ON SALE NOW: Complete Guide to San Diego Breweries

I warned the beer-loving world it was coming, and now it’s arrived: the San Diego Beer News Complete Guide to San Diego Breweries. An eBook designed to be use on-the-go by visitors, locals, craft beer rookies and full-blown enthusiasts alike, it is available for download in a number of formats from a variety of outlets including Amazon.com, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.

If you want to know about every brewery tasting facility in operation within the county, there is no better resource. Many publications and written works will tell you about the companies that comprise San Diego’s craft brewing scene, but few will offer truthful opinions and numeric rankings determined by beer experts and industry insiders, and certainly not in such an expansive and all-inclusive manner.

In putting this book together, I took a step out of my "beer writer" personae and put myself squarely in the shoes of the consumer. What would I need if I were looking to figure out how to best navigate the 70-plus breweries, brewpubs, brewery-restaurants, tasting rooms and other ancillary brewery-owned facilities in San Diego County? How to ensure that I didn’t hit any duds, while also tailoring my visits to include places that served the type of beer I was looking for on that given day and in an environment that was up my alley? The answer: ratings in a variety of categories and broken-down information describing exactly what each location provides—or doesn’t.

But most important—I’d need honesty. That’s what this book provides that others do not: an honest, no-holds-barred, factual look at each venue that celebrates the good, but casts light on shortcomings when appropriate. The panel of qualified critics who weighed in on each of the sites included in the guide provided thoughtful, detailed feedback both good and bad. As a result, the guide is a resource its users can count on to give them the best shot at setting up an ideal beer touring and tasting experience.

On sale just in time for San Diego Beer Week, this is the first edition of the San Diego Beer News Complete Guide to San Diego Breweries but it will not be the last. The guide will be updated and improved annually to keep up with the breakneck pace of brewery openings (and the occasional closing), as well as reexamine every single location to make sure the ratings are reflective of the current state of affairs with each location. For now, it is accurate to exactly what awaits consumers at every brewery-owned spot in the county, so download your own copy and go extract the fermented marrow from America’s finest brewing region.