Mission Brewery: San Diego’s 1913 Beer Landmark and Its Strange Second Life
A San Diego building once went from hosting beer tastings to serving as an isolation hospital during the 1919 influenza epidemic, then spent decades processing seaweed. That is a more varied career than most of us can fit on one résumé, and it belongs to Mission Brewery.
The brewery’s story connects San Diego’s growing port city, its early beer culture and the changing rules around alcohol. It also gives the city’s present-day bars a deeper backstory than “this is where we ordered the lager.”
The details are unusually vivid: a city-backed project, a distinctive architectural style and a business that had to reinvent the building after beer stopped being the plan. Follow the dates and Mission Brewery starts to feel less like a dusty address and more like a tiny case study in how San Diego adapts.
A brewery built for a growing city
Mission Brewery opened in 1913 in Middletown, a historic district between downtown and Old Town. The San Diego History Center’s archive records that the City commissioned the brewery in the early 1900s and hired Chicago’s Griesser and Son to design it. Architect Richard Griesser oversaw its construction in 1912.
The building’s Mission Revival style made it a striking piece of civic architecture, but the business had a practical purpose: produce local beer for a city whose population and commercial life were expanding. The brewery quickly became more than a place where barrels left the loading area.
Tastings, lunches and an early beer community
In its heyday, Mission Brewery welcomed community leaders for tastings and lunches and promoted its beer throughout San Diego. Those details make the place sound less like a sealed-off factory and more like a social hub with a brewing operation attached.
San Diego’s beer scene now includes independent breweries, tasting rooms and tap lists that can take a determined visitor all weekend to investigate. Mission Brewery belongs to an earlier chapter, when a local brewery helped give the city a place to gather around its own product.
The archive records that the brewery closed in 1917, as temperance and prohibition movements gained influence in San Diego. National Prohibition did not begin until 1920, so the brewery shut down before the nationwide ban. That timing matters: local pressure and changing laws were already reshaping the business before the familiar national chapter arrived.
The building changed careers
Mission Brewery’s closure did not end the building’s usefulness. In 1919 it served briefly as an isolation hospital during the influenza epidemic. American Agar Company bought it in 1923, and the site processed seaweed until 1986.
The building was later renovated as Mission Brewery Plaza. The History Center notes that it was designated a historic site in 1989 and recognizes its connection to Prohibition history and its status as the country’s first Mission Revival-style brewery. A place that once marketed beer survived by changing its job description several times.
Find the story on a San Diego visit
Mission Brewery Plaza sits in Middletown, outside the Gaslamp Quarter, so it is a separate stop to plan rather than a promised stop on a pub crawl. The surrounding district also connects downtown with Old Town and Little Italy, making it a natural addition to a day exploring San Diego’s historic core.
If you visit, look at the building as both architecture and evidence. The decorative style speaks to San Diego’s early-twentieth-century ambitions; its uses tell a less polished, more practical story about public health, industry and changing tastes.
Take San Diego’s bar stories into the Gaslamp
Mission Brewery is one chapter in a city whose relationship with beer has kept changing. San Diego Crawling’s Gaslamp Pub Crawl follows that larger thread through local bars and four stops in the historic Gaslamp Quarter, with an expert guide sharing hidden and hilarious stories along the way. Public crawls run daily at 3:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m., plus noon on Saturdays and Sundays, and last 2 hours and 15 minutes. Guests are 21+, and drinks are purchased separately.
The brewery and the crawl are different visits, but both reward the same habit: notice the building, ask what used to happen there, and let San Diego answer with a story. Pick a visit to Mission Brewery Plaza, book a Gaslamp crawl, or make room for both.
One small itinerary note: save time for the building itself rather than treating the brewery as a quick photo stop. Its exterior gives you a chance to notice the Mission Revival design, while the history adds context to San Diego’s early commercial districts. The Gaslamp Quarter history page helps connect the historic core to New Town’s early development.