Mission Brewing - East Village — Restaurant in San Diego

This place is very upsetting, I wouldn’t even give this place 1 star. I scheduled a brewery Tour & Tasting for my husband and 7 of his closest friends on Saturday 4/21/2018. I scheduled this 5 weeks in advance on 3/29/2018. They were in San Diego celebrating a bachelor weekend in honor of their friend. I purchased a Groupon for the tour and was directed to the mission brewery website where I booked a tour/tasting for 2:00pm on that Saturday. I received a confirmation email confirming that reservation for 2pm. We emailed back shortly to change the time to 4:00pm or 4:30pm due to another activity that would have overlapped. Over the next few days we checked our email and nothing, NEVER had any correspondence back from Mission Brewery that our requested time change was honored, therefore we stuck with the 2:00pm confirmation that we initially received and later adjusted our schedule of other activities around to fit in with the brewery tour. Unfortunately, when my husband and his friends arrived early for a 2:00pm tour/tasting, they said the tour was at 4:00pm and they would not be able to honor 2:00pm. Mind you, without further correspondence from their end they had already had other activities planned out. The manager lady that handled this dispute was very rude, not accommodating or flexible. Overall terrible customer service. She treated my husband like a second class citizen and I do not appreciate that. She made it seem like we were in the wrong but we never, I repeat never had an email response or phone call to confirm our change of time request so it was clearly on Mission Brewery’s end not ours! A company that has good reviews and even offers a Groupon made this choice easy for us to choose and now we regret it. My husband and his group of friends had a dissatisfied experience at that brewery because of that unresolved confusion. In the future, we will happily pay full price somewhere else just to have better customer service and some respect. San Diego is the “Napa” of breweries and unfortunately, we chose...

Mission Brewery is located in what appears to be an old Wonder Bread factory. The brewery has an old world Spanish galleon theme going on, and it’s really cool. I didn’t get a good shot of the bar, but the wood it’s built with is finished to look like it came from one of those old ships. They also sell kegs, growlers and crowlers, but they keep with the ship theme and call their crowlers “cannons.”

On my maiden voyage to the Mission Brewery, I ordered a flight of four - four ounce pours for $7.50. On my sample board were the following beers:

“Mission Hefeweizen” - Hefs are usually one of my go-to beers, but this one just didn’t do it for me. It was too light tasting I guess. “This Must be a Saison” - I try saisons on occasion, but they’re not on my usual rotation. However, this one was quite tasty. It was a Saison with sauvignon blanc mixed in and it had a light, crisp, fruity smell and taste to it. It wasn’t on the menu board, but the tapmaster told me about it and talked me into it. “Mission Amber” - this was probably my favorite - good and malty, but in a good way. “D-Gnarly India Pale Kolsch” - I like a good kolsch, but not Inida Pale Ales. So when I saw India Pale in the name of this beer, I almost didn’t order it. But I had never heard of an IPK before, so I figured what the hell, let me try it out. I wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as hoppy as a straight forward IPA, so I survived it. It was a crisp kolsch with light fruit flavors to it - very light. I don’t like fruity beers, but the taste of it in this one was perfect, and I would try it again.

All in all, this is a cool brewery, with awesome staff, service, and beer! They also have a nice shuffleboard table, some pinball machines, a really long bar and plenty of table seating. You can also bring your own food or have it delivered here.

Five stars to...

Do not hold events here, and if you do make sure they’re large enough (50+) to make money because this place doesn’t really seem to care about smaller events. My husband and I held our rehearsal dinner here. We hired a food truck and contracted the bar to serve a party of 25+ upstairs in their event space. Our event was supposed to begin at 5, guests promptly arrived at 5PM and there was no mobile bar set up as we had agreed upon. My guests were left to order downstairs and pay for their own tab rather than adding to our minimum bar tab for the mobile bar. It took about 45 minutes for them to setup the mobile bar when we arrived.

Now we didn’t expect a mobile bar to have all of the full offerings as the bar downstairs, however there were only two beers on tap and no soft drinks upstairs. Which still left guests having to go up and down the stairs and again, being charged downstairs rather than adding to the tab upstairs unless my husband or I went with them.

I was also originally told there were tables we could use for seating, then they backtracked and said no there weren’t, which was fine, so I went ahead and rented tables and chairs for our older guests who couldn’t sit at the high top tables which were offered. Upon arriving I discovered there were two, large, round glass tables (standard height) which meant I never needed to order the rentals but no one told me this. Money wasted.

I gave this place enough opportunity to resolve the issues we had and have yet to receive a response but prior to the event they were very responsive. I’m extremely disappointed in how they’ve decided to handle this matter and would not recommend to anyone for...