Press Release:

(San Diego, CA) – Fighter Town Brewing LLC will become San Diego’s premier contract craft brewing company when it opens a new facility at 5995 Pacific Center Blvd, formerly Building X on the Qualcomm campus, later this year. The 41,900 square foot facility will be the city’s first and largest contract craft brewing entity, with the ability to keg, bottle and can, complete with a state-of-the-art 8,000 sq. ft. tasting room. The project is estimated at $7 million.

Initially launching with a 30 barrel brewing system, the fourth largest in San Diego, the facility is capable of scaling up to a 120bbl system, producing 200,000 barrels per year. Fighter Town will produce beers for growing local, national, and international craft breweries.

Fighter Town has secured the rights to produce, market and operate tasting rooms for the La Jolla Brewing Company, one of the original craft beer brands in the region. The first such tasting room will be located at the new facility.

Says Phil Aitken, Operating Partner of Fighter Town Brewery, “Successful craft brewers always reach a point where demand for their beers is greater than their production capacity. But expansion is daunting for small breweries, as they consider the costs of facilities, equipment, and staffing up. At Fighter Town, we will have the capacity to keg, bottle or can a great diversity of craft beers for our clients, including small batch experimental beers. They will also have the opportunity for immediate on-premise tap handle placement in the tasting room, laying the groundwork for their future success. If a particular beer becomes very popular, we have the ability to immediately scale up the production to meet demand. With a facility of this size, the worry of competing with the house brand for production time is non-existent.”

Fighter Town’s new facility is centrally located in the middle of San Diego’s Sorrento Valley, known as a center for high tech, biotech and scientific research, in close proximity to the University of California, San Diego and within the reach of San Diego’s famous beer tours. Currently, the craft brew industry in the region supports nearly 4k jobs with a $600M dollar footprint in San Diego County.

Building the new brewery in San Diego comes at a time when the craft beer market is enjoying a double-digit growth curve, with a nearly 20% increase in sales of craft beers between 2013 and the end of 2014. Craft beer now accounts for nearly $20 billion in U.S. sales, up 22% from the 2013 totals, according to a Brewers Association report.