The greater San Diego area is home to some 150 breweries, and quite a few of them are large national, or at least regional, players. The city is synonymous with hops-forward ales and established brands that have helped grow an industry. It’s littered with brewing medals, brewers who need only go by their first name, and a can-do spirit that often leads the state when it comes to trends and influence. So, if you’re going to open a brewery there these days, you need to come ready to blaze further down a path that has already been set, or you need to find a patch of land that hasn’t been trodden and make it your own.
And so it is for Pure Project, which opened in 2016 and, in the words of Brewer and Partner Winslow Sawyer, “is focused on staying small.”
“Less is more sometimes. Being bigger means more beer, more production, and more employees, and so the question we ask is, ‘How much money do you need?’ because it is a business, and we want the brewery to be sustainable, to feed our children, to maybe buy a house. It has to do with life goals. If you want a helicopter or a jet, maybe you want to be bigger. For us, we want to be simple and small, to live humbly, and to treat our employees well (and being small, it’s easier to do that). We’re all in agreement on this.”