Why Lawless Brewing Co. matters.
Lawless Brewing Co. is an independent craft brewery where the NoHo Arts District's entertainment culture meets a homebrewing project developed by Emmy-winning television producers, German-trained brewing expertise and North Hollywood's first dedicated production brewery.
Set along Craner Avenue near Weddington Street and just steps from the Television Academy campus, the brewery occupies the eastern side of the NoHo Arts District between Lankershim Boulevard and Vineland Avenue, with the Metro transit hub anchoring the district westward and studio properties extending south toward Toluca Lake. The 8,000-square-foot facility occupies a former film-equipment property, retaining the broad industrial volume required for production brewing and a substantial public taproom. A mezzanine rises above the main floor with direct views across fermentation tanks and the 15-barrel brewhouse, making production equipment a dominant part of the interior composition. A 500-square-foot patio extends the gathering area outdoors, with a barrel room adding pinball machines, video games and another social zone within the brewery. The result is a working brewery whose industrial scale, exposed production system, elevated taproom views and location inside North Hollywood's entertainment district connect craft beer directly with the neighborhood's creative industries.
What defines Lawless Brewing Co.
Lawless Brewing Co. is best known for turning Ben and Whitney Wallace's homebrewing project into North Hollywood's first dedicated brewery after an unusually long development period spanning television careers, recipe development and a pandemic-era buildout. The husband-and-wife founders accumulated a combined ten Emmy Awards as producers for Entertainment Tonight, with Ben's brewing interest beginning after he bought a small homebrew kit and started fermenting beer in a closet. A friend encountered the improvised setup and declared that it was “Lawless” inside, supplying the name that Ben and Whitney retained when they founded the project in 2010. Ben began brewing with Aaron Rainwater in 2013, and the pair spent subsequent years developing recipes before plans for a commercial operation advanced. The brewery entered regulatory work for its North Hollywood facility in 2018 and secured a critical conditional-use permit shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted Los Angeles in 2020, pushing the physical buildout into an exceptionally difficult operating environment. The delay gave the brewing team additional development time, and German-trained brewer Josh McCombs brought professional production expertise after earlier brewery work in Los Angeles. Lawless finally opened its North Hollywood taproom in 2021, placing an 8,000-square-foot brewery in a district that had previously lacked a production brewery of its own.
A 15-barrel brewhouse gives McCombs and the brewing team the production base for a rotating lineup spanning pilsners, IPAs, sours and Belgian-derived styles. NoHo Boho approaches lager through the crisp malt and hop structure of a Bohemian pilsner, giving the tap list a traditional counterweight to the brewery's more hop-driven releases. Dankershim shifts toward West Coast IPA territory, concentrating hop bitterness and aromatic intensity into a beer whose name folds the surrounding Lankershim corridor into the brewery itself. Hazy IPAs move toward softer bitterness and fuller hop aroma, widening the contrast against the brewery's lager production. Sixteen rotating house-brewed selections formed the early tap list, allowing McCombs to move among fermentation profiles and brewing traditions without narrowing production to a single stylistic specialty. The fermentation tanks remain visible from the mezzanine above the taproom, keeping the equipment responsible for those changes physically present within the public room. Lawless ties its beer program to both classical brewing technique and the experimentation enabled by a production facility conceived from the outset for a broad range of styles.
How Lawless Brewing Co. fits.
Lawless Brewing Co. works as the anchor for a North Hollywood outing connecting the nineteenth-century railroad infrastructure behind the district's agricultural growth, a surviving theater from the Valley's transition into screen entertainment and the institution that made North Hollywood a permanent center of American television culture.
Begin at Lankershim Depot, a wood-frame Southern Pacific station constructed 1896 as rail service reached the community then known as Toluca and agricultural producers needed a freight connection for fruit, livestock and other goods moving through the San Fernando Valley. The depot later carried the Lankershim name as the surrounding settlement adopted the same designation, and Pacific Electric added passenger service there in 1911, turning a freight facility into part of the Valley's expanding electric railway network. Service ended in 1952, leaving one of the region's few surviving nineteenth-century wood-frame railroad stations; Metro began a $3.6 million restoration in 2010 that addressed contaminated soil, roofing, lead paint and historic exterior woodwork. Continue to El Portal Theatre, built in 1926 as a vaudeville and silent-film house before motion pictures became its dominant purpose. The building survived decades of entertainment-industry change and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, then underwent reconstruction during the late 1990s and reopened in January 2000 as a performing-arts complex. Its former 1,400-seat auditorium was divided into three venues, including a 360-seat main stage, with carpeting salvaged from the former Shubert Theatre later entering the interior. Conclude at Television Academy, founded from Syd Cassyd's ambition to create a serious professional forum for the emerging television medium and eventually responsible for the Emmy Awards. The organization announced North Hollywood as the site of its permanent campus in 1987, broke ground in 1988 and moved there in May 1991 beside a giant Emmy statue and Hall of Fame Plaza conceived under production designer Jan Scott. A $40 million campaign launched in 2014 subsequently rebuilt the campus around the Saban Media Center and Wolf Theatre, which opened during the Academy's 70th anniversary celebration in June 2016. The progression moves from the railroad depot that connected the agricultural settlement with regional commerce through a 1926 theater shaped by successive forms of popular entertainment and culminates at the Television Academy campus, tracing North Hollywood's evolution from Valley farming center into an institutional home of American screen culture.
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