History
In 1988, Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner asked Cramer’s cousin, the late Karl Strauss, to help them develop a brewpub. Strauss was a former vice president of production at Pabst Brewing Company, reaching the title of Master Brewer. Strauss agreed, contributing his library of hundreds of beer recipes, helping to design brewing operations, and serving as the company's spokesman on radio advertisements and in public appearances until his death in 2006.
The company’s first brewery restaurant, Karl Strauss Brewery Restaurant, located on Columbia Street in Downtown San Diego, opened in 1989. It was the first new brewery of any type to open in San Diego in more than fifty years, and the first-ever brew pub in San Diego. At the time the craft brewing industry was in its infancy and the American standard for beer was light, mild and mass-produced, but Cramer felt that the country was ready for beers with more personality. He believed that “If we could get this style of beer into people’s mouths, we could create converts.”
The company's first distributing brewery began producing beer in late 1991. In 1996 the company’s distributing brewery operations were moved into a 22,000-square-foot (2,000 m2) home office and brewing building in Pacific Beach. In 1999, the company installed new brewery equipment at its microbrewery, which more than tripled the brewing capacity. In 2009 they introduced a bottling line so that they could produce bottled beer as well as kegs in their local facility. Prior to that, all the bottling had been done by Stevens Point Brewery. The company expects to produce 50,000 barrels of beer in 2012.
Karl Strauss Brewery Gardens restaurant in Sorrento Mesa opened in 1991. In 1996, the company opened Karl Strauss Brewery Restaurant in La Jolla. In 1999, the company opened a brewery restaurant in Carlsbad, California, and under a licensing agreement with Host Marriott opened a Karl Strauss Handcrafted Beers Bar at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and San Diego International Airport (SAN). In August 2000, the company opened a Karl Strauss Brewery Restaurant at Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles. In 2001 the newly-opened Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim included a Karl Strauss "beer truck" in the Pacific Wharf area, selling six of the company's brews. A Karl Strauss Brewery Restaurant was established in 2002 in Costa Mesa, California. The most recent addition to the company is in 4S Ranch, California, in San Diego's North County, which opened in August 2012.
In 2009 the company made news by partnering with the Greenhouse alternative energy company in a program to convert its waste to ethanol for use as a fuel.
Annual events held at the microbrewery include the Beach to Brewery Beer & Music Fest in May and the Karlfest in October.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“A people without history
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