Start-Up

We can agree that getting your paws on some brand new special release beers is downright delightful; we can also probably agree that the pick-up reservations have been tricky to navigate...UNTIL NOW. We're implementing an entirely new reservation system and pickup policy, starting today. It's significantly easier to use than the last system, and best of all, reservations are no longer required for pickups. While no longer required, we still highly encourage them; people with reservations will receive priority over those without them.

This new system allows us to be prepared for the day while also allowing for people making spur of the moment trips, which keeps lines moving in a safe and efficient way. Think of it like getting a FastPass at that famed, mouse-worshipping amusement park. We're about to get into it; there is a lot of info below, and all of it is important, so be sure to read carefully (we wouldn't blame you if you had to take a second pass).

Once this system is up and running, reservations can be made from 24 hours to 14 days in advance. DO NOT make reservation until after you make your purchases. If you are unable to make your time, please edit or cancel your reservations ASAP. Yep, moving forward, reservations can be changed or canceled on your own--no more having to send us an email. Please, instead of hoarding multiple time slots, we ask that you simply make any necessary changes your existing reservation; it's the excellent thing to do.

When you make a reservation, simply choose a date and time, then indicate whether you're picking up all of your outstanding orders, or just specific ones. PLEASE NOTE THAT RESERVATIONS ARE HANDLED BY TASTING ROOM MANAGEMENT. For the quickest and most efficient service, message the location-specific email addresses listed on the booking site.

WHERE TO FIND RESERVATIONS:

• SimplyBook Website

• The Modern Times Online Store

As always, be sure to check all sale confirmation emails and make sure you are making a reservation that is within the deadlines listed. When picking up, it's a good idea to double check your orders before you leave. While it's wonderful that you trust us and our staff, mistakes can happen and we would love to fix them before you leave.

We think you'll find the new system far more intuitive and much easier to navigate and adjust. Just remember--one more time for the people in the balcony: DO NOT make reservation until after you make your purchases.
 

In addition to being in the midst of one of the craziest, most difficult eras to navigate in recent memory, a lot has been going down for MT. As of this very moment, we are up to EIGHT locations on the West Coast, including one MANY years in the making (*cough* Anaheim), with distribution in TEN states. It’s a glorious, magical beverage empire, and it’s a lot to keep track of as a guest. Ergo, We’re here to break it down for you, location-by-location, south to north, with all the important stats, fun facts, & need-to-knows.

IMPORTANT NOTE: As previously mentioned, we are experiencing a global pandemic, which means social distancing is enforced at every location. While indoor/al fresco mandates may vary county-to-county & state-to-state, we are dedicated to the health & safety of our employees & patrons across the board. Please check out & abide the rules & guidelines if you’re planning to swing by, and be excellent to each other.

LOMALAND FERMENTORIUM

We’ll kick off this tour with our San Diego mothership. Located in Point Loma and known for its Post-It mural, our flagship brick-and-mortar boasts 32 taps, and is home to our coffee roastery, a full Mini Mart, and exquisite patio for al fresco revelry. Hours of operation are Wednesday through Sunday 12PM-8PM for to-go or on-premise* indoor & outdoor beveragery (we have food vendors conveniently situated on the patio). 

*State guidelines mandate that we cannot serve beer without food at this location. Ergo, if a food vendor cancels on us (which rarely happens, but happens), we have to switch to to-go-only for the day. Please feel free to check our social media or call us before visiting if you want to be extra sure.

THE FLAVORDOME

Our second San Diego location is a perfect little MT haven in the heart of North Park. We have 20 taps pouring all manners of delicious liquid beveragery at any given time. In addition to the aforementioned array of drinkable miracles, you may also procure tasty coffee & swanky merch at the Dome Wednesday,Thursday, Sunday 12PM-8PM and Friday & Saturday 12PM-10PM for socially distanced on-premise beveragery & to-go offerings.

Another bonus: there’s an abundance of patio space where you can get tasty noms brought over from our noodle-slinging neighbors for a full gastronomical experience. 

THE FAR WEST LOUNGE

Our North County outpost of culinary and libational magic features a full menu of staggeringly delicious plant-based cuisine and over 30 taps of mind-bendingly yummy beer. It’s an elegant den of leisure and merriment that makes downtown Encinitas radder than it already is--which is no small feat. This vortex of excellent vibes also has a full mini-mart where you can buy coffee, beer to-go, & a host of sexy MT gear. You can swing by any day of the week 12PM-8PM to have a beer and some bites at our place, or grab noms & bevs to-go.

LEISURETOWN

Part brewery, part restaurant, part swim club, part botanical wonderland, our Anaheim hotspot catapults each guest through the stratosphere of luxury and into a dimension of epic & abiding chillness. Prepare to set sail on a sprawling, 33,000-square-foot party-cruiser (equipped with over 70 taps) that includes a full-scale production brewery surrounded by a breathtaking beer garden, a swanky pool area, multi-story outdoor seating, a beautifully renovated historic 3-story craftsman home, & a dizzying array of palate-enchanting delights (including wine, slushies, coffee, & plant-based noms). Seriously, we went HAM on this place, & would love nothing more than to have you over Monday-Friday 11AM-10PM and Saturday & Sunday 10AM-10PM to have a beer in the garden, or to snag stuff to-go.

THE DANKNESS DOJO

Our downtown Los Angeles pilot brewery hosts over 30 taps of our delicious beer, plus merch, coffee, and beer to-go. While we fully unleashed the power of our design team on this incredible historic space, our lack of outdoor seating has limited us to only facilitating to-go orders Wednesday-Sunday 11AM-7PM. This being the case, many of our L.A.-based employee-owners have been furloughed. It’s an all-around tough situation, but if you can afford to be generous, we’re accepting tips on their behalf on to-go orders, as well as online here (100% is divided evenly amongst our furloughed staff).

THE ACADEMY OF RECREATIONAL SCIENCES

The apex of luxurious social experiences, our Santa Barbara pleasure-dome is a wall-to-wall bonanza of face-melting party magic, complete with State Street's largest outdoor patio (which is pretty great, given the current circumstances). Equipped with over 30 taps, a stunning array of boundary-pushing plant-based cuisine, full mini mart, & a visual feast of mind-bending installation art, you can drop by 12PM-8PM on Mondays & Wednesdays (CLOSED TUESDAY), 12PM-10PM on Thursdays & Fridays, 11AM-10PM on Saturdays, & 11AM-8PM on Sundays for socially distanced on-premise consumption & to-go offerings.

THE HOUSE OF PERPETUAL REFRESHMENT

Our Bay Area nexus of flavorcraft is an eye-popping psychedelic playground of adult beverages, caffeinated marvels, mind-bending artwork, and some of the sexiest merchandise ever beheld by mortal eyes. Prepare your taste-receptors for 34 taps of unimaginably delicious beers, including seasonals, year-rounds, one-offs, and rare special release magic that’s going to knock your socks off. If you’re in Oakland, feel free to stop in Wednesday & Thursday 3PM-7:30PM, Friday 3PM-8:30PM, Saturday 1PM-8:30PM, and Sunday 1PM-7:30PM for socially distanced on-premise beveragery.

BELMONT FERMENTORIUM

Our bastion of flavor-sorcery in the Pacific Northwest is located in one of Portland's raddest neighborhoods. This culinary wonderland brews & serves a lineup (70+ taps) of fan favorites, rarities, and experimental offerings, and offers a menu of mind-bendingly tasty vegan cuisine (also available to-go) a well as tons of beer & merch. Whether you’re looking to have a rooftop refreshment, or you’re down to grab a bite, you can come by 12PM-8PM (CLOSED TUESDAYS) for on-site consumption & to-go stuff.

DISTRO

If you haven't stayed completely abreast of where you can find our beverages, fret not. We've totally updated our map of distributors on our website, so no matter where you reside within the MT realm, you can create an acquisition gameplan. ALSO, our coffee realm is expanding! Cans of our impossibly delicious cold brew are totally available at Sprouts (nationally), Whole Foods (SoCal & Arizona), Raley's/Nob Hill/Bel Air (California & Nevada), Erewhon, Jimbo's, Lazy Acres, Lassens, Mother's Market, & Co-Opportunity Market. Yep, pretty glorious. As always, if you ever need specifics, feel free to shoot an email to coffee@moderntimesbeer.com or info@moderntimesbeer.com, depending on what you're after.
 

Here’s some seriously huge, immensely consequential news: we’ve signed a distribution agreement with Stone Distributing. Together, we’re launching Modern Times Beer throughout San Diego in the coming weeks.

Here’s the plan: our beer will be available to retailers through Stone starting June 24th. The week of July 8th will be our official launch week, for which we’re planning a slew of spectacular, invigorating events featuring our crew of marvelously entertaining brewers.

So all of you who have been emailing me about carrying our beer at your bar/restaurant/liquor store? Talk to your Stone sales rep ASAP. If you don’t know who your rep is, you can find them here.

I couldn’t be more thrilled about this partnership. As many of you are aware, I spent two years working at Stone; it’s where I learned the business and I have a deep affinity for Stone’s values.

During those two years, I came to understand just what a remarkable operation Stone Distributing is. Distributors, like breweries, come in all shapes and sizes and exist on a broad spectrum of quality. Stone is at the far, far, far end of “high quality” on that spectrum.

Why? Three main things: 1) Extreme persnicketiness about beer quality & freshness, 2) Deep commitment to building the local craft beer market, and 3) Unimpeachable standards for business ethics.

Let’s flesh that out: Stone stores and ships all of the beer they distribute under refrigeration. They pay close attention to date coding. They work like crazy to put craft beer on tap at every possible outlet in their territory. They have extremely knowledgeable sales reps that are generally hardcore beer geeks (I often see the remnants of their absurd bottle shares in my Facebook feed). They invest a huge amount of time and effort in educating themselves, their accounts, and beer drinkers, even when there’s no immediate pay-off. And most importantly, they operate completely above-board with an obsessive attention to the law. That means they sell craft beer because it’s better, not because it comes with illegal inducements or shady incentives.

All of that has made Stone Distributing an enormous success and a perfect fit for Modern Times. This is the start of something deeply, flagrantly beautiful.

Our distribution agreement covers all of Southern California, but we’re going to stick to San Diego County for the time being. Once we get a feel for how much demand there is here, we’ll start talking about expanding distribution up the coast and inland.

Right from the get-go, we’ll be launching with what we plan to make our year round beers: Lomaland (saison), Black House (oatmeal coffee stout), Blazing World (amberish IPA), and Fortunate Islands (hoppy wheat). Limited quantities of our first special release, Neverwhere (100% Brett IPA), will also be available. For now, Modern Times will be draft-only, but you can expect to see our supremely luxurious 16oz. cans on shelves in early August.

Well, it’s been over 17 months since I left my job at Stone to begin work on Modern Times, and we (this has officially gone from an “I” to a “we” project) are finally making beer. Fuck yeah.

17 months sounds (and feels) like an enormous amount of time, but the construction phase of this project has actually been relatively short: just ~6 months from the time I took possession of the building until now. By almost any measure, that’s pretty speedy for turning a giant vacant warehouse into a functioning 30bbl brewery.

And functioning it is! We’ve brewed three batches already, which is pretty goddamn remarkable. Our first brew day was shockingly smooth: Lomaland, our saison, has a fairly light grain bill and no exotic ingredients, which kept hiccups to a minimum. The equipment all more or less worked as planned, which was an immense relief.

The yeast is another matter. Our blend of 95% Dupont/5% Westmalle has been exceedingly sluggish thus far, perhaps owing to our excessively low knock-out temp (we were still learning how to run the pumps/heat exchanger) and the fact that it’s a first pitch, which are often considerably slower than re-pitches. We’re hopeful that future batches will move much faster, but it’s possible that something more fundamental—like tank geometry—is at play.

Despite the slowness of the yeast, the beer is shaping up to be pretty magical. Right now it’s throwing off loads of hay, grass, and earthy complexity in the aroma, with a hint of floral esteriness. The dream of churning out an uncompromisingly complex yet reasonably sessionable saison remains alive for now.

Blazing World, our second batch, was far more difficult to brew, owing to its additional ~600lbs of malt, which led to a sluggish run-off, and the use of our hopback, which was a touch dicey to operate and also interminably slow. The jury is very much still out on whether or not it offers any qualitative advantages to a whirlpool addition, but right now we’re all a bit skeptical, mostly because it was such a pain in the ass.

We ironed out a few issues before our third brew day, but Black House was still a challenge. The ~300lbs of oats (17% of the mash bill) once again led to a sluggish run-off, but also a fairly unpleasant grain-out for Alex and Derek. Spent grain came rushing through the door at unpredictable intervals, which led to a great deal of shoveling spent grain off the floor, which is not anyone’s favorite task.

Since getting into the tank though, Black House has been racing along, thanks to a 5th generation Cal Ale pitch generously donated by the wonderful folks at Ballast Point. Our little corner of Point Loma is skipping distance from Home Brew Mart, as well as Coronado’s Knoxville brewery, and the camaraderie & support we’ve been enjoying from both has been marvelous.

Despite the above mentioned minor annoyances, brewing so far has been unexpectedly straight-forward. We've hit our mash temps and gravities, and the hardware only requires some exceedingly minor tweaks. On the whole, we're all quite pleased with how it has gone. 

On the docket for this coming week is Mike’s 100% Brett IPA, which I’m absurdly excited about, and Fortunate Islands, our hoppy wheat beer, the brewing of which will be made possible by the sale of 88lbs of Amarillo to us by my former co-workers at Stone. Needless to say, we’re incredibly thankful for the solidarity from other San Diego brewers, and we look forward to returning the favor/paying it forward in the happy years to come.

What’s that? You want me to hazard another guess at when we’ll be open? That’s largely dependent on whether or not we pass our final inspections early next week. If we do, it should be no more than a few weeks.

Whoa has a lot happened since my last update. As shameful as it is to have fallen behind on updating you, it’s made less shameful by the fact that we’ve made a ton of progress on getting this motherfucker open.

Since there’s so much to cover, I’m just going to run through it:

a) A week ago tonight was one of the coolest, most amazing nights of my life. While I didn’t lose my virginity, I did witness and participate in an insanely fun, rowdy, and electric gathering on the back patio of The Toronado, as 50-some folks gathered to celebrate the close of our Kickstarter campaign. I’ll never forget the moment we broke $65,000 and the entire place went absolutely bananas. I’ll do a full write-up on the entire Kickstarter experience once we’ve fulfilled the rewards and held the local backers party.

b) So much progress on the construction side. Our entire glycol system is working—which is like the frosty circulatory system of the brewery—which means working cold boxes and tanks that chill down. Tomorrow we’re expecting to fire up the boiler and start running our water filters, which gets us most of the way there on the utilities side.

c) We got a ton of hops in. It’s actually not the most desirable situation, but since I started this whole crazy project too late to snag any 2012 hop contracts, I’ve had to do all of my buying on spot (until our 2013 contracts become available in December-ish). Sourcing these hops took a shitload of work, but here are the results:

d) Today, this rad roll-up glass garage-style door went it. It’ll bring precious air and light into the Lomaland Fermentorium tasting room; we’re going to build a counter in front of it so you can sit there and suck in the sea breeze. 

e) We’ve brewed and tasted many pilot batches. I deeply regret not having the time to write-up all the recipes and results right now, but suffice it to say, we’ve made significant progress. Here’s the core of what we’ve decided:

i. Our first Lomaland batch will be fermented with a 95%/5% blend of Dupont and Westmalle yeast. Dupont is a pain to work with, but it produced the best version of this beer by far. The Westmalle kicker is in there to help the beer finish out in a reasonable amount of time without interfering with the Dupont character. So yeah, we’ll be brewing (and canning, in tallboys) a 5.5% saison with Dupont yeast. That’s pretty spectacularly exciting if you’re a saison fan.
ii. A small addition of Coffee Kiln malt similarly took Black House to 11. It now “pops” whereas before it was just “tasty.” Now it’s “delicious.” Our most recent pilot batch was too thin but otherwise spot on, so we’ll be upping the mash temp but changing nothing else.
iii. Testing on the red rye Mike has been working on was less conclusive, or rather, resulted in less progress, but we’re going for it anyway. It’s going to be a piney, sappy beast heavy on Simcoe & Chinook (we’re considering supplementing with Summit and/or Columbus).
iv. As of right now, we’re planning for our initial round of tank fills to look like this: Lomaland, Blazing World, Black House, unnamed red rye, unnamed 100% Brett Drie IPA. Fortunate Islands will probably wait until summer because we don’t have enough Citra & Amarillo right now.

f) When will we be open? I’m not sure. Perhaps early June if we’re lucky? Perhaps later if we’re not?

Who: Modern Times Beer

What: A Kickstarter campaign

When: RIGHT NOW, ending April 30th

Where: http://kck.st/ZqKU2l

Why: Six months of determined fundraising got me enough capital to get Modern Times off the ground. But by working together on this crowdfunding campaign, we can make Modern Times so much more than just the bare minimum. We can make it a truly spectacular space, a producer of devastatingly tasty sours, and a metronomically consistent producer of high quality beer.

We’re seeking $40,000 in pledges to build a wildly creative tasting room, purchase a truckload of used wine & spirit barrels, and acquire precision lab equipment. We’re offering some shockingly rad rewards to help make this campaign a success, including a slew of one-of-a-kind experiences that go well beyond the standard Kickstarter rewards.

So (pretty extra super please) check out the Kickstarter campaign, pledge what you can, and share this link like the plague: http://kck.st/ZqKU2l