Karl Strauss Brewing Company, the pioneer of craft beer in San Diego, now brews and bottles its beer in San Diego since it opened a new bottling operation on Santa Fe Street in Pacific Beach. The local brewing giant also celebrates 20 years of business this year. “San Diego’s such a beer Mecca,” said Melody Daversa, spokesperson for Karl Strauss, “We’re happy to have sparked a beer renaissance in San Diego.” After an extensive remodel completed in January, the Santa Fe Street Brewery now fills 72,000 brown bottles of beer a week. The beer was formerly bottled at Stevens Point Brewery in Wisconsin and shipped West, where it can be found at more than 2,500 locations throughout Southern California, from Santa Barbara to San Diego County. The brewing company first started in Mission Beach and moved to the Santa Fe location in 1996 into a converted greenhouse. Wanting to expand operations without moving from the facility, the company reconfigured the building to include a two-story bottling production line, five new 240-barrel fermenting tanks and two new 120-barrel bright tanks, increasing brewing capacity from 31,000 to 60,000 barrels annually. A new computer system enables brewers to monitor each step of the fermentation process. “When we outgrew our original location we knew that we wanted to stay near the beach where we felt connected to our community and close to where it all began,” said president and co-founder Matt Rattner. “We found just the right spot for our brewery in Pacific Beach and we plan on being here for years to come.” The new bottling line can produce both 12 and 22-ounce bottles, allowing for the production of more seasonal and specialty beers, and the equipment can fill up to 350 bottles per minute. Karl Strauss Brewing Company has hired an additional brewer and brewer’s assistant to help oversee the expansion. Improvements have also been made to improve the quality of the beer. Cold sterile filtering will replace the heat pasteurization process to help bottled beer taste more like draft. To match the newer, fresher taste, Karl Strauss has also freshened up its look, with an updated packaging and design scheme in celebration of its 20th anniversary. Its iconic Red Trolley Ale logo will not go away, however. College graduates Chris Cramer and Matt Rattner started the Karl Strauss Brewing Company in the late ’80’s with the help of Cramer’s uncle, master brewer Karl Strauss, who worked at the helm of Pabst beer for decades. Seeing microbrews as the wave of the future, the entrepreneurs opened their first brewery downtown on Columbia Street in 1989.    By 1990, Cramer and Rattner were distributing beers to other bars and restaurants. A year later they had built their first distributing brewery in San Diego County. The first bottled beer, Amber Lager, was first sold by Costco in 1995. They opened a brewery restaurant in La Jolla in 1996. Three years later, the company began distributing in Orange County and Los Angeles. In December 2006, Karl Strauss died at the age of 94, leaving a legacy of brewing that spanned generations. Now, there are six Karl Strauss brewery restaurant locations in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange County. The brewery employs a total of 440 employees: 372 at the restaurants and 68 at the home office. Cramer and Rattner are also philanthropists. They established a Brewer’s Education Fund to assist aspiring brewers. The company also commits 1 percent of its beer sales to nonprofits ranging from museums to arts and environmental organizations, including the Surfrider Foundation. So far, the brewing company has donated $67,000, according to Daversa. Beer appears to be a recession-resistant commodity. Overall sales are about on par with last year and bottle sales have increased. The economy may be tanking, but people have not stopped drinking beer yet.