Modern Times Beer
San Diego, CA
Operational Philosophy
San Diego cult house focusing on experimental styles, in-house coffee roasting, and heavy adjuncts.
Specialty Focus
Coffee-Infused Stouts & Fruit-Saturated Goses
Benchmark Expression
Black House Stout features rich, roasted coffee beans blended with oatmeal smoothness.
Sommelier Audit Deconstruction
Modern Times built its identity in San Diego on a combination that isn't obvious on paper — a genuinely serious coffee-roasting operation paired with a hop program built for the hazy-can era. That coffee background shows up throughout the beer lineup, particularly in stouts and darker beers where house-roasted coffee gets folded in with more precision than most breweries manage as a side project. The hazy IPA side of the business is where Modern Times competes with San Diego's deep bench of hop-forward breweries, leaning on bright, juicy, can-forward releases built for freshness over cellaring. Between the two threads, the brewery has carved out an identity that's harder to pin down than a typical San Diego IPA house, and that range is part of its appeal. Haliʻā watches Modern Times for both sides of that equation — hazy cans that need to travel cold and fast to hit their freshness window, and coffee-driven stouts that bring a different kind of San Diego complexity to a drop-box lineup heavy on hops. Oʻahu readers: a Modern Times drop could land as a juicy hazy or a coffee-forward stout — either way, it's San Diego by way of the roaster.
