Beachwood Brewing Opens Bright Bixby Knolls Tasting Room

Long Beach’s homegrown Beachwood Brewing is opening up a brand-new tasting room in Bixby Knolls. Beachwood Brewing & Distilling, as it will be known, is the fourth Beachwood location, and the first of three new tasting rooms they are planning to open in 2022.

The taproom debuts on Saturday, after a quick-flip of the space, taking over from Liberation Brewing Co., which closed down earlier this year. Though most of the space will be dedicated to the distillery, they do plan to brew small batches of beer to be released in-house. The tap list will be filled out with beers from their flagship Long Beach and Huntington beach production locales, plus Beachwood Blendery sours.

Though the tasting room does open this week, the distillery aspect is still in the works – the team hopes to start releasing that part of this latest venture in 2023. This will mark Beachwood’s first foray into liquor, but they’ll draw on their deep experience in blending at Beachwood Blendery, their sour-only tasting room in downtown Long Beach that opened back in 2015.

“Distillation is something that we have talked about doing for years,” Beachwood co-founder Gabriel Gordon said in a statement. “Beachwood’s brewing team has excelled at creating beers that pinpoint specific flavors we want to express, and the sour beer program at the Blendery has honed our ability to work with all kinds of fruits, herbs and spices, as well as our blending skills.”

“With the team’s experience, it was all there to form a concept around a distilling program, and we’ll approach the spirits that we produce the exact same way we approach beer – respect of the tradition, mastery of the fundamentals, and building upon that to create unique interpretations,” Gordon continued.

The space has been brightened up significantly since the Liberation days – gone are the industrial aluminum panels and giant murals, and in are flashing whites and bursts of color from their trophy-style tap handles. They also added a fresh coat of paint, and designed simple mosaics to cover the tap walls. Perhaps most impressively, they’ve added significant draft capacity, upping the 12-tap capacity to 24.

Though new to the Bixby Knolls neighborhood, Beachwood is a familiar name to Long Beach locals. They opened their original Seal Beach location back in 2009, and then began brewing at their current downtown LB hub, led by longtime head brewer Julian Shrago, in 2011.

This is the first of a giant planned expansion still to come for the brewery in 2022. Next up will be a taproom in the Long Beach Marina. Beachwood Brewing Taproom has been in development since 2019, but was delayed significantly by COVID. After that will be Beachwood Pizza & Beer in Huntington Beach, a brand-new pizzeria concept. Both new locations are expected to open before fall. For all the details on those locations, check out our story from earlier this summer.

Beachwood Brewing & Distilling will hold its grand opening this Saturday, with giveaways, new beer releases, live music, food pop-ups, and more. Going forward, they’ll be open Wednesday and Thursday 3-9pm, Friday and Saturday 12-10pm, and Sunday 12-7pm.