Unless they make some updates by the time you read this, you won’t find much about beer on Craft Coast’s website. There’s no draft list, virtually no info about the brewery itself, and the web shop offers only merch.
Instead, we see tacos—Baja-style, plus bowls, mulitas, and nachos—outlined in a simple menu and shown in colorful photos that set the scene and stoke the appetite. At Craft Coast Beer & Tacos in Oceanside and San Marcos, California, the online face of the business is decidedly taco-forward.
Most guests who step into Craft Coast for the first time, if they don’t already know, quickly figure out that it’s a brewery—and then, if they drink it, they probably figure out that the beer is pretty great. Local enthusiasts are aware: Craft Coast has established itself among a crowded field of San Diego–area breweries, winning eight medals in the past four years at the World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival for lagers, pale ales, and IPAs.
Craft Coast’s Oceanside location opened in August 2020, another one of those hospitality businesses that managed to blink into existence during the pandemic. Cofounded by head brewer Blake Masoner with longtime friends Brian Gillen and Lars Erickson, the formula proved successful. Demand for the tacos drove demand for the beer, and vice versa. To meet that demand they opened a second location in April 2024 in San Marcos, at Rip Current’s former production facility. A third location—not a brewery, but a taproom with tacos—is set to open in Encinitas in mid-2026.
The beer-and-tacos concept is elegant, but what’s most striking is how it appears to have filled an unlikely void. Southern California doesn’t lack for Mexican food, nor does it lack for great breweries, but few have put them together with this kind of dual focus.
“It’s baffling how long it took for an entrepreneur to pair together two of San Diego’s most trademark cuisinal offerings with its world-famous craft beer,” says Brandon Hernández, founder and executive editor of the San Diego Beer News. While some San Diego beer enthusiasts may not even be aware of Craft Coast, Hernández says it’s built a devoted following in its North County communities. “Locals and tourists alike have stumbled upon the brewpub in search of taco-shop fare, discovered they also make beer, and likely been pleasantly surprised they do both very well.”
And it’s all made from scratch—handmade tortillas, fresh salsas, the chips, the marinades… all of it.
“It’s all done in-house,” says cofounder and head brewer Masoner. “So, when you put it all together, and you get to have that with a beer that is freshly made—it’s a no-brainer. … And I can’t tell you how many brewer friends [say], ‘Dude, I always wanted to do beer and tacos. I can’t believe I didn’t do it.’ Like, we all thought about it. It was right there the whole time.”
Craft Coast distributes very little beer—customers consume virtually all of it right there, on draft; takeaway means a freshly filled crowler. Led by Mexican-style pale lager Agua Baja—it accounts for nearly 40 percent of production—there are a handful of core beers, several that rotate, and a parade of one-offs. Craft Coast’s model isn’t based on massive batches—it’s a 10-barrel brewhouse in Oceanside and a 15-barrel one in San Marcos—and they’re pumping it out without sitting on idle capacity. They brewed about 1,200 barrels in 2024, Masoner says, and after a full year of having San Marcos up and running they expect to brew 2,000 barrels this year.
Granted: What works in one part of the world may not work in another. “Beer trends don’t necessarily pertain to everybody,” Masoner says. “So, when they say craft beer’s down as a whole—maybe. But from what I’ve noticed over here in San Diego and just Southern California in general, the brewpub model has really taken a good foothold in what’s working in craft beer right now. We just wanted to be that, by design. We didn’t want to chase the mass-production game. I had already been doing that, so I didn’t have interest in that. We put together a brewpub model that, if we wanted to, we could scale it, and we could grow it. Right now, that’s what has been successful—having a place that’s very simple and effective [where] people could just come and hang out and have a good time and drink fresh beer all the time.”
Masoner wouldn’t mind seeing more of the industry moving in that direction—“everybody going back to a brewpub model, adding a food element,” he says. “It’s easy to see why it works. You know, you put good beer and good food together in a good environment. … People still want to go out and hang out. Overall, craft might be down, but that could just be on the shelf. People are still super-stoked to go drink beer with their friends.”
Mutual Support in SoCal
Speaking of friends: Masoner frequently credits his fellow brewers, especially those in the San Diego area, for helping Craft Coast to get on its feet and find its stride.
Masoner, Erickson, and Gillen all grew up together in North County, and Masoner was living in Vista when he caught the bug. “Breweries started popping up all over the place, left and right,” he says. “Mother Earth and Iron Fist, Green Flash was there—a whole bunch, and they were right down the street from my house. I thought it was super-cool that you could just go to a brewery right down the street from your house.”
There was a homebrew shop attached to Mother Earth, which opened in 2010. The person running that shop was Johnny Johur, who in 2014 would go on to cofound Artifex in San Clemente. “He knew my brother-in-law, and we were getting into it together,” says Masoner. His wheels were turning: “I’m going to school for business, but I really like this craft-beer thing, it’s super-cool. How can I get into that? Maybe open a brewery someday?”
While those thoughts hovered, he got a job at the Pizza Port in Carlsbad’s Bressi Ranch neighborhood—busing tables, helping in the kitchen or behind the bar, “just doing a little bit of everything.” That’s about when he and Gillen, who also had experience in finance, started formulating their plan for Craft Coast.
When the two of them were brewing in their garage, Erickson would often come over to hang out. “We were super into it,” Masoner says. “We’d go to breweries all the time—we’d drive around to every new brewery and scope it out.” They were also driving up to L.A. and around the region to try taco spots and figure out what excited them the most.
“We wanted to do them super-legit—handmade, everything,” Masoner says. “We wanted to mimic what you’d be getting down in [Tijuana] and beyond. There are great taco spots that existed, and there are amazing breweries and craft-beer bars that existed—but nobody had put them together in that setting before.”
Pizza Port’s Bressi Ranch location also was its production brewery; as soon as a job in back became available, Masoner applied. He started by washing kegs and went on to work the canning line, cellar, and brewhouse, and he was lead cellarman before stepping into the head brewer role in 2018. While at Bressi Ranch, he saw output grow from about 8,000 to 40,000 barrels a year. “At that production, things happen fast, and you learn really fast,” he says.
The Pizza Port team knew Masoner had other plans, and their response was typical of San Diego’s tight-knit brewing community. “I told them that I was going to be starting my own brewery in Oceanside,” he says, “a brewpub that kind of followed their model of food and beer and local vibes, close to the beach, except we’d be doing tacos instead. They were stoked. They definitely embraced the idea, and they gave me a lot of good insight, some good tips, and they still support me and our business to this day.”
Masoner left Pizza Port in 2019 to focus on launching Craft Coast, but the pandemic slowed down the buildout. So, when Belching Beaver needed a hand at its Vista location, Masoner went for it. Their 10-barrel Premier Stainless brewhouse—a different animal from Bressi Ranch’s 30-barrel, five-vessel system—was exactly what they were installing at Craft Coast.
“It really was nice,” Masoner says. “They helped me out. I helped them out. I got to learn the system day in and day out, just running a little brewpub—so that when we opened our doors for Oceanside, we could just hit the ground running.”
Fresh, Intuitive, Creative
Downtown Oceanside was up-and-coming at the time, Masoner says, “still a little unknown.” But the cofounders found a new building in an area where hotels were under construction.
They were “banking on the upside,” he says. “It wasn’t like this crazy tactical plan, really. It was all a matter of timing. We just saw a really good opportunity. We have a business plan that is opportunistic—it’s tacos and beer, and for some reason nobody’s done it yet. And the second thing was, we have a really cool location that’s the exact size and feel that we want.”
The brewery always was the heart of their plan. “That’s the foundation we’re built on—beermaking in-house,” Masoner says. “And then we came up with this menu and game plan for food, and that really took off. … At first, I think we definitely pushed the beer visuals harder because we needed to captivate craft-beer drinkers and get people in the know [to know that] we’re there, that we exist. And then they’re like, ‘Holy shit—these tacos are insane!’ And we’re like, ‘All right, well, we need to now make sure that people know that the food is amazing, too.’”
When you walk in the door, they want you to know immediately what to do and what the place is about. “You see it right when you walk in, you smell it right when you walk in,” Masoner says. Tacos and beer: “They both work together, and they need to.” Neither piece of that dual focus can be an afterthought—if you’re going to do food, as a brewery, you’ve got to invest in making it great and promoting it.
“You have to, especially if you’re building it and operating it,” he says. “It’s not cheap to build a kitchen, and it’s not cheap to staff a kitchen, but it is extremely important because not everybody drinks, and not everybody who walks into Craft Coast is even drinking age. We get families, teenagers, kids, people coming up from the beach. … Obviously, we want everybody drinking beer—that’s where our heart is. But such an important thing today is, if there’s opportunity, you’ve got to take it. There are people who are just wanting the tacos, and that’s totally okay. That’s still a massive part of our business. There are people who come in and drink a couple pints a day, and they never eat. That’s totally fine, too.”
After customers asked about getting their food and beer at private events, Craft Coast added another arm to the business: catering. “We do a lot of private caterings, weddings, and corporate parties,” Masoner says. Managed by Erickson, that part of the business has grown quickly.
“It’s almost become too large in scale for what we can put out right now,” Masoner says. That’s why we’re currently trying to expand and find a bigger home for our catering operation. … And, you know, people dig it. We have a catering team. They won an award at this local food festival called Oside Flavor—they got first place for the tacos. The people who attend vote for their favorite thing. They had gotten second every year, then we won last year, so that was super-sick for them—recognition for the food just beyond people saying that it’s good.”
In planning Craft Coast, Masoner says it was important to him and his partners to put ego aside and create something that people really want, “whatever experience they’re looking for,” he says. “That’s even why catering became a thing—people were asking for our food at events. It’s like, ‘Well, I guess, yeah, we could make that happen. It’s going to be challenging. We’ll figure it out. It’s not perfect, but we’re going to figure it out. I think people respond well to when you just try your best, and you’re always trying to be creative and put your best foot forward.”
Winning with Quality
Craft Coast’s medal success at the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup began in 2021 with a steady run of four bronzes—for brown ale, dark lager, and IPAs—both West Coast and hazy.
The team raised the bar in 2024, first at the WBC with a silver for the Italian-style Chillzner and bronze for the Australian-style XPA. Chillzner then leveled up to gold at GABF, and the XPA won silver at this year’s World Beer Cup.
Central to Masoner’s philosophy on quality is the janitorial work. “The one thing that really was ingrained in my head is [that] sanitation and cleanliness are everything in the brewhouse,” he says. “Whether you’re in your kitchen at home or in a massive production facility doing 40,000 barrels, your sanitation and your cleanliness are going to be the name of the game. Pizza Port has a long history of winning medals and being a successful brewery in competition, and being the place [that] everybody knew and respected. I came from that lineage, so those ideologies are just ingrained in my brain. And I was already a fan of that before I even worked in a craft brewery professionally.”
Working at Pizza Port’s scale also helped Masoner and his partners decide how Craft Coast would look at the outset. “We made Oceanside intentionally very naked, wide open to the public,” he says. “What you see is the entire brewhouse, so we can’t have stuff laying around. We can’t have hops all over the ground. The cleanliness and the organization of the brewhouse are super-important. It always will be.”
While Masoner says the science isn’t his strong suit, he credits Pizza Port QA/QC manager Ann Spevacek with informing his approach to stability and quality. “I was able to take a lot of those principles away,” he says.
At the outset in 2020, he was Craft Coast’s only brewer, “doing everything—brewing, cellaring, cleaning, putting beers on draft, cleaning draft lines.” They’ve since hired two more former Pizza Port brewers—Will Cleary and Adam Morasse—to join the production team.
“We were brought up through the Pizza Port system together, and we’re friends at work and outside of work, so it’s easy to drink beer and talk about it when we’re just chilling,” Masoner says. Often, what they’re talking about is how to make each beer just a little bit better.
“Once the precedent got set, it’s like, ‘Hey, we won an award! Okay, cool,’” Masoner says. “And then we started winning more, and it’s like, ‘All right, now that is the standard, so we have to chase that every batch.’ And we like the challenge, and we like being surrounded by so many great breweries and great brewers. They’re coming in to get lunch, and while they’re in there, we could snag them and be like, ‘Hey, what do you think about this beer?’ So, we’re fortunate to be where we are. I’m surrounded by a lot of really, really good people and good friends.”
Coming out of Pizza Port, Masoner says, he was eager to put his own stamp on Craft Coast’s beers. He’d been writing recipes there and knew what he loved to drink—mostly West Coast IPA.
“But being a younger brewer, I was leaning more toward the lower bitterness, kind of fruitier hop characters, and not so much of that big pine and resin and bitter and just punch-you-in-the-mouth,” he says. “I really wanted an easier-drinking, but still very aromatic and approachable, West Coast IPA.”
With that in mind, he seems genuinely surprised to have become an award-winning lager brewer. Pizza Port was IPA-centric without much spare capacity, so Masoner didn’t get to brew much lager there. One exception was a Mexican-style lager collaboration with Arizona’s Wren House. Masoner helped to shape the recipe and loved how it turned out—and he knew he wanted something like it at Craft Coast.
“I was like, ‘Okay … if we’re going to be doing freshly made Mexican food, we’ve got to have Mexican lager to go along with that.’” That path eventually led to Agua Baja, Craft Coast’s popular 4.8 percent ABV flagship.
That’s been another surprise for Masoner: He didn’t expect to have a sturdy core of year-round beers—he wanted a constantly rotating selection.
“I think we have it somewhere in our early plan,” he says. “It’s like, ‘We’ll never brew the same beer twice.’ And then, after the first little wave of rush, we ran out of the Mexican lager. … And I was buying like five kegs of Mexican lager from other breweries every week—and this was during COVID, we weren’t even open all the way.”
So, they revised the plan, rotating all beers except the now-permanent Agua Baja. “You know that beer is going to be on tap—I want to make sure of that because it works with our menu,” Masoner says. “It’s our Pacifico, our Modelo, and it works. And from a craft-beer enthusiast side, from professional brewers—that’s what those people like to drink. And then for the everyday regular person who comes in knowing nothing about us, they will drink it. And we’ll give you a lime with it; we don’t care. It’s just part of the experience.”
Eventually, customers started asking for specific beers, and the team could see which ones were selling best. Today, there are five more-or-less permanent taps and several others on regular rotation. “Honestly, it’s really cool,” Masoner says. “Our customers, our drinking base, really set the precedent for what our core lineup is. … We know what we do well, and we know what our people want to drink, so let’s stick within that realm.”
Finally, a tip: For those competition beers, they’re not sending crowlers—they bottle those with a counter-pressure filler. “It never fails,” Masoner says. “It’s a long day. It’s a lot of work, but the proof is in the process. When you can purge your bottles and go straight from the tank into the bottle, it’s super-nice. You’ll get fresh beer that’ll last for a long time, every time.”
Laid-Back Coastal Vibes
The demand for Agua Baja and other lagers was a big part of why they added the San Marcos location in 2024.
“We needed more space—just as a company—and we needed more capacity,” Masoner says. “And a lot of that had to do with the need for more lager. It just wasn’t feasible to keep the amount of lager and IPA on with only five fermentors in a 10-barrel brewhouse.”
Craft Coast brewed about 1,200 barrels of beer in 2024, Masoner says. After a full year of having San Marcos up and running, they expect to brew 2,000 barrels this year, with a potential capacity that could reach 5,000 barrels as they consider additional locations beyond Encinitas.
Today, they devote the San Marcos brewery to Craft Coast’s lagers and core IPAs, while Oceanside brews the one-offs, including trials of advanced hop products and other new ingredients or ideas.
While they plan to soon add cans for takeaway—the Rip Current purchase included a canning line—there are no plans to expand into distribution.
“We’d have to invest a lot, and we’d have to take away some focus from the restaurant mentality, the brewpub mentality, to make a distribution model feasible,” Masoner says. “So, we’re like, ‘Let’s just hammer down on this beer-and-taco thing and really try and grow that.’ I feel like the experience of Craft Coast makes the most sense when you just go there and you drink it, you eat there, and you hang out with friends. That’s one thing I think that all three of us are most proud of—it’s just a really good community hub. … You’re going to get good food, and you’re going to get good beer, and you’ll probably see at least one person or more that you know, and you could just cruise in and hang out.”
Finally: About that taco-forward website that barely mentions beer—that’s not entirely by design.
“We always laugh about it because we’re doing our best, but at the end of the day, we’re three dudes [who] have a lot going on in our brains. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, we probably should do a beer menu on the website.’ So, we’ve been working with our graphic designer. We put the project off three different times. We’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll come back to it. It’s fine.’ And now we’re going to be five years old in two weeks.”