THE STORY, PURPOSE, MISSION & CORE VALUES
PURPOSE STATEMENT (External, Why, Guides Us)
BEER FOR GOOD
MISSION STATEMENT (Internal, What, Drives Us)
Use consciously crafted beers as a catalyst for
connection and environmental action.
CORE VALUES (How We Get There)
● Ingredients matter: True to our roots, we brew intellectually curious beer with respect for ingredients, their producers, and the environmentally sustainable ways they were grown.
● Details matter: We approach our work with passion and keen attention to detail, acknowledging that all interactions with our brand—even the small ones—contribute to the overall experience.
● Relationships matter: We engage in all relationships with accountability for our actions, the intention to uplift each other, and genuine care for the greater good.
● The planet matters: We embrace our role as a leader in a community of global citizens responsible for environmental stewardship.
BEER AS A FORCE FOR GOOD:
GIVING BACK
We chose to become a 1% for The Planet Company right out of the gates because we all believe very strongly to this day, that if you love something you have a duty to protect it.
This means that the 1% of all sales (not just profits) are donated to environmental non-profits. We do not consider this as charitable donations by us, rather we view it as more of a “cost of doing business.”
We choose to donate our 1% locally, nationally & internationally working with environmental non-profits on the ground actually doing the work protecting the lands we all love and the planet that sustains us.
BREWING CLEAN & WITH THE SEASONS
In our eyes, beer is an agricultural product and brewing with the seasons using local and organic ingredients when seasonally available just makes sense. It makes sense from a community perspective as well as sustainability perspective.
Unlike a lot of breweries, we often times work backwards when creating beer starting with the best ingredients we can find at the peak of freshness and then finally settling on a style. We like to say we brew with style and not necessarily always “to style.”
Our process is simple: Use the best ingredients you can find, leave out the chemicals and fining agents, add in some passion, hard work, a little bit of love and we believe that you can taste the difference.
CREATING COMMUNITY
Becoming part of the local community to us is more than just becoming the ol’ watering hole.
The origins of brewing were communal and beer was simply brewed with what was growing locally creating a terroir of the beer showcasing the local community.
To us it means connecting and working with other local businesses, breweries and farmers, raising awareness, hosting events and generally just being a good neighbor and community member.
IT ALL STARTED BACK IN 2013
When friends from San Diego, Jesse Pine and Mat Robar were on a backpacking trip with friends in the Rocky Mountains. Now if you have ever been backpacking, there is not a whole lot distracting you out there, so you tend to talk a lot on the trail and that is where it started, on the slow climb to the top of a 12,253 ft mountain in Colorado…
Jesse had recently moved to Costa Rica and was starting to become acquainted with the country. The conversation flowed from the scenic vistas he had seen to hidden beaches, exotic local fruits and eventually settled on beer oddly enough. You see at that time in Costa Rica, there weren’t many options for beer other than mass produced local lagers. That being said, Jesse had attended the country’s 2nd annual craft beer festival and saw that it was starting to gain some traction, not just with American expats looking for a taste of home, but also with the local population.
AND SO, OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS IN THE WOODS,
the idea took shape to open a craft brewery in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica and Manuel Antonio Brewing Company was born, Pura Vida!
Fast forward 2 years after raising money, brewing in the jungle and going through the “eventful” process of starting the business in Costa Rica and we had a decision to make. Try to make the brewery work in an area that did not have the right infrastructure (waste water treatment, cold transportation…etc) or move the business back to the states. As fate would have it, the weekend we decided not move forward in Costa Rica, we got a call about a space opening up in Miramar with a prebuilt brewing system that would allow us to get up and running quickly and it made the decision pretty clear.
WITHIN A MONTH WE HAD A LEASE SIGNED AND THE BREWERY WAS MOVING BACK TO SAN DIEGO.
Now, even though the brewery was moving back to San Diego, we decided to keep a lot of the elements that made Costa Rica and the initial brewery concept unique. Things such as using pure, unique and local ingredients whenever possible, taking care of the environment and telling a story of the ingredients and process along with the beer itself. Although we were no longer in the jungle, we wanted to bring the Pura Vida spirit back to San Diego and that is how we came to settle on the name, Pure Project for the new brewery.
We had another big decision to make however, because we needed a real brewmaster. We probably could have scraped by in Costa Rica home brewing for awhile, but in one of the top beer destinations in the world, we knew we needed a professional.
Enter Winslow Sawyer, an award winning brewer from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Winslow stood out to us immediately because he was a great culture fit. With a strong knowledge and background in agriculture, he was very connected to the ingredients and did his senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz on sustainability in the brewing industry. Winslow jumped on board in late 2015 and quickly began to build out our initial tap list.
AS WINSLOW WAS HARD AT WORK ON RECIPE DESIGN, THE REST OF THE TEAM SET TO WORK BUILDING OUT THE TAP ROOM AND DIALING IN HOW WE WANTED THE BUSINESS TO RUN.
First and foremost on our list was a mantra that we used back in the Costa Rica days: “Details Matter.” From the ingredients, to how the beer is brewed, to the atmosphere in the tap room, to the way the bartender greets you, to the way you interact with the brand online, all the way down to the way the bathroom looks and smells.
To this day we still print the following on all of our cans and bottles: “For those who believe that quality ingredients and attention to detail matter. From grain to glass.”
It all matters.
