California’s First Seltzery Coming to Pacific Grove

August 10, 2021 – A cancelled country music concert, a rare brewery in wine territory and some fond memories of the Feast of Lanterns don’t seem like the most natural recipe for a historic—new word alert—seltzery.

But those are among the key ingredients bringing California Seltzer Co. to Pacific Grove, and to a landmark Lovers Point property that’s been dark for seemingly forever.

As soon as this November, the former Latitudes (and before that, The Tinnery) will be tapping eight different house flavors of hard seltzers to go with craft beer from its Lodi-based brother brewery, wood-fired pizzas and panini. (While CSC’s plans are filed with the city and the health department, a fall or winter debut seems optimistic.)

But back to the country concert. 

Central Valley Brewfest founder Veronica Camp was planning a show with headliner Easton Corbin for summer 2020, with Five Window Beer Company as the primary sponsor.

In came COVID, and out went the lights. 

Here’s where Camp likes to say life gave them lemons, and they made pineapple-lemon seltzer. She and Five Window owners Charlie Lippert and Joseph Ehlers started scheming new projects, and landed on fermenting sugar into adult beverages, which they promptly started studying. 

When their small batches of sparkling tonics—in cans they rolled labels onto by hand—sold out almost immediately, they started scaling up their dreams.

“Wouldn’t it be cool to do the first ‘seltzery’ in California?” Camp remembers asking. 

They wanted to cultivate a craft beer-bar style counterpoint to massive productions like Truly and White Claw, and craft beer happens to be a core competency—and one that made Five Windows a darling of Lodi. 

Five Windows started 10 years ago as Lippert and Ehlers began home brewing with a kit on the stove. As their brew gained popularity among friends, they built bigger and bigger brewing systems, and started doing the math on the local winery/brewery ratio (which hovered around 80-to-one). After two years of searching, they eventually found an attractive industrial space at one end of downtown and decided to go for it.

Today their Northeastern-style Doubly Hazy Juicy IPA, high-voltage Cream Ale and Wango Mango IPA rank among popular pours. Another crowd pleaser is the house pizza, like the spicy sopressata-garlic, thanks to unique double-proofed dough made with brewer’s yeast.

“Some of our most popular pizzas are simple,” says Lippert, who helped develop the pizza program after studying with the Mugnaini oven makers who crafted Five Window’s cherrywood-fired oven. “People just rave about the crust.”

The plan is to export the same wood-fired recipe to P.G., along with kegs of small-batch seltzer and craft beer.

CSC’s flagship seltzer flavors are the product of an intensive tasting marathon mid-pandemic. 

“When we were thinking about flavors I wanted to do something different than what was on the market,” Camp says. “I am Mexican-American and I’m drawn to aguas frescas, so I went to some of my local markets and picked and pulled from there.” 

For two weeks, the pineapple juice, plum juice, hibiscus juice, tamarind juice, peach juice, nectarine juice, watermelon juice and prickly pear juice flowed.

“You name it, we tried it,” she says. 

Along with their fourth partner/sales pointman Andrew Enos, the three co-founders voted and landed on pineapple lemon, hibiscus lime, blood orange and berry rush—the latter name a nod to Camp’s time as a cheerleader with the San Francisco 49ers Gold Rush. They’ve since added seasonal flavors like pink lemonade and are developing the other seltzers that will star at Lovers Point.

The team scouted spots from Napa to Sacramento to Livermore to Pleasanton before pinpointing Pacific Grove. Butterfly Town U.S.A. took the inside lane because of trips Camp took with her family to watch lights float out on the ocean for the annual Feast of Lanterns, from the grass at Lovers Point Park.

“Nothing captured our hearts like Pacific Grove,” she says. “We fell in love with the spot.”

Since the Latitudes days, the Lovers Point property has been sliced into several spaces. CSC will occupy one of them, part “A,” a 1,400-square-foot piece with an adjoining patio that approaches 500 square feet. A basement will work as the cold room, holding kegs whose lines run up to the taps and freeing up crucial floor space. 

Final plans for the buildout are filed with the city and health department and the partners say contractors are ready to pounce once clearances are issued. 

They’re not the only ones eager for new life. Locals have watched the place stay dormant for a dozen years, which is at least one reason CSC has received a very enthusiastic welcome.

“It’s an understatement,” Camp says, “but the outpouring of support we’ve received has been amazing.”

P.G. Chamber of Commerce President Moe Ammar is well-versed on the site’s potential, citing annual revenues for The Tinnery that reached $5 million (though The Tinnery took up more square footage). He points to the parking it includes, the lodging that surrounds it, and quotes a recent chamber study saying an estimated 4.5 million people pass through Lovers Point Park every year. 

“In terms of strategic location,” Ammar says, “it’s as good as it gets.” 

Like the bubbles its business is built upon, here’s hoping the state’s first seltzery rises to the occasion.

More at californiaseltzerco.com. Parties interested in applying for chef, tasting room manager, and other positions can email veronica@californiaseltzerco.com.