This new location came to fruition in December of 2021. First and foremost, this new location allowed for abundant indoor seating, a permanent patio set-up, and a small production brewery – all things tougher to come by at their original location. While navigating the challenging waters of the Covid-19 pandemic by having to shut down their Torrance taproom for over a year and selling their beer via Curbside Pickups on Saturdays, they were also working to open up a new brewery taproom and beer garden in Anaheim’s Packing District, located just down the road in Orange County. We’ve come to think of Monkish in a similar context as Stanford, which has become known as the “Ivy League of the West Coast,” so too has Monkish become synonymous as best New England IPA brewer on the left coast. Demand for these new offerings from beer traders all over the country were piling on to the already freakish local demand. The number of passionate beer nerds that would fill their parking lot for a can release on a given Saturday numbered in the hundreds. Before they knew it they were setting up hop contracts and ever so subtly took down the comical “No MSG, No IPA” sign the taproom was known for displaying.Īs a result, Monkish quickly became known as the first west coast brewery to fully understand and dial in the New England-style IPA. Later in April they released their first IPA, a collab with Other Half Brewing called First Things First – it sold out in under an hour. While he did occasionally enjoy IPAs from time-to-time from other breweries, the bitterness wasn’t quite to his liking, so these juicy creations were a whole new thing. According to Henry he first had a New England-style IPA when Monkish was set-up alongside Tree House Brewing at the LA Shelton Brothers festival and he tried Julius for the first time. Imagine how much everything changed in 2016 as they slowly began to brew test batches of Hazy IPA. They were so busy that Henry could only brew batches overnight because it was the only time he had left to create the lifeblood of the business. The early days of Monkish saw the couple working in every aspect of the operation – from washing kegs and pouring from a make-shift draft system in the taproom, to brewing, doing sales & delivery. Originally bit by the Belgian-beer bug while studying in Cambridge in 2005, Henry began homebrewing once back home in LA’s South Bay a few years later. Opening their taproom in March of 2012, Henry Nguyen and his wife Adriana’s Monkish Brewing was one of the earliest small breweries to open in Torrance, California and one of the first on the west coast to specialize in Belgian-style ales. With over 11 years of steady innovation, various incarnations, and now multiple locations, Monkish Brewing has become a stalwart brewery, vitally important to the development of craft beer in Southern California and the West Coast as a whole.
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