How Stone Brewing put San Diego on the craft beer map

In 1996, Greg Koch and Steve Wagner — two former music industry employees who bonded over a shared obsession with brewing — opened Stone Brewing in a small warehouse in San Marcos, north of San Diego. Their first beer, Stone Pale Ale, sold in July of that year. By December, the fledgling brewery had produced 400 barrels.

The beer that changed Stone's trajectory was arguably Arrogant Bastard Ale — an intentionally aggressive, hop-forward beer that became, in the words of beer trade press, a watershed release that helped define San Diego's identity as a craft beer capital. Stone's West Coast-style IPAs, high in hop content and alcohol by volume, helped popularize a style that's now closely associated with California brewing.

Stone relocated to a larger, custom-built facility in Escondido in 2005 and has expanded steadily since — adding a packaging hall, an East Coast brewery in Richmond, Virginia, and multiple restaurant and taproom locations across Southern California, including a widely noted restoration of historic buildings at the former Naval Training Center in Point Loma. By 2018, annual production had grown to roughly 400,000 barrels.

Nearly thirty years after that first keg sale, Stone remains one of the most recognized names to come out of San Diego County's brewing scene — now home to more than 130 breweries — and is frequently credited as one of the companies that helped build that scene in the first place.