By Zoe Licata and Justin Kendall
Jan. 12, 2022 at 2:03 PM
The former owners of Green Flash Brewing have put the San Diego brewery and its equipment up for sale as a turnkey operation.
Heritage Global Partners, a global asset advisory and auction services firm, is handling the sale of the equipment for WC IPA LLC, the investor group that purchased the Green Flash and Alpine brands in a foreclosure sale in 2018 and sold the intellectual property last month to global cannabis firm Tilray, which also owns Atlanta’s SweetWater Brewing Company.
Loeb Equipment & Blackbird Asset Services are assisting Heritage in marketing the brewery site as a full turnkey opportunity.
“We’re not liquidating the site and auctioning off the contents,” Heritage president Nick Dove told Brewbound. “If a company wanted to build a similar site, it would take years and years and cost significantly more, so the fact that someone can just scoop this up and immediately plug and play, get going, it’s a really tremendous opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted.”
Any potential buyer of the equipment would have the option to negotiate a lease for the site with its landlord or relocate the equipment. “Staying in place and negotiating a new lease” is a “much more likely” outcome, according to Dove.
The location boasts a 100,000 barrels of production capacity, with bottle, can and draft packaging capabilities, according to the listing, which went live today. The sale includes two brewhouses – a 50-barrel Mueller brewhouse and 5-barrel Premier Stainless brewhouse – as well as stainless and wood fermenters (approximately 250,000 gallons), high- and low-speed canning and bottling lines, and a 4,000 sq. ft. taproom and full kitchen.
“A lot of this equipment [has] 12-, 18- or 24-months lead time,” Dove said. “So the fact that even if a company wanted to get some of this stuff, they’d have to wait a year, year and a half, to buy it new when they can literally get it tomorrow installed ready to go. And that’s the benefit of taking over the site is you get the benefit of all the engineering and the installed value and the infrastructure that you’d never get in a liquidation.”
The brewery is located on Mira Mesa Boulevard, “in the heart of the San Diego brewery world.” Green Flash opened the site in June 2011, moving from its original brewery in Vista, California.
“This thing should sell really easy,” Dove added. “Our hope to someone who is looking to expand to keep operations alive and continue on with the site.”
Offers for the location are now open. There is no closing date.
Heritage previously oversaw the sale of Green Flash’s former Virginia Beach production facility to Atlanta-based New Realm Brewing in 2018.