They may sell beer – and they may even sell similar beers – but all breweries start with a different story.

Some have grown from where they first began; others have migrated around. Many have their original founders still around, while some have handed off the keys or sold to larger operations. Whether they mostly package cans and distribute or mostly fill pint glasses at the taproom can vary and often changes for economic reasons. The styles that define breweries are ever-evolving.

One thing they all share is passion.

“No one is running a craft brewery – I’m talking day-to-day operations like physically on the floor – who doesn’t love what they’re doing,” said Ben Turkel from Boomtown Brewery. “This is a hard job, and it’s a demanding job. And if you don’t like doing it, you’re just not going to do it.”

Nearly 100 craft breweries dot the Los Angeles-area landscape, many of which have called downtown home. Food and beverage is a low-margin industry, but the sweat-equity that brewers put into their operations shows in their unique take on, say, the Mexican lager or the West Coast IPA or the rice lager – styles that Turkel said are increasingly defining what an “L.A. brewery” looks like.

What follows are the origin stories of a handful of downtown’s established craft beer operations.

Boomtown Brewery

The genesis of Boomtown Brewery is not atypical of craft breweries.

A group of millennials of varying backgrounds gradually coalesced, identifying a mutual appreciation for craft beer. One was a restaurateur in Los Angeles, while another began dabbling in beer in Portland. Everyone came together and decided it was time to make it happen, in L.A.

“This is like 2009-ish, or maybe even 2008 – right before the recession,” recalled Ben Turkel, operations manager of the brewery. “So everyone had these grand schemes and plans and the recession hit and that really put everything on hold for about four years.”

They spent those four years working on recipes and looking for a future home. The first idea of setting up shop on Hollywood Boulevard didn’t pencil out. In 2012, they found an old warehouse in the Arts District-Little Tokyo area that, for what it lacked in charm, had potential.

“It was tough down here,” Turkel said, recalling the routine cleaning up of used needles and human waste.

Their instincts that the area would revitalize and bring success bore out, however – so perhaps it is appropriate that they chose Boomtown as a name.

Delays in getting the taproom up and running forced them to pivot early to packaging and distribution, which helped build their name. When they did open, the site became a destination brewery that was largely enhanced by a large event space. Turkel guessed that about a third of the taproom’s customers were regulars. And at the time, craft beer was morphing from an L.A. novelty to something more.

“I think during that pre-pandemic era, craft beer was just extra sexy. It was still a new kid on the block,” Turkel added. “We had DJs Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This place was packed to the gills until 1 or 2 in the morning with a significantly younger crowd – probably 22 to 32.”

One key to Boomtown’s brand has been actively elevating other entrepreneurial spirits in L.A. It eschewed having in-house food and instead invites food trucks and pop-ups to sell their dishes to guests – often with the hope of providing that cook the break they need. Mark Tripp, the man behind Tripp Burgers, started off cooking at Boomtown.

“It makes a really cool symbiotic relationship,” Turkel said. “A lot of our vendors, they do so well here that eventually, they don’t come back because we’ve helped them build.”

That support especially extended to other brewers during the pandemic, when the shutdown of in-person anything forced a lot of operations to pivot. The screwed-up supply chain also threw off operational patterns. Turkel said they became “cup of sugar neighbors” in the sense that at any given time, one brewer might be short on a yeast that another tends to have extra of, for example.

“When you’re running a factory, two things are constant. One is you need supplies and the second is things are always

breaking. Brewers especially in Southern California, our suppliers are coming from all over the world,” Turkel said. “A lot of our specialty grains are coming from Europe. A lot of our hops could be coming from Oregon, from New Zealand, Australia.”

And the nature of craft beer, which holds a tiny amount of the beer market, removes any notion of competition with each other, Turkel added.

“It’s just, ‘Can we get more people to drink beer? And can we get more people to drink local beer?’” he added. “I think that’s the real competition, is getting people to drink local beer and realizing that within the craft industry, a rising tide lifts all ships.”

Angel City Brewery

With a large footprint in the Arts District and a relatively long operational history, Angel City Brewery is certainly among the most recognizable craft beer brands in Los Angeles.

The name was first coined in 1997 as the latest iteration of what started as Hofbräuhaus in the Alpine Village that formerly existed near Torrance. The operation eventually moved to its current location, a historic building at the edge of the Arts District, in 2010 and by 2011, it had come under ownership by national craft brand Boston Beer Co.

The brewery as we know it now kicked off serious operations in 2012. The Arts District saw a surge in residential and nightlife development and it remains a popular spot for people to go out and hop from place to place – anchored very likely by Angel City.

“I’ve seen how many new places have popped up over the years,” said Layton Cutler, head brewer at Angel City. “Now the Arts District and Little Tokyo are extremely popular.”

Cutler joined the brewery in 2013 and has helped usher in several different eras and business models.

“Right when I started, our focus was going to be on keeping a production brewery. We were going to try to get as much as we could into the market,” he recalled.

As the area became popular with foot traffic, the spacious taproom started filling up. Food trucks became a regular presence. Cutler observed that unlike smaller breweries that were more destination spots than part of a rotation, to-go cans didn’t do well here. He speculated that was because no one really wanted to walk from place to place all night with a four-pack in tow.

“We were doing really, really well on the weekends. Selling beer by the pint is quite profitable,” Cutler said. “That was the focus for quite a few years. Then we started working on having a really big lineup of beers at the bar so we could get as many drinkers as possible. We were trying to cater to every kind of beer drinker.”

Things were looking good in 2019. The brewery produced about 5,000 barrels of beer that year, 75% of which was sold in glasses at the taproom. It had inked a deal with Los Angeles Football Club to be the organization’s official beer partner. Going into 2020, the tanks were all full in preparation for that partnership.

And then Covid happened.

“We were ready to have an insane 2020,” Cutler said, “and that just didn’t happen.”

Angel City thus pivoted back to production and wholesale. Now, Cutler said, upward of 65% of the brewery’s outpost is wholesale distribution. It produced about 2,900 barrels last year, but Cutler is optimistic they could reach about 5,000 again this year.

The site remains active. In 2022, Truly Hard Seltzer opened its first brick-and-mortar location on Angel City’s property. The two share real estate and transactions, so customers can easily float back and forth depending on what they want.

Cutler said that as downtown adjusts to its new identity, the Arts District is once again evolving – for the better.

“Drinking habits changed a little bit during the pandemic. After everything opened up, people were ready to go out but they were ready to take it easy. It’s almost back to what it was before for us, but it did take a little bit of time,” he observed. “There always used to be a few food trucks that would be in the area. Now, there’s a lot more trucks and little food stands. There’s cheap food, there’s street food, there’s trucks. If you go over into Little Tokyo, there’s a few more bars. It kind of caters to everybody.”

Highland Park Brewery

At the genesis of Highland Park Brewery, the 480-square-foot operation qualified as a microbrewery.

A decade after producing its first beer, the brewery now has a respectable output of about 2,600 barrels a year and mainly does business out of a 14,000-square-foot space in Chinatown. It has become something of an anchor there, where it sits across from Los Angeles Historic State Park and the Metro A Line’s Chinatown station.

Owner Bob Kunz said he picked this location because of a special zoning designation for the area that permitted a manufacturing operation mixed in with residential and commercial. It was also just a good spot, he added.

“We were pretty cognizant that we’d be on the edge of downtown, Dodger Stadium and that new park,” he said. “Back in 2016, downtown had more momentum. For us, all of that did work out. We’re in a unique space in that we’re adjacent to downtown, so people think we’re a little more approachable.”

The brewery – so-named for where its initial production spot was located – had a simple start in 2014. It has one customer, a Highland Park bar called The Hermosillo, that for years was essentially the only place you could drink the brewery’s beer.

By 2018, it had settled into 9,000 square feet along Spring Street in Chinatown, where it divided the space into thirds: taproom and kitchen, storage and, importantly, production. It retains the initial space, which is now used for test and one-off brews.

With a dedicated kitchen, Highland Park Brewery is among the few in the county to open for lunch. This and the allure of nearby amenities largely defined the operation’s business model for years.

“From the get-go, we always had moderate growth in mind, direct-to-consumer in mind and freshness in mind,” Kunz said. “If you’re selling wholesale instead of direct-to-consumer, it’s a pretty drastic margin difference. I think we’ve been fortunate in that we are a brewery that operates on a larger margin because we sell most of our beer direct-to-consumer.”

The pandemic of course upended that model, with all dining – and drinking – limited to takeaway. In this, Highland Park Brewery had found a bit of luck.

“One thing that really happened that couldn’t have been more ideal is that we’d been in the works of getting that canning line installed,” Kunz said. “Having our own canning line really made that transition function well.”

Having an in-house packaging system allowed the brewery to pivot from canning 10% of its beer to all of it. The company self-distributed, so employees either became delivery drivers or handled to-go pickups at the taproom. It helped, Kunz added, that the park across the street had taken form and people were using it as an escape from being cooped up in their homes.

“Everybody buckled down and we just kept pivoting. I think that really paid off for us because we found new customers who were grateful. Whatever it was, we were trying to figure it out,” he said. “During Covid, our customer base actually got stronger, I think.”

Things are looking up at Highland Park Brewery. The operation has settled at about 35% wholesale. On the direct-to-consumer side, it benefits from a loyal base and proximity to places like Dodger Stadium. Kunz estimated production would rise about 10% this year.

It’s also going through a physical expansion. The company leased a 5,000-square-foot warehouse across the street and will migrate its offices, dry storage and cold storage there. At the main site, the brewery is upgrading its facilities and has enough room to bolster its production capacity and permanently install the canning line (which, previously, had to be assembled and disassembled each time, a two-hour task).

All of this, Kunz said, thanks to its success during the pandemic.

“We hadn’t done wholesale before, but it’s been really good marketing for us as a company,” he said. “When we started doing that, all of a sudden our cans were in stores and people were being exposed to us for the first time. We used to be kind of a niche operation, but us pushing to the wholesale really benefited us.”