Stone in South Park and Europe

I saw on San Diego Beer Blog that Stone Brewing's planned store / tasting room and small brewery has experienced licensing problems and neighborhood protests.  Here is the tweet from Stone:

Hey San Diego, the #SouthPark @StoneStore may take a while. Quite a while. Months. That's an "if" not a "when." Sorry. Licensing challenges.

That stinks.  The regulatory resistance is mind numbing.  The small, but vocal local push back is understandable, but I'm always troubled how a few loud voices can hijack a debate.  Hopefully they won't derail this project.  It's not like Stone's tasting room and store would be the only place that sells beer in South Park.

While looking through Stone's tweets (why does that sound dirty?) I saw a link to this article in Brewer's Guardian.  Apparently, Stone has narrowed its European brewery location choices to Bruges and Berlin:

His team have spent the last year trawling more than 75 sites in nine different countries, from Spain in the south to Denmark in the north, and have finally set their sights on two potential locations in Europe’s beer heartlands – one in Berlin, one in Bruges.

Koch said: “It’s been quite a journey. We were looking for a brewery but we were unable to find any that met our parameters. As we couldn’t find one, it’s been our goal to create something where we can open our doors to the public and have a visitor component. 

“So we started looking at historic warehouse sites and we found these two that qualified. Fantastically interesting buildings, very visible and also had the square feet that would enable us to do our brewing.”

Good for Stone.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Stone can prevail in getting its store open in South Park.