Today we’d like to introduce you to Guy Shobe.
Guy, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Guy Shobe and Paul Sangster founded Rip Current Brewing in 2011 and opened the brewery with a tasting room in San Marcos in Dec 2012. Our original business plan had us opening five tasting rooms around San Diego County. In 2015, we opened our first satellite tasting room in the North Park community of San Diego. Because of the boom of the craft beer industry in San Diego at that time, we opted to go a different direction and invested in a canning line in 2016. We currently can five different beers.
Although Rip Current is best known for our IPAs, led by our flagship beer, Lupulin Lust Double IPA, we thrive at producing a wide range of styles from all over the world. We have won multiple awards at many prestigious beer competitions such as: Great American Beer Festival, San Diego International Beer Festival, Los Angeles International Beer Festival, and California State Fair, just to name a few. In addition, Rip Current was listed at one of the Top 10 breweries in San Diego County as voted on by our colleagues in the San Diego brewing community.
But our biggest award to date was being named the Very Small Brewing Company and Brewer of the Year at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival. This award goes to the top award-winning brewery in the country that produces less than 1,000 barrels of beer per year. It is one of the highest honors a brewery can achieve in the brewing industry! And while our continued growth has “graduated” us out of the “very small” category and into just the “small” category, we continue to brew our award-winning beers on the same 15-barrel system and take great pride in every single batch.
Has it been a smooth road?
Organic growth came fairly easy the first three years or so as the craft beer industry in San Diego, and around the country was booming. However, there are now over 140 breweries in San Diego County only, many of those with multiple tasting rooms. So that caused us to deviate from our original business plan of opening several tasting rooms and in to a more traditional business model of canning our beers.
The biggest obstacle to growing in the brewing industry for us is probably raising money. Our plan was to grow slowly and organically without taking on too much debt. However, that is difficult to do in this industry without substantial starting capital. For instance, if we want to grow just 25%, we’ll need to buy new fermenters, more kegs, lease more industrial space, buy additional cold rooms, invest more in people, another delivery truck, etc., so each growth phase needs to be carefully planned out and accounted for.
So, let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Rip Current Brewing story. Tell us more about the business.
Rip Current is a craft brewing company. We specialize, and are probably best known for, brewing a wide array of award-winning beer covering just about every beer style around the world. In addition to the many different IPAs we brew, we brew Belgian styles, German styles, British styles, and obviously, a lot of U.S. styles. We also have a bourbon barrel-aged program and release different beer styles, usually dark and flavorful beers, at least once a quarter. We also started up a sour beer program last year, so we’ll be releasing sours, in bottles, by summer 2018.
As a company, we are most proud of our many awards, especially the Very Small Brewery and Brewer of the Year award at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival, our company culture and how our employees come together for the common cause of producing the best possible beer we can, and just the overall quality and consistency of our beer across so many different styles.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
San Diego has always been in the forefront of the U.S. craft beer scene. With local craft beer giants like Stone, Karl Strauss, Green Flash, Ale smith, Port Brewing Co, just to name a few, having so much success around the country, the smaller breweries like us were exposed to great beer, great ideas, and were able to learn from them, as they set the standard of collaboration amongst all breweries that are headquartered in San Diego County. Because of this, the San Diego craft beer market has grown faster than just about any other city in the country. Many believe that we have finally reached, or at least neared, the saturation point as most breweries in town are feeling the pinch of over 140 breweries. There may not be any big shifts coming, but there may be a thinning out period, at least in San Diego County, as other cities around the country continue to grow their local craft beer market.
Contact Info:
- Address: Brewery: 1325 Grand Ave. North Park Restaurant: 4101 30th St.
San Marcos, CA 92078. San Diego, CA 92104 - Website: Www.ripcurrentbrewing.com
- Phone: 760-481-3141
- Email: guy@ripcurrentbrewing.com
- Instagram: @ripcurrentbrewing
- Facebook: @ripcurrentbrewing
- Twitter: @ripcurrentbeer
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