In April, we shared the story of Zane Curtis, a longtime craft-beer fan who, despite his love of the beverage and the communal culture surrounding it, gave it up three years ago when adopting a sober lifestyle. Since then he’s opened a pair of bottle shops exclusively selling a curated selection of non-alcoholic (N/A) takes on a wide variety of adult beverages. It’s worked out well for him, enough that earlier this year he was inspired to get into the manufacturing of those products, taking over a San Marcos facility that was previously home to Creative Creature Brewing and working with a team of beer-industry veterans to reconfigure it for production of N/A beverages. That business, Monday Morning Lab, is about to start brewing beers (not just for Curtis’ company, but contract-brewing clients), and come Saturday, July 18 it will soft-open a public tasting room ‒ the first-ever for a N/A producer in San Diego County. We caught up with Curtis to find out what visitors can expect from that trailblazing venue and what he’s learned since crossing over from simply selling N/A beverages to crafting them.
How have you configured your base of operations?
Our facility is just over 6,000 square feet, and nearly all of it is dedicated to production and storage – the engine room of the whole operation – but 800 of those square feet are carved out for the taproom and retail side. It’s an intimate space on purpose with a pool table, our best-selling bottle-shop products on the shelves and an N/A beer line pouring fresh. What we’re building is the first of its kind in the country, a real brewery and taproom experience built around world-class N/A beer. No compromise, no “near beer”, just genuinely great beer that happens to be alcohol-free.
What will the taproom look and feel like?…