Bottlecraft Little Italy — Restaurant in San Diego

I'm thoroughly impressed with Bottlecraft. While I've never actually stepped foot in the store, my experience dealing with them was phenomenal.

As a San Diego ex-pat living in NYC, I was looking to get my old college roommate a birthday gift. I hit up Yelp* (because, let's be real, google is a less than ideal local search platform**) to see if I could find a solid beer store near his place in North Park. Whammo! Up pops Bottlecraft: solid four-star rating, sleek hipster aesthetic stylings and a beer list that would satisfy any beer snob's standards. And only a few blocks from my friends place to boot.

Going out on a limb, I called them up to see if they could help me out. Lo an beer hold, they were more than happy to put together a six pack sampler of awesome craft brews for me. And, here's the kicker, they even delivered to my friends place free of charge. Maybe New York has left me jaded but I was amazed at the level of customer service they demonstrated. Special shout-out to the manager, Brandon, for coming through in the clutch.

tl;dr If you're a beer drinker living in the San Diego area, give these people your business.

*full disclosure: I work for Yelp but can't write reviews so I'm forced to voice my awesome opinions on second-tier review forums such as this one. **Don't take it personally, Google, I love most everything...

Great tap list. They had some La Cumbre beers from New Mexico beers on tap that I know do not distribute to Southern California, so it means they do some trading for kegs or commuting. 5 stars for that effort alone. The pricing was pretty crazy for the pours of that IPA ($4 for a 5 oz taster), but I suppose they had to go to some lengths to get it there.

The refrigerated bottle section was small, but all pretty decent offerings. Most things are sold as individual bottles and cans, even if they are typically sold in 6-packs elsewhere (Port Brewing, etc.), but the individual bottle/can pricing isn't bad for their convenient location, especially if you are drinking on premise. A bottle shop + beer bar combination is a great thing for any neighborhood, and they do a good job of it for the limited amount of space...

If only the staff was more informative instead of immediately shutting down when we walked in. We had our niece and nephew with us and we were unaware of the 21+ rule. The bartender demanded to see everyone’s ID….even the obvious 13 yr old who made a joke about being 21. Dude he was so obviously underage. Chill. They went outside and I told the bartender they would continue down the side walk. Well he informed me they “own” the sidewalk and he refused to serve me. I told my party to keep walking off the property and that still wasn’t enough for this bartender. So I eventually left without escalating the situation but it was super unnecessary. Could have been handled way better especially since all the underage people were gonna walk down the street. A 40 year old dude Just...