Upon entering the building at the corner of State and Haley, I’m ushered back 23 years in time when the perfect storm — Santa Barbara Brewing Company opening just as I’d turned 21 years old — enabled me to drink the freshest beer possible from my first-ever microbrewery. For perhaps obvious reasons, I don’t have any recollection of what I drank — it was so long ago! — but I knew it was special.
That was in 1995, when the country was home to about 800 breweries. Today, according to the California Brewers Association, there are some 900 craft breweries in California alone. Over the years, that made Brew Co., as it came to be widely known, a little less special — so much so that Brew Co. is now dead. But long live The Cruisery, which is taking over the iconic space.
Brew Co. owners Wayne and Michelle Trella had a good run. Their brewpub, which means it had a kitchen, opened during America’s second wave of microbreweries. They won awards at the Great American Beer Festival from 2004 to 2006, but then competition stiffened. Their recent hiring of award-winning brewer Dave “Zambo” Zamborski — formerly of SoCal breweries BJ’s and Karl Strauss as well as San Francisco’s 21st Amendment and Speakeasy Brewing — turned the brewing program around, but apparently not the brewpub’s profitability.