Firestone Walker and Duvel Moortgat Acquire Stone Brewing Brand and Venues

Firestone Walker Brewing Company and Duvel Moortgat USA have agreed to buy the Stone Brewing brand and select hospitality locations from Sapporo USA, a move that could redraw where Stone beer is made, sold, and experienced in person. For drinkers who still read the Stone name as shorthand for West Coast IPA attitude, the biggest change is not just ownership. It is geography: production is expected to move gradually to Firestone Walker’s brewery in Paso Robles and Duvel USA’s Boulevard brewery in Kansas City, Missouri.

That matters because Stone was built as a Southern California beer company from the start. Greg Koch and Steve Wagner founded it in 1996 in San Marcos, and Stone’s own history frames the company as a North County, San Diego original. The brand later became one of craft beer’s most recognizable hop-forward labels, which is why this sale lands like a reset button for a company that once defined “independent” in the most aggressive way possible. It is also Stone’s second ownership change in about four years, after Sapporo bought the company and now steps back out of the picture.

The hospitality piece may be even more visible than the brewery shift. Stone’s Escondido site sits at 1999 Citracado Parkway, and recent coverage places its venue footprint across San Diego, Oceanside, Pasadena, and Liberty Station, with other local reporting also pointing to Little Italy. Those are not just taprooms on a map. They are restaurants, tourist stops, and daily-work spaces for the people who pour, cook, host, and manage under the Stone banner. San Diego Beer News reported that the buyers expected to offer positions to a significant number of Stone employees in hospitality, sales, and marketing, while production jobs would be reassessed as brewing moves.

The deal also reflects the shape of the companies now taking over Stone. Duvel Moortgat describes itself as a fourth-generation family company founded in 1871, with 13 breweries and more than 20 brands, and it became a shareholder in Firestone Walker in 2015. That long relationship helps explain why this does not read like a fire sale so much as a strategic consolidation inside an already connected beer family. Nick Firestone tried to signal continuity in the clearest possible terms: “The Stone heart keeps beating.” For Stone fans, the hard question is whether that heart can keep beating from the same places, with the same feel, once the beer, the bars, and the jobs are spread across a much wider map.