in breweries, from the otherwise wine-soaked stretches of the Santa Ynez Valley down to the sandy shores of Carpinteria. We’re the birthplace of regional brewing behemoths like Firestone Walker and Figueroa Mountain, but also a comfortable home for much more boutique producers such as brewLAB and Draughtsmen.
By our count, there are 26 breweries, brewpubs, and home-brewing supply stores in the county, a considerable concentration for the less than half million people who live here. This thriving industry is now a firm fixture of life in the 805, employing our neighbors, contributing to countless causes, and, best of all, filling our fridges and bellies with handcrafted beverages.
It’s time to toast Santa Barbara’s brewing scene, and so we present to you our first-ever Santa Barbara Brewery Guide. Also inside this special issue are two more stories: one by a college student who embarks on home brewing for the first time, the other an interview with the man hired to teach UCSB’s first beer class. Cheers!
