BLAH Brewing

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About

BLAH Brewing produces nano-batch craft beer inside Blind Lady Ale House at 3416 Adams Ave in Normal Heights, San Diego, a brewpub that added on-site brewing capacity in 2010 after launching as a beer-focused pizza pub in 2009. Co-founded by restaurateurs Jeff Motch and Clea Hantman alongside ex-Stone Brewing fermentationist Lee Chase, the operation earned a spot on Draft Magazine's 100 Best Beer Bars in America list in each of its first several years. Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine ranked the bar 12th among the best beer bars in the country, and San Diego CityBeat readers voted it Best Brew Pub five times between 2010 and 2016. The kitchen runs a farm-to-pizza program that sources ingredients locally, and Coco & Jules Cookies handles the dessert end of the Adams Avenue corridor with handmade cookie varieties that pair with BLAH's lighter wheat and blonde ale styles. Communal tables fill the main room under walls covered in vintage skateboard decks and beer-can memorabilia, and the long window row along Adams Avenue lets natural light into a space that reads more neighborhood living room than commercial bar. The 92116 address puts the brewpub at the center of Adams Avenue's dining and nightlife strip. Motch and Hantman, who are married, now run the business as a women-owned operation following Chase's departure in 2021. Food Network's Food Paradise featured the concept, and Eater placed it on the Essential 38 list for San Diego dining. Meatless Monday stacks the specials board with all-vegetarian and vegan pizza options, a weekly program that has run since the pub's earliest years. The Adams Avenue Street Fair turns the block outside BLAH into one of the festival's highest-traffic zones each fall, with the brewpub typically extending its tap list for the event. Post-game crowds heading north from Snapdragon Stadium find the Adams Avenue corridor within a ten-minute drive up the 15, and the late-night kitchen keeps pizza service running through the evening dining window. The same Adams Avenue block supports a dense cluster of independent restaurants, and El Zarape Restaurant anchors the Mexican dining category two blocks west at a location that shares the walk-in, no-reservation ethos. The in-house brewing system runs at nano scale, producing small-run batches of IPAs, stouts, Berliner Weisses, and Belgian-style blondes that rotate through the tap handles alongside guest pours from California and international breweries.