Green Flash thinks 2018 is the year to re-focus Remix

Green Flash, San Diego’s second largest independent brewery, has been sprinting at top speed for years.

In 2014, it bought Alpine Beer; in ’15, it debuted a barrel-aging unit, Cellar 3; ’16, its Virginia Beach, Va., brewery; and ’17, it annnounced plans for a brewery in Lincoln, Neb.

In ’18, though, the Mira Mesa-based brewery intends to introduce just one new beer — Remix IPA, starring a classic trio of hops, Cascade, Columbus and Summit— while retiring four others and discontinuing all 22-ounce “bombers.”

Is the Flash taking a breather?

Not at all, said co-founder Mike Hinkley. Instead, the brewery believes a leaner lineup will make Green Flash shine in craft beer’s ever-expanding universe.

“We decided to shrink the number of products because the market is so crowded,” Hinkley said. “By limiting the number of Green Flash beers (distributors and retailers) have to focus on, it really concentrates the focus on our core beers.”

This will be a busy year, Hinkley insisted, with a series of draft-only beers from the brewery’s “Genius Lab” and — perhaps — a fourth brewery in an as-yet undetermined location.

“We are looking in a number of places,” he said. “We sell a lot of beers on both coasts and in the major cities of the U.S., but there’s a lot of white space in between.”

(For those keeping score at home, Green Flash is dropping Tangerine Soul Style IPA, Dia de los Serranos Stout with Serrano Chiles, Imperial IPA, and Cosmic Ristretto Baltic Porter with Espresso. Le Freak, the Belgian-style IPA, will reappear in a corked 750mil bottle as a Cellar 3 offering.)