Santa Clarita is inviting you to come get your beer on – or perhaps to come get your brew on.
And not just any kind of beer. We’re talking about a banana cream pie-flavored hefeweizen, brewed with lactose. Or a Belgian-style dubbel brewed with cacao nibs and black cherries. Maybe you’re in the mood for a honey-infused brown ale.
Whatever you’re looking for, there’s a chance you’ll find it handcrafted in a Santa Clarita brewery.
Starting at the turn of the century, civic leaders have worked to vault the city from a suburban bedroom community to one where people are attracted to live, work and play. An important part of that equation for many is beer, and in the past decade several craft breweries have taken off in the community, bringing with them their distinct brands and cultural homages to the third largest city in Los Angeles County.
“The city wasn’t totally familiar with the craft beer scene, so when we opened up in 2015, we were kind of a new concept for the general public here,” says Todd Tisdell, a cofounder of Valencia’s Pocock Brewing Co. “It took a while for the city to embrace it. Slowly but surely, I think the town has come to embrace craft beer.”
After having Wolf Creek Restaurant & Brewery as the main option since 1997, Santa Clarita’s beer scene grew in 2015 when Pocock opened its doors. After that came Brewery Draconum in Newhall and the now-shuttered Telco Brewery in Valencia. One of the founders behind Telco is now reviving that old site as Santa Cruz Brewing Co., and Palmdale-based brewery Lucky Luke Brewing Co. has taken over Wolf Creek’s brewery facility in Valencia as its third location.
Some are open to the possibility of bringing in even more breweries – notwithstanding the presence of restaurant-brewhouse brands BJ’s and Oggi’s in the area.
“The beer scene here is definitely growing,” says Tony Santa Cruz, who is launching Santa Cruz Brewing in May. “Just in the five years we at Telco were open as a brewery, you could see that people were becoming more interested. We always had new customers come in. I think the Santa Clarita community can actually sustain more breweries and it would definitely help us out.”
Evolving interests in beer
Tisdell, who has lived in neighboring Castaic since 2005, took up homebrewing with a friend – Geoff Pocock – and from there got curious about how far they could take it.
“It’s something that I felt was definitely missing in Santa Clarita,” Tisdell says. “Back then it was a great place to live and raise a family, but everybody left to go do things. I want to create something that I would go hang out at, and I believe that’s what we did.”
The pair launched Pocock Brewing in 2015, building a brand of “English inspired, West Coast brewed” beers and earning their share of medals from beer competitions. On top of stalwarts like the Surfing Hippos hazy, Proper American lager and the Despicable passionfruit-orange-guava imperial tart, they’ve since added ciders and non-alcoholic beverages to their products, serve locally made wines and run a popular pizza kitchen under their roof.
This year Pocock made its first expansion, opening a tasting room and restaurant – complete with rooftop seating – in the Newhall neighborhood.
“It’s one of the areas that Santa Clarita is really trying to turn into a nightlife walking street,” Tisdell says. “The city has been bugging us for quite a while to put a spot down here on Main Street and they really saw the vision here.”
Santa Cruz, similarly, has spent more than two decades living in Castaic. He befriended a fellow Cub Scout parent who would sometimes bring his homemade beer on camping trips – thus piquing Santa Cruz’s interest. He embarked on his own homebrew journey, often fashioning makeshift equipment using other appliances.
After Telco – which opened in 2018 – closed in August, Santa Cruz says he decided to keep the craft going and made plans to launch a new operation.
“During that process, I thought, ‘I don’t want to stop,’” he says. “When the equipment went up for auction, I went ahead and grabbed all of it. Once I knew I had the equipment, I had arrangements made to keep the property with the landlord.”
Santa Cruz says he aims to keep things more dynamic with the new brand. He’s already brewing his launch beers – a lineup that will include a Mexican lager, hazy IPA, West Coast IPA, brown ale, blonde and a seltzer.
“On the first go-round, we were making these beers that were always on tap. They never really changed out. We would, every once in a while, change one out, but never really had a rotating tap,” he says. “This time, that’s one thing I’m going to change. I’m going to leave some of the styles we had before, but at least half of the taps are going to be rotating, always changing.”
Open for business
After first opening in Palmdale and then expanding into Lancaster, Lucky Luke made Santa Clarita its third outpost in 2021. The company purchased Wolf Creek’s brew location and continues to brew the restaurant’s own recipes for them in addition to their own operation. Lucky Luke co-founder Samantha Schmitz, who is also president of the Los Angeles County Brewers Guild, said she previously found mentorship from the Wolf Creek owners and had long admired this location. Since joining the Santa Clarita scene, the reception for her products has been warm, Schmitz says.
“You never know how it’s going to be going into a new city as an outsider, but it’s been wonderful and they’ve accepted us,” she continues. “It feels a lot more tight-knit and community-based than we anticipated because of the size of it. We love to see that it’s not just a community where everybody commutes out of. I would definitely say they care a lot about what’s happening in their community. It’s been fun to bring new beer styles and tap into what people are looking for.”
Jey Wagner, chief executive of the Santa Clarita Valley Economic Development Corp., says the city’s demographics – mostly ages 18-24 and 45-64 – along with a working population of 65% and proximity to fringe parts of the county make a good market for breweries. Average return on investment for breweries, he notes, is around 20%, and at a startup cost ranging from $500,000 to $1.5 million are comparable to starting a restaurant or bakery.
“You may find these breweries in the middle of industrial areas – and we have many of those,” Wagner adds. “They’re easy to set up, easy to get permitting on and positively ripe for a lot of industrial areas.”
Santa Cruz says that while the city has grown from being merely a bedroom community, it has retained a small-town charm that makes him want to stay there.
“Santa Clarita is one of the biggest cities in the county, but at the same time you have that feel of it being a small little hometown. I definitely wanted to keep all of that here,” he says. “The city was great to open up in. You always hear those nightmares about working with the local city, but that didn’t happen here. It wasn’t a hard decision to open up a business in Santa Clarita.”