Mission Brewing - Kensington

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About

Mission Brewing in Kensington pours 24 rotating taps of house-brewed San Diego craft beer, hard seltzer, cider, and wine from a 1,500-square-foot taproom at 4067 Adams Avenue in the 92116 ZIP. The brand traces to 1913, when the original Mission Brewery operated in the city's Middleton district before Prohibition shuttered it; homebrewer Dan Selis re-established the label in 2007 and built a production facility inside the 25,000-square-foot historic Wonder Bread Building in the East Village, where the operation has collected more than 50 national and international craft beer awards. Flagship pours include Mission IPA, Waves of Haze Hazy IPA, Shipwrecked Double IPA, Carrack Imperial Red, and Dark Seas Imperial Stout, all brewed downtown and kegged for the Kensington tap wall. Breakfast-and-brunch traffic on the same Adams Avenue block flows through Kensington Cafe, whose morning crowd often becomes Mission's afternoon draft crowd once the garage doors roll up. The Kensington taproom took over the former Kensington Brewing Company space and kept several legacy recipes on dedicated taps as a nod to the previous tenant's regulars, a detail that sets this satellite location apart from the production-scale headquarters downtown. Roll-up garage doors on the front facade open to Adams Avenue foot traffic, while a covered rear patio seats groups under string lights — a layout that fills fast during the annual Adams Avenue Street Fair each fall, when live music stages line the corridor within steps of the taproom. CEO Dan Partelow, a former Anheuser-Busch executive brought on after a 2021 ownership restructuring, has expanded the tap program to include rotating single-hop experimental batches brewed on the East Village production system and kegged for Kensington-exclusive release. Families walking the San Diego Zoo — a straight shot south on Park Blvd from Kensington — end up on Adams Avenue for post-visit pints, and the Kensington-Normal Heights Branch Library sits a few blocks east along the same corridor. Italian gelato and espresso at Pappalecco anchor the dessert end of Kensington's dining row, completing an eat-and-drink loop that keeps foot traffic on Adams Avenue through the evening. The taproom's 24-handle draft tower runs a glycol-cooled line system calibrated to serve nitrogenated stouts at 38 degrees and hop-forward IPAs at 42 degrees across its full rotation.