Port Brewing is one of the founding stories of San Diego craft beer, and also one of its strangest. It began in 2006 as the production arm of Pizza Port, moved into Stone Brewing’s original San Marcos brewery the day Stone moved out, and spent 17 years brewing two very different identities under one roof: Port Brewing for hop-forward American beers, and The Lost Abbey for Belgian-inspired and barrel-aged experiments. Then, in 2023, the two halves split. The Lost Abbey moved out to find a new home, and Port Brewing came back under the Pizza Port umbrella, where it started. The beers survived the move. The old taproom did not, and that is the first thing to know before you go looking for it.

The basics

• Location: Production brewery at 155 Mata Way, San Marcos, CA 92069 (in Stone Brewing’s original San Marcos facility). The tasting room at that address now operates as the Pizza Port Tasting Room.
• Founded: May 2006, by Pizza Port founders Vince and Gina Marsaglia with brewmaster Tomme Arthur and partner Jim Comstock, in the former Stone Brewing facility in San Marcos.
• Known for: Wipeout IPA and Mongo Double IPA, the hop-forward West Coast flagships that paid the bills for the whole operation; Shark Attack Imperial Red Ale; and sharing a building, a brewhouse, and a reputation with The Lost Abbey, its Belgian-inspired sister brand. Named Small Brewing Company of the Year at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival and Champion Small Brewery at the 2008 World Beer Cup, with Arthur named Small Brewer of the Year in 2007.

The taproom

Here is the honest part. The Port Brewing and Lost Abbey tasting room that occupied 155 Mata Way closed on May 1, 2023, when the two companies separated. The Lost Abbey moved out, eventually landing in Vista, and Pizza Port took control of the San Marcos facility. Today the room at 155 Mata Way is the Pizza Port Tasting Room, and it pours Port Brewing beers alongside Pizza Port’s own lineup, including Mongo on tap. It is a working tasting room in an industrial park, not a polished brewpub, and that suits the beer.

If you visit, go for the flight. The room still carries the DNA of the old Port and Lost Abbey bar: a long list of taps, a crowd that knows what it is drinking, and no fuss. Check Pizza Port’s site before you drive up, since hours have shifted over the years and the room has run on limited weekday-afternoon hours at times. The old Lost Abbey satellite rooms in Cardiff, San Elijo Hills, and downtown San Diego belong to The Lost Abbey now, not Port, so do not expect to find Wipeout on tap there.

Standout beers

• Wipeout IPA: The flagship, a 7% ABV West Coast IPA built to be massively hopped with enough malt body to carry it. Tropical fruit and dank hop character, sticky and solidly bitter, brewed for the surfers who brave cold water and big northwest swells. The beer that put Port on grocery store shelves across the West.
• Mongo Double IPA: The big one, an 8% ABV double IPA with 99 IBUs, brewed with Columbus, Cascade, Centennial, and Simcoe hops. Massive resinous aroma, citrus and pine, with a dry finish that hides the strength better than it should. The flagship double IPA and the bottle that built Port’s national reputation.
• Shark Attack Imperial Red Ale: A 9.5% ABV imperial red ale brewed with crystal malts and Centennial and Cascade hops. Big caramel malt up front with a spicy hop character behind it, smooth for its size and dangerously drinkable.
• Old Viscosity: The dark ale of the original lineup, a rich, malty counterweight to the hop bombs, and one of the beers that showed Port could do more than IPA.
• Board Meeting Brown Ale: An imperial brown ale brewed with coffee and cocoa nibs, added as a year-round beer in 2013, the first new regular in the Port lineup since Mongo arrived in 2010.

Our take

Port Brewing matters to San Diego beer history more than its current shelf presence suggests. Wipeout and Mongo helped define what a West Coast IPA tasted like in the late 2000s, and the awards came fast: Small Brewery of the Year at GABF in 2007 and the World Beer Cup in 2008, back when those titles meant something smaller and harder to win. The two-brand split with The Lost Abbey was a clever idea that worked for nearly two decades, until the economics of a 30-barrel brewhouse and a 40,000-square-foot building stopped working, and the 2023 separation was the honest end of it.

The good news is that the beers did not die with the old company. Under Pizza Port, Mongo and Wipeout are still brewed at 155 Mata Way, still taste like themselves, and still show up on shelves and taps around the county. Mongo remains the beer to judge the brand by: resinous, citrusy, bitter, and dry at 8%, it holds up against any double IPA brewed in San Diego today. Wipeout is the everyday version, a proper West Coast IPA that never chased the haze trend.

The caveat is that Port Brewing is now a legacy label, not a brewery you can go visit as itself. There is no Port Brewing taproom anymore, and the brand’s identity is folded into Pizza Port, which is where it came from in the first place. If that sounds like a demotion, it is also a homecoming, and the beer is better for the stability. For a North County beer day, pair the Pizza Port Tasting Room in San Marcos with the Lost Abbey’s Vista brewery down the road, and you can taste both halves of one of the most important partnerships San Diego beer ever produced.