Ambitious Ales, the Long Beach brewery that took home gold at the 2024 Great American Beer Festival, is crossing into Orange County for the first time, opening a brewery and tasting room at The LAB Anti-Mall in Costa Mesa with a grand opening weekend set for October 24-25. The new taproom sits at 696 Randolph Ave., tucked into the open-air retail center that has anchored Costa Mesa’s creative commerce scene for decades.
The expansion marks the brewery’s first location outside Long Beach, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reported that Ambitious Ales is based in Long Beach and was founded in 2012 by Jon Cuthbert, Juan Carrillo, Jerome de Leon, Garrett Carroll and Danny Karpinski after the group took a trip to the Oregon Brewers Festival. The brewery opened its first physical location in Long Beach’s Bixby Knolls neighborhood in 2019, and this new Costa Mesa spot represents its first Orange County outpost.
That original Bixby Knolls taproom came together inside the historic 1947 Tuttle Cameras building on Atlantic Avenue, a renovation that doubled as a piece of neighborhood revitalization, according to the Long Beach Post. The founders also leaned on the city itself to get off the ground: Long Beach’s Economic Development Department helped connect the brewery to a zero-interest, $10,000 Kiva microloan that funded its outdoor patio and custom tasting room furniture, the Long Beach Business Journal reported.
A Gold Medal Pedigree Heads South
Ambitious Ales isn’t walking into Orange County without credentials. The brewery’s hazy IPA, Professional Human Being, won gold at the 2024 Great American Beer Festival in what was the competition’s most entered category among 349 submissions that year, per the Los Angeles Times. The brewery has also picked up multiple awards at the California Brewers Cup and a bronze medal in 2019 for its coffee beer, Central Perk, building a reputation for handcrafted, small-batch and seasonal releases…