Some folks come to the City of Angels for a shot at stardom; Bob Kunz arrived to make beer. The owner of Highland Park Brewery, which now has two locations in California’s biggest city, he arrived more than a dozen years ago and found “a nonexistent beer scene that has become what I consider one of the most vibrant beer scenes in the United States.”
Kunz, a native of Washington State, was an English major in college when he discovered homebrewing and quickly became “obsessed.” After stints at breweries in the Pacific Northwest, such as Boundary Bay Brewery in Bellingham, Washington, he wandered about and eventually landed in Los Angeles where he got a job as assistant brewer with Craftsman Brewing and began to hone his craft. A move to Father’s Office, a well-known beer bar and restaurant in the city, further sharpened his skills (and helped him save a bit of money) before opening Highland Park Brewery in 2013.
“[Our production] brewery is awesome; it’s one of those scrappy rustic breweries that you just make happen,” he says. And it’s in a place where things happened. The original 7-barrel brewery with two 15-barrel fermentors was crammed into a 500-square-foot back room of The Hermosillo, a now-trendy wine, beer, and cocktail bar that was once an escort club. The brewery is housed in what was the VIP room but wasn’t always confined to that space. “Most of the brewery sat in the parking lot. We had a shipping container jimmy-rigged into refrigerated cold storage next to barrels, puncheons. It was tight.”