Made in the West

One of the joys of the newly opened MadeWest Brewing Company is sitting on the patio and looking out to the Channel Islands with a cold housemade beer in your hands. Located in an industrial area of Ventura, and a new addition to the Off-Market Street Tasting Trail, the brewery is ultra hip: concrete floors, high ceilings and a black, white and stainless motif. There’s a striking, hand-painted brewery mural along one wall created by Scott Chenoweth, the brewery’s art director and marketing guru.

With a 30-barrel brewhouse and four 60-barrel fermenters, there’s lots of brewing capacity.

There’s lots of seating, too. People can pull up a chair at one of the long communal tables, sitting down with food brought in or ordered from a food truck stationed there and sample from the six or more beers on tap brewed in a West Coast style. Three to four will be core beers with a rotation of “one-offs” and seasonal varieties, says co-founder and head brewer Mike Morrison. (The other member of the team is co-founder and CEO Seth Gibson.)

The MW Standard (with German Hallertau hops) and WM Classic (with Hersbrucker and Cascade hops) are both cold-fermented ales. “We wanted to utilize our California ale yeast to produce lager-like flavor characteristics to diversify our beers,” says Morrison, a Ventura hometown guy who’s been brewing beer about a decade.

It’s an innovative craft, he says, with endless possibilities. So it’s not surprising that the day we visited the six beers ranged from a pale ale with three hop varieties (Mosaic, Simcoe and Equinox) to a porter with Cascade hops.

MadeWest Brewing Company
1744 Donlon St., Ventura
805-947-5002; MadeWest.com