Pizza Port Brewing’s Ocean Beach location — a 15-year anchor of Bacon Street and one of the most decorated craft brewpubs in American beer history — was ordered closed by San Diego County health inspectors on April 21, 2026 following a routine inspection that cited a major vermin violation alongside three additional findings. The closure ends a three-year run of A-grade inspections at the address and comes as vermin-related closures have surged across San Diego County in the wake of new state pesticide restrictions.
What Inspectors Found
According to the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health and Quality, the April 21 inspection resulted in an “Ordered Closed” outcome driven by four violations. The critical finding was Vermin — classified as a Major violation and the trigger for the closure order. Accompanying it were a Minor holding temperatures violation, and two Out of Compliance findings: Equipment and Utensil Storage and Use, and Premises, Personal/Cleaning Items, and Exclusion Measures.
That last violation is particularly telling. The Premises and Exclusion Measures category covers the structural and physical controls that prevent vermin from entering a facility in the first place — gaps, entry points, harborage areas, and sanitation practices that eliminate food and shelter for rodents. Failing on both the active vermin finding and the exclusion infrastructure simultaneously suggests the problem is not merely incidental but reflects a lapse in preventive maintenance. Under San Diego County’s inspection system, a Major vermin violation constitutes an imminent health hazard and requires closure until the issue is resolved and a passing reinspection is completed.
A Surprising Turn After Three Clean Years
The closure comes as a notable reversal for a location that had held an A grade through its previous three consecutive annual inspections. The April 2025 inspection scored 92 (A); March 2024 scored 95 (A); and February 2023 scored 96 (A). None of those prior inspections cited any vermin activity. The 2025 inspection did flag Out of Compliance findings for Warewashing Facilities and Equipment and Utensil Storage — a pattern that continued into this year — but there was no indication, on paper at least, of a developing rodent issue until this week’s inspection.
About Pizza Port Ocean Beach
Pizza Port Brewing Company was founded in March 1987 when siblings Gina and Vince Marsaglia purchased a struggling pizza joint in Solana Beach, according to Wikipedia. They installed a seven-barrel brewery in 1992 and quickly became foundational to San Diego’s emerging craft beer identity. As Paste Magazine has documented, Pizza Port’s early IPA recipes directly influenced Vinnie Cilurzo — later the co-founder of Russian River Brewing — and the chain’s guest homebrew taps were described as “hugely influential” in the development of San Diego’s broader brewing culture. The brand has won over 100 Great American Beer Festival medals in total, more than any other craft brewery in the festival’s history, and was named Small Brewpub of the Year at the GABF in both 2003 and 2004.
The Ocean Beach location opened in 2010, the fourth in the chain, and has built its own reputation within the Pizza Port family. Its Junk In Da Trunkel Dunkel took a gold medal at the 2024 World Beer Cup in the South German-Style Dunkel Weizen category, according to Wikipedia. The address at 1956 Bacon St. sits at the heart of Ocean Beach’s commercial strip, a block from the beach, drawing a mix of local regulars, families, surfers, and craft beer pilgrims who make the location a destination.
A Countywide Vermin Surge
Pizza Port OB is the latest entrant in what has become an alarming countywide pattern. As SanDiegoVille reported in a detailed investigation last July, more than 300 San Diego County restaurants were shut down for vermin-related violations in roughly a year’s span. The publication and others have pointed to California’s AB 2552, the Poison-Free Wildlife Act, which took effect January 1, 2025 and bans the use of nearly all anticoagulant rodenticides — the class of poison that had long been the most effective urban pest control tool. Pest control operators and restaurant owners have warned that without those tools, structural exclusion and sanitation must work harder, and where they fall short, inspectors are increasingly finding the consequences firsthand. That concern is reinforced by the Premises and Exclusion Measures violation cited at Pizza Port OB — if the physical barriers against entry aren’t maintained, no amount of trapping or alternative treatments will hold the line indefinitely…