Great news for San Diego breweries and craft beer lovers! Recently, San Diego took home no less than 7 gold medals at the 2025 Brewers Cup of California! This was the fifth annual statewide brewing competition, put on by the Sacramento Area Brewers Guild, in collaboration with the San Diego Brewers Guild.
Gold-winning beers
Beer fans, looking for weekend plans? How about a pub crawl, where you try all these award winning brews? Here’s where you find them, and what to order:
- Burning Beard Brewing (El Cajon) – “In Praise of Bacchus” – Sour/Brett/Other Yeast category
- Fall Brewing Company (Miramar) – “Sweet Resistance” – New Zealand-Style IPA category
- Hodad’s Brewing Company (Serra Mesa) – “Throwback” – American-Style Brown Ale category
- Pizza Port Brewing Company (Carlsbad) – “Irish Hello” – Irish-Style Red Ale category
- Pure Project (Vista brewery) – “Double Dust” – Imperial Hazy IPA category
- Taproom Beer Co. (North Park) – “True Dark” – Specialty Stout category
- Tarantula Hill Brewing Co (San Marcos brewery) – “Feel the Flow” – International-style Pilsener category
Besides the gold-winning pints mentioned above, SD’s craft breweries took home 16 medals overall – including four silver and five bronze. TapRoom led the way, with three medals overall. This year’s Brewers Cup of California received 1,360 entries from 203 independent breweries – so we sure got somethin to be proud of!
And speaking of being proud…
Five San Diego breweries won medals at World Beer Cup
The well-deserved prizes keep on coming! Just a couple of days after, the World Beer Cup took place – a competition developed by the Brewers Association in 1996, to celebrate the art and science of brewing. This year, it featured 8,375 beers from 1,761 breweries spanning 49 countries. And we took home 8 medals!
While we didn’t win a gold one this year, the results are still highly impressive and worth celebrating. Here are our silver and bronze winners:
- Pizza Port’s Imperial Beach – silver – “Schwarzbier” – German-Style Schwarzbier category
- Solana Beach brewery – silver – “Oscar Wanted a Brown Ale” – English-Style Brown Ale category
- Craft Coast Brewery & Tacos San Marcos – silver – “XPA” – Australia-Style Pale Ale category
- Ocean Beach brewery – bronze – “Junk In Da Trunkel Dunkel” – South German-Style Dunkel Weizen category
- Coronado Brewing Company – bronze – “Guava Hard Cider” – Fruited Cider category
- North Park Beer Company – bronze – “House of Fu!” – Imperial IPA category
- Taproom Beer Company (North Park) – bronze – “Modern Love” – New Zealand-style IPA category
Did you know that San Diego is known as The Capital of Craft™, a term that was trademarked in 2015? We can’t help but be proud of all the people who work hard, so that we can enjoy the greatest beers. Cheers!