San Diego sees most upcoming brewery venues in three years

San Diego’s brewery pipeline finally looked alive again. After years of slow openings and caution from operators, the county had more work-in-progress breweries, brewpubs and tasting rooms than at any point in the past three years, a turnaround signal in a market that has spent too long under pressure from shifting drinker habits and higher costs.

That does not mean the local beer business suddenly got easy. The broader industry was still contracting in 2025, when the Brewers Association said craft volume sales fell 4% and retail dollar sales slipped 3.6% to $27.8 billion. Even so, craft’s share of the U.S. beer market by volume edged up to 13.3%, which is exactly the kind of mixed signal that makes San Diego’s new pipeline worth watching closely. This is not a boom-era scramble. It looks more like operators making sharper, more deliberate bets.

One of the clearest examples is Koakai Brewing in Oceanside, a soft-open brewpub next door to Kyoto Japanese Market. After about two years of work, Mike Aubuchon and Tomomi “AJ” Aubuchon were ready to open a place that is far more curated than a standard neighborhood taproom. Mike Aubuchon, an award-winning brewer and Pizza Port alum, built a beer list meant to play with the adjacent market and food program, mixing West Coast IPAs with low-alcohol, international-style lagers alongside Japanese- and Hawaiian-inspired barbecue, sushi and izakaya-style dishes. That kind of pairing is a sign of confidence, not just in beer, but in the whole hospitality package around it.

In San Marcos, Monday Morning Lab pushed the market in a different direction entirely. The space was billed as the county’s first non-alcoholic brewery tasting room, with production aimed not just at its own bottle shops in Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach, but also at other Southern California breweries that need help making alcohol-free beer. Owner Zane Curtis had already turned Monday Morning into a two-location non-alcoholic bottle shop business after cutting alcohol out of his own life three years earlier. That is a sharp read on where part of the market is moving, and it is smart enough to serve both consumers and other brewers.

Encinitas added another signal. Encinitas Brewing Co. won unanimous approval from the city’s Planning Commission, and the project ties together Brian McBride with Ryan Van Biene, the co-founder and vice president of development and facilities for Pinthouse Brewing in Austin. It follows Fox Point Brewing, which was described as the first brewing company to operate within Encinitas city limits in nearly 30 years, after the short-lived early-1990s Red Kettle. When a city goes from almost nothing to multiple brewery plays in quick succession, that is not nostalgia. It is demand finding a new shape.