USA, CA: Ballast Point to open a brewpub in Disneyland

Disneyland is getting its own on-site brewery, Food & Wine reported on January 25.

No, unfortunately, it’s not literally in the theme park, giving you a chance to go on your own wild ride while the rest of the family goes on Mr. Toad’s. Instead, it will be found in the California resort’s public shopping area currently known as Downtown Disney District. And it won’t be selling Disney-branded beer like Dumbo’s DIPA or Kylo Ren’s Dark Side Stout (or at least, that’s not the plan for now). Instead, the facility will be run by the well-known Southern California-based brand Ballast Point. Still, opening a brewery in Mickey Mouse’s backyard shows just how massively mainstream the current brewing trend has gotten. (And might be making some of us who remember the big brewing crash of the late ’90s and early ‘00s a bit nervous.)

As you’d expect, this new brewery won’t be a full-on production facility. Instead, it will be a brewpub and restaurant featuring a three-barrel “research and development” system—meaning that much of the beer will likely be produced off premises by Ballast Point, which was bought by Constellation Brands back in 2015 and is currently listed as America’s 13th largest brewery. The new taproom, which will be Ballast Point’s seventh in California, will also include a family-friendly beer garden so people can soak up that lovely Anaheim weather.

According to the brewery, executives at Disney were actually the ones that reached out to them about the plan. “After visiting several of our Southern California locations and interacting with our employees, Disney asked if we were interested in opening a Downtown Disney location about a year ago—an offer we couldn’t refuse,” Ballast Point president Marty Birkel told Brewbound. “Disney has a clear plan to elevate and localize their offerings in Downtown Disney to make it a destination for locals and visitors alike.”

Interestingly, Ballast Point was launched with humble beginning out of the back of a homebrew shop in 1996 but has gone on to become one of the biggest and best-known names in beer. It’s actually a story not that dissimilar from Disney’s own story of “It was all started by a mouse.”

25 January, 2018