I usually (though often unsuccessfully) try to keep these San Diego craft beer brewery features brief in an effort to cater to the short attention spans of modern internet culture. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of good information and footage ends up on the cutting room floor… The time I spent with the good folks at Legacy is no exception.

The greatest story never told in this particular case was Mark’s 91 year old father cutting and grinding the steel to fabricate the bridge they all use to access the brewhouse. One of the things I learned quickly about these guys is they’re all about repurposing just about everything they can get their hands on. Partially out of necessity (especially in the beginning) but also because as Mark put it, they felt like they were cheating if they DIDN’T put every scrap they stumbled across to good use.

The steel for the bridge started life as the framing for their tanks used to protect them during shipping. They found their cold box in the middle of a field and tore it apart, re-foamed it and put it back together in the Oceanside facility themselves. Every piece of wood inside the place came from “somewhere else” and the only new material they actually purchased was for the exterior fascia of the building. Etc, etc, etc…

Now, maybe all this doesn’t have a lot to do with making beer but it seems to me that it takes true craftsmen to take would-be trash and turn it into… Well, just about anything they want. I don’t know about you but that sounds to me like just the kind of guys I want making my next beer 😉