Why Boomtown Brewery matters.
Boomtown Brewery is an industrial craft brewery where the Arts District's warehouse culture meets Samuel Chawinga's long pursuit of a Los Angeles brewhouse, old-world beer styles reshaped through California ingredients and a production program increasingly recognized in statewide competition.
Set along Jackson Street near Vignes Street and just east of the Los Angeles River rail corridor, the brewery occupies the northern Arts District between former freight infrastructure, low industrial blocks and the historic transportation district surrounding Union Station. A 1912 double-truss industrial building contains the operation, preserving the broad spans and utilitarian scale that originally distinguished the neighborhood's manufacturing architecture. Brewing occupies a 9,000-square-foot production facility built around a 23-barrel combination mash tun and lauter tun with a direct-fire kettle, placing working equipment immediately beside the public-facing operation. Two bars, custom furniture, lounge groupings and murals spread the drinking areas across the warehouse. The result is a production brewery whose large physical footprint binds brewing, visual art and public gathering to the converted industrial architecture that shaped this section of Downtown.
What defines Boomtown Brewery.
Boomtown Brewery is best known for converting Samuel “Chewy” Chawinga's nearly decade-long effort to establish a brewery into one of the Arts District operations that helped define Los Angeles craft beer during its mid-2010s expansion. Born in Malawi to an American mother and African father who had met in Los Angeles, Chawinga became interested in beer through a UC Davis course on alcohol production at E. amp; J. Gallo Winery, then earned his bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley and brewed professionally before graduating. His brewing career continued in Portland, where he developed the technical foundation for a project he wanted to bring to Los Angeles. The future Boomtown group began coalescing 2008 or 2009, but the recession interrupted its early ambitions for about four years as recipes continued developing and the partners searched for a viable property. An attempted Hollywood Boulevard location failed to pencil out, and Chawinga subsequently spent more than a year pursuing another Hollywood site before the group found an Arts District warehouse in 2012. Chawinga scouted the eventual location, secured funding and directed development of the brewing operation, joining partners including John Rankin and Alex Kagianaris. Production began in 2015, with Ingenue Belgian white ale reaching the L.A. Beer Week kickoff before the public taproom had opened; regulatory delays kept that room unfinished as Boomtown distributed kegs through Wine Warehouse and established its beers in Los Angeles bars. The taproom eventually opened in 2017, turning the production site into the destination brewery the founders had envisioned years earlier. Boomtown's brewing leadership subsequently passed through Ben Turkel to Amber Sawicki, a Fine Arts graduate who entered Los Angeles craft brewing and became head brewer after seven years in the industry; by 2026 she was serving as both head brewer and director of operations. Competitive recognition followed that maturation. Ryetetous won first place for rye ale or lager at the 2023 Brewers Cup of California, Submission took second place in specialty honey ale or lager at the same competition, and Oscuro earned bronze in the European dark and Münchner Dunkel category in 2026. Chawinga's own career subsequently extended beyond Boomtown through South Los Angeles Beverage Company, where he applied the brewing, branding and production experience developed in the Arts District toward beverage incubation and brewer training in South Los Angeles.
Submission preserves Chawinga's early preference for old-world structure with an unconventional Los Angeles ingredient set, building an 8.6-percent Belgian golden strong ale from Belgian brewing components, local star jasmine and carrot blossom honey. The honey contributes cedar-like notes that merge with the yeast's fermentation character and jasmine aromatics, yet the beer finishes dry despite its strength, making attenuation as important to the composition as its floral ingredients. Ingenue approaches that dry finish through another route, combining Belgian pilsner malt, white winter wheat and rolled oats with imported Czech Saaz hops and extremely soft brewing water, using the oats for body. Limelight reverses the water treatment by constructing hard water in-house before Citra, Cascade, Mosaic and Zeus hops build guava, grapefruit and stone-fruit character over caramel-toned malt and firmer bitterness. Brett Michaels pushes the brewery into fermentation and aging, taking a kettle-soured Belgian blonde through a minimum of three years in barrels before seasonal fruit enters the finished beer. The Artist Series connects another production cycle directly to the surrounding district by pairing successive hazy double IPAs with commissioned artwork; Richard Arthur, whose Bowie and Roxy Music murals appear inside the brewery, carried that relationship onto the 8.4-percent Medusa release, whose hop profile develops mango, grapefruit, citrus and tropical fruit. Boomtown's brewing character emerges through controlled changes in water chemistry, fermentation, flowers, honey, hops, barrel time and fruit, using technical decisions to move old-world ale and lager foundations into distinctly Los Angeles expressions.
How Boomtown Brewery fits.
Boomtown Brewery works as the anchor for a northern Downtown outing connecting Los Angeles' oldest surviving residence, an immigrant community hall that became a center of labor and free-speech activity and a grand postal facility built to process the communications of a rapidly expanding metropolis.
Begin at Avila Adobe, constructed in 1818 by Francisco José Avila, a Sinaloa-born ranchero who had served as alcalde of Los Angeles in 1810. The house belonged to the Mexican-era pueblo decades before industrial development pushed eastward toward the river. During the American conquest of California, Commodore Robert Stockton's forces commandeered it as military headquarters for nine days in January 1847. Avila's daughter Francisca later occupied the property with Theodore Rimpau and their nine children before the family moved to Anaheim, where Rimpau became that city's first mayor. The building subsequently passed through periods as a restaurant, rooming house and vacant property before twentieth-century preservation secured the oldest surviving residence in Los Angeles. Continue to Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, housed inside Italian Hall, the 1908 community center built when an Italian enclave occupied part of the northern Downtown district. Immigrants used the building to find employment, housing and advice, and its rooms accommodated weddings, dances, concerts and cultural celebrations. Its position inside one of the city's early free-speech zones brought Emma Goldman and Mexican revolutionary organizers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón through the hall, connecting immigrant social life with labor and political movements. The State of California acquired the property in 1953, ending its original community-center chapter; decades of deterioration later prompted Italian American preservationists to organize for its restoration. The museum ultimately opened inside the rehabilitated building in 2016, returning Italian community history to one of the few surviving structures from the former enclave. Conclude at Terminal Annex, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's immense postal building opposite Union Station. Sarver & Zoss constructed the three-story, twin-towered facility between 1939 and 1940, with Underwood using Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture to relate the federal building to the new passenger terminal across the street. Its 400,000 square feet were engineered for continuous mail processing, and the operation opened with 1,632 postal clerks, carriers and laborers handling two million pieces each day. Conveyors, chutes, weighing equipment, cancelling machinery and sorting stations mechanized the movement of mail through a facility operating around the clock. Demand grew so rapidly that federal officials were planning a $12 million expansion only a decade later. The progression moves from a Mexican-era residence surviving the original pueblo through an immigrant hall binding community life to political activism and culminates in industrial-scale communications infrastructure built for Los Angeles after its extraordinary metropolitan expansion.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
