About Barley & Sword Brewing Company
The term craft beer probably doesn’t make sense to Europeans because they have been drinking “craft beer” their entire lives. They just didn’t know it. In Europe they have pilsners and heffeweisens. Stouts and kolschs. Porters and dunkels and saisons and brown ales and red ales and regional beers. I mean, they grow up drinking Smithwick’s and we grow up drinking Busch heavy. Every town in Europe has a local brewpub and every brewpub has a favorite beer they make using only local ingredients. At least that is how we picture Europe. We have never actually been there.
But we have been to Barley & Sword Brewing Company here in San Diego and assume it is the closest you can get to an old world brewpub without an expensive plane ticket. At Barley & Sword they specialize in British, German, Czech, and Belgium beers (Kolsch, Irish Red Ale, Scottish Ale, Pilsner, ESB) and they do them damn well. So if you are sick of IPAs and in the mood for a bitter English or a crisp pilsner or a sour goze this your place. They do keep an IPA on tap, but this is for profiling purposes and that is not what you should be drinking here.
Barley & Sword has a cozy seating area inside, as well as a large beer garden out front and on most days of the week there is a food truck parked right outside. The place has a communal feel and the people who work there are incredibly friendly. So take a break from the IPA train and get back to the roots of beer-craft by experiencing the more subtle notes of a Belgian saison.
Great For
• Day drinking
• Good beer
• A taste of the Old World
A Closer Look
Opened in 2023 by four local Navy veterans, Barley & Sword is a true passion project. Most of the owners still work their day jobs in San Diego and only hope to share their craft with the community as much as they can. The site of their outfit is called Brewery Igniter, a kind of brewery test kitchen, a place where local brewers can try their hand at larger scale operations in a prefab environment. Local breweries Eppig and Juneshine both started here.
