Inside Highland Park Brewery: a Visual Tour from La’s Chinatown to the San Juan Pop-Up
By Alexander Ross
Breweries across the country talk about balance. Highland Park builds it into water profiles and hop selection logs. Kunz came up through the brewing ranks with a hyper-focus on expressive aromatics, stripped of muddy sweetness or cloying finishes. This philosophy culminated in the development of Timbo Pils, a hoppy lager that altered the American beer competition landscape.
Timbo Pils takes modern hop varieties, specifically Mosaic and Citra, and presents them over an immaculate, featherweight German pilsner malt foundation. It pours crystal clear, hits the nose like a freshly cracked bag of ripe passionfruit and resin, and finishes with a snappy, crisp snap that washes the palate clean. The beer captured major accolades at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), proving that hop-forward IPAs did not have to remain locked inside hazy, high-gravity profiles. For West Coast IPA offerings like Hello LA and DDH Cloud Party, the brew team keeps finishing gravities bone-dry, dial-in water chemistry to push crisp sulfate minerality, and practices careful cold-side dry-hopping to limit grassy polyphenol extraction.
Alongside the clean tank lines sits an extensive oak program. In temperature-monitored cellar pockets, barrel-aged wild ales rest inside neutral French wine casks and oak puncheons. These mixed-fermentation projects combine Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and local ambient flora with seasonal stone fruits, California citrus, and wine grapes sourced from small regional growers. Production batches remain limited to a few hundred bottles per blend, creating rapid demand among cellar collectors.
Alexander Ross has covered the video game industry for a decade, writing deep dives on game design, esports tournaments, VR developments, and gaming culture.
