HOW EL SEGUNDO BREWING SURVIVED AND THRIVED BY
KEEPING IT MIGHTY PURE AND PURELY LOCAL
Words By
MARK McDERMOTT
Photos By
JESSIE LEE CEDERBLOM
Rob Croxall doesn’t mind going the opposite
direction. Maybe that’s because all the roads
he has chosen lead back home to El Segundo,
where contrariness is baked into the local way of being.
And so when Croxall founded El Segundo Brewing
Company in 2011, he took no issue with the many
friends who kindly suggested he was out of his mind.
He was, by most measures, already sitting pretty. He
had a high paying job in aerospace finance, a beautiful
blue house in his hometown, El Segundo, and a lovely
wife, Amy, with whom he was raising two cool kids.
Croxall was still Business Operations Manager for
Northrop Grumman when he got into home brewing.
His signature brew became known as Blue House Pale
Ale, named after his family’s home. Friends loved it
so much that demand for the beer just kept growing,
and it sparked an idea – what if, Croxall thought, I left
corporate life behind and started a brewery?
“I can’t tell you how many people back in the day
that I told, in my prior job, that I’m starting a brewery,”
Croxall said. “People just rolled their eyes. And probably
rightfully so.”
But Croxall is nothing if not methodical, and this
wasn’t just a pipe dream. He’d been accepted to the
professional brewers program at UC Davis. He had
some funding lined up, most of it from his father, Dick
Croxall. Then, in November of 2010, his boss told him
he would have to lay off some of his staff.
“I told her, ‘Hey, I’m leaving. Give me the package
to go,’” Croxall said. “So I saved a couple people on the
way out and got a check to walk out the door.”
That severance package became the seed money. And
what he didn’t realize at the time was that his aerospace
career had perfectly prepared him for the unlikely
undertaking of founding a brewing company. Croxall
wasn’t an engineer. He had been in finance.
“I was a numbers guy,” he said. “Everything was
forecasting, cost modeling, things of that nature. And
it’s amazing how well that way of thinking played into
what we do. You can come with the best brewer in the
world, but if you can’t run a business, then none of it
matters.”
At Davis, the class of 40 went around the room
introducing themselves.
“I said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to open a brewery in El
Segundo.’ And one of the guys in the class was like,
‘You’re crazy for opening a brewery not having worked
in one.’” Croxall paused. “I said, ‘You’re crazy for
opening a business never having managed money.’”
The next piece of advice he ignored was the name.
“We had that conversation early on about, do we call
this El Segundo?” he said. “A lot of people say don’t tie
it to a location, because you want to grow and all this
stuff. And it’s like, nah — this is what it’s about.”
He was born in El Segundo. Amy moved there when
she was one. They both went to El Segundo High
School. His parents were locals. His kids grew up El
Segundo.
“This is hometown,” he said. “That’s really what it
was about.”
It was, at the time, a deeply unpromising place to
sell craft beer — a Standard Oil, Coors Light, blue
collar town, as Croxall describes it. He was the sixth
independent production brewery in Los Angeles
County. Along with ESBC, only one other, Craftsman,
is still standing.
There are now more than 90 breweries in Los
Angeles. But they tend to come and go. ESBC is here
to stay.
The third piece of conventional wisdom he declined
to follow was about the beer itself. Croxall loved hops,
but he’d planned to come to market with breadth — a
couple of IPAs and a wide supporting cast. Tom Kelley
talked him out of it.
Kelley, then general manager at Library Ale House in
Santa Monica and one of the first certified Cicerones in
Los Angeles, had been with Croxall since the founding
days of ESBC. He handled sales. Croxall handled
production, deliveries, keg washing, drain scrubbing
and the books. “He said, ‘Why are we not going to be the hoppy
beer, the hoppy brewery in L.A.?’” Croxall said. “I’m
like, yeah, you’re right.”
So the board filled up with IPAs and almost nothing
else.
“It was a conscious choice, and we filled a gap that
nobody was doing in L.A.,” Croxall said. “I really think
that at that point in time, we probably fit in better with
San Diego breweries than we did with L.A. breweries.”
It also turned out that whatever crazy combination it
takes to be a good brewer – the palette, the attention
to detail, the planning, the sheer tirelessness, and
an indispensable sense of adventure, and humor –
Croxall had in spades. His beers from the outset were
almost ridiculously good. In that hop-forward field
of endeavor, the gold standard has long been Pliny,
produced by Russian River Brewing Company and so
elite that they only distribute to those they consider
worthy. Croxall is too modest to ever say so himself,
but in ESBC, Pliny finally had a worthy compatriot.
That hophead flag stayed planted through every craze
that came after it — the hazy takeover, the pastry stouts,
the pivot to lagers. The lineup has broadened since, out
of genuine market shift rather than fashion; there’s a
Mexican lager, a Kölsch, a light lager. But Mayberry
IPA – named after El Segundo, of course, in reference
to the small town on the old ‘Andy Griffith Show’ – is
still a West Coast IPA and it is still the flagship.
The first delivery went across the street to Rock &
Brews in May of 2011 — Blue House Citra Pale Ale,
the homebrew grown up. Croxall sat at the bar with his
father and his brother and had the first three pints.
He had been imagining that moment for years. It did
not go the way he’d pictured.
“We’d worked so hard to get this out. Our beer’s out
in the market,” he said. “And it’s like, oh my God, this
is terrifying. This isn’t what I thought it should be at
all. I was waiting for people to take a sip and spit it
out. I was expecting this glorious moment, and I was
terrified.”
He laughed. “You can’t predict it.”
ESBC was an immediate hit, both among the beer
cognoscenti and, more crucially, El Segundo locals.
True hopheads from near and far sought out the
brewery. So began its steady upward trajectory. Along
with Kelley, Rob’s father, Dick, was in the trenches
alongside his son from the get go. His dad had been
chief engineer and VP of quality at Northrop, so his
son’s undertaking caught his attention beyond just a
natural familial interest. The Croxalls shared a devotion
to quality.
“He would help brew on a lot of brew days,” Croxall
said. “Here’s this retired Northrop Grumman vice
president who would be schlepping 55-pound sacks of
grain around the brewery.”
Then came the decade in which nearly everyone else
got bought, or at least flirted with the idea.
In November of 2015, Ballast Point walked away from an initial public offering valued at $172.5 million
and sold to Constellation Brands for $1 billion, the
largest craft acquisition in history. It was the shot that
echoed through every taproom in Southern California.
Croxall wasn’t tempted to sell. What was the point? He
didn’t start a brewery to go corporate. But El Segundo
Brewing had its own version of that fork in the road,
and Croxall walked away from it.
The company self-distributed as long as it possibly
could — four or five trucks on the road daily, 4,500 to
5,000 barrels a year moving by their own hands. It was
the only way to control what sat on a shelf. Croxall was
too much of a stickler for quality control to turn over
his beer to a third party for distribution.
“We were so picky about our dates on shelves,”
Croxall said. “We have a 90-day code on most of our
beers, and most breweries don’t have that anymore. We
won’t sell a beer out of the brewery to go out on the
market that’s more than six weeks old.”
But eventually self-distribution became untenable.
“We had this realization, like, we’re running a
distribution company. We’re not focusing on the beer
side, which is where we really want to be,” he said. They
signed with Stone Distributing, which Croxall describes
as a good marriage because Stone came from the craft
side and understood what they were protecting. Stone
was later sold to an outfit now called Sunset.
The quality obsession didn’t relax. It got, if anything,
more expansive, and more expensive. Croxall’s director
of operations, Logan Smith, is a microbiologist whose
primary job is research and development. His head
brewer is Sean Manriquez.
“These guys are doing things beyond the quality
that I was doing back in the day, which I’m still proud
of,” Croxall said. “We’ve spent a lot more money than
the vast majority of breweries our size on quality tools.
Because that’s where it’s at.”
The most improbable relationship in the company’s
history began the same way — with Croxall telling
someone what was true rather than what was useful.
Steve Austin — Stone Cold Steve Austin, the biggest
star professional wrestling ever produced — got into
craft beer around 2014, and got into ESBC. A mutual
acquaintance called. Austin came by the brewery.
People may think pro wrestlers are not the discerning
kind. But Austin was deeply versed in beer.
“He’s the farthest thing from a meathead kind
of guy,” Croxall said. “He’s articulate, asking smart
questions about beer.”
Austin floated the idea of doing a beer together.
Croxall talked him out of it.
“I was honest with him,” Croxall said. “I said, look,
we’re a small brewery. We’re big for L.A. But on the
grand scale of things, if you really want to leverage your
brand and go big on something, you’ve got to talk to a
regional [brewery]. I’m not your guy.”
Austin’s answer: “Nope. I just want to do something
that I’m proud of. I’ll be part of the process, and
nothing more than that.”
More than 10 years later, Broken Skull is still in
production — a lifespan almost no celebrity beer
achieves. Austin has never once asked for more
production, a bigger share or more profit. The contract
between ESBC and the wrestler is about a page long.
Because of it, El Segundo beer has reached as many as
31 states.
And Austin still calls when something’s wrong.
“If he and his wife are out and they see out-of-code
beer on the shelves, she’ll call me or text me that beer’s
out of code,” Croxall said. “It’s that kind of ownership.
They actually really give a shit.”
In 2019, ESBC turned this gift for exactitude towards
another realm – making really good pizza. The Slice &
Pint sits at 130 W. Grand, on the corner of Richmond,
built on a dough that ferments for days and a supplier
list of independent farms and small producers. Croxall
opened Slice & Pint for families — because of his
daughter, he was deep in El Segundo girls softball
and wanted somewhere for people to go after games.
Kelley is co-proprietor. In its first year, it survived the
pandemic shutdown on takeout and family meals, and,
when outdoor dining started happening, spread across
Richmond Street, becoming one of the most popular
dining destinations in the area in the most challenging
environment imaginable. Once again, Croxall zagged
when everyone else was zigging, not only surviving but
thriving through a global pandemic that would cull the
field. And yet again the decision to more deeply root in
El Segundo paid dividends.
A second Slice & Pint, in Redondo Beach, would
open in 2024. Between the brewery and the two
restaurants, the company now employs about 120
people. Pete Crowner has run the restaurant side for
more than a decade.
Croxall now runs the company as president and
CEO; Kelley functions as the COO. What hasn’t
changed is the hometown nature of the business. Blue
House Pale Ale was named for his house. White Dog
was named for the Croxall family dog. Mayberry is
what people call the town. Hammerland DIPA refers
to the revered local surf break. Standard Crude Stout
is named after the refinery around which the town was
built – El Segundo means “the second,” referring to
Standard Oil’s second refinery on the West Coast.
“None of it’s contrived,” Croxall said. “If you just
start picking names out of the air, it kind of has no
soul. You can’t fake it.”
Fifteen years in, even for a numbers guy, the thing
that gets Croxall isn’t the numbers – not the years, not
the 8,500 to 10,000 barrels ESBC produces annually.
It’s the depth of community that surrounds, supports,
and lifts the brewery. He has customers who have been
coming since its very beginning.
“People are still regulars, and people are so fiercely
loyal. It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve made lifelong
friends out of this.”
In an alternative reality, the road he chose not to take,
Croxall would probably be wearily eyeing retirement.
Instead, he followed a crazy, hopheaded dream, but
did so with the clarity of an aerospace guy. He wasn’t
aiming for the stars. Just for El Segundo.
“Every once in a while I’ll be at the brewery in
the tap room with my wife, or we’ll be in one of the
restaurants, and we’ll be sitting there,” Croxall said.
“It’s like, holy shit, we did this.”
