Ballast Point San Diego Brewing

How did Ballast Point start?

It started, fittingly, with homebrewing. Founder Jack White caught the beer bug in college and, frustrated by how hard it was to find good supplies, opened Home Brew Mart in San Diego in 1992, a shop that doubled as a gathering place for local brewers. A back-room brewery grew up behind the counter, and in 1996, with award-winning homebrewer Yuseff Cherney as head brewer, Ballast Point Brewing was born.

White’s vision always reached beyond beer, toward high-quality spirits and toward teaching the next generation of homebrewers. Both ambitions would come true, though the company that realized them would look very different by the end.

What beers is Ballast Point known for?

The beers are what built the name. Sculpin IPA took years of tinkering, the brewers eventually settling on hopping the ale at five separate stages, and the payoff was a gold-medal-winning IPA with bright hints of peach, apricot, mango, and lemon. Named for the stinging sculpin fish, it carries a small tangy sting of its own. From there came the spinoffs: the tart, clean Grapefruit Sculpin, the fiery Habanero Sculpin, and limited mango and pineapple versions.

Beyond the flagship, the lineup runs deep, from a crisp German-style Longfin Lager to the cloudy, citrusy Wahoo White, a wheat ale with orange peel and coriander. But the beer that first gave the brewery its balance was its original Pale Ale, a Kölsch-style brew built on German hops with Munich and American malts.

Ballast Point’s Core Beers

What about Ballast Point’s spirits?

Ballast Point’s brewers were never content to stop at beer. In 2008 they launched a spirits program with Old Grove Gin, and in doing so became the first microdistillery in San Diego since Prohibition. The lineup grew to more than a dozen spirits with sea-faring names: Three Sheets Rum, distilled in a hybrid pot-and-column still; the juniper-and-rose Old Grove Gin; Devil’s Share whiskey; Fugu Vodka; Opah herbal liqueur; plus canned cocktails and Bloody Mary and Mai Tai mixers.

Here’s the twist that reshaped the whole company: those spirits are no longer Ballast Point’s. When the brewery was sold, the spirits operation went a different way entirely, which is where the story takes a sharp turn.

What happened to Ballast Point? The billion-dollar saga

At the peak of the craft-beer acquisition frenzy in 2015, Constellation Brands, the company behind Corona and Modelo, bought Ballast Point for a staggering $1 billion, the largest craft deal of its kind. It did not go smoothly. The distilled-spirits operation wasn’t part of the sale, and disputes over its fate helped push founder Jack White, Cherney, and other leaders out by mid-2016.

“Quality beer is one and change is the other.”

— Colby Chandler, longtime Ballast Point brewer, on the company’s two constants

White and Cherney took the spirits with them, rebranding the line as Cutwater Spirits in 2017, which was itself bought by Anheuser-Busch in 2019. Constellation, meanwhile, struggled to integrate the beer brand as sales fell, and in 2019 sold Ballast Point to Kings & Convicts, a tiny Chicago-area brewery, for a small fraction of what it had paid. The arc, in five steps:

Where does Ballast Point stand today?

A leaner version of itself. Under Kings & Convicts, Ballast Point has leaned back into Sculpin as its signature beer and kept releasing new ones, but the company is a shadow of its peak, and its longtime Miramar production brewery closed in 2024. The brand still sells nationally, with Sculpin, Longfin, and Fathom IPA among its year-round beers, and it never fully abandoned its homebrewing roots: the original Home Brew Mart remains in San Diego’s Linda Vista neighborhood.

The pioneering spirits, meanwhile, thrive under a new flag. Cutwater Spirits, built by the original Ballast Point team, has become one of the country’s biggest canned-cocktail brands, carrying forward the rum, gin, vodka, and whiskey that Ballast Point started. Two companies, one origin story, and a reminder that in craft beverages, change really is the only constant.

Frequently Asked Questions

🍺 Ballast Point at a Glance

Key facts about San Diego’s most talked-about craft brand.