DZO Brewing Company – Closed

In early 2025, Garden Grove’s Phin Smith – one of Orange County’s best coffee shops – opened DZO Brewing Company in a building just down the street from its original location, close enough that the businesses could share a (large) rear parking lot. Each morning and afternoon, DZO’s building hosted a new cafe called Phin Smith Express, which offered a handful of quick-service drinks, baked goods, and acai bowls, with the artistically decorated DZO offering Vietnamese-inspired beers and hard seltzers alongside burgers and other bar fare during lunch and dinner hours. Those who showed up around 11am could get the full experience; at dinner time, DZO was the only option.

Based on our experience at DZO, the beers were the key reason to visit. Fans of Phin Smith know that the coffee shop’s baristas are obsessive over quality to the point where they’ll gladly remake any unsatisfactory beverage, a guarantee we’ve never needed to test over numerous visits. DZO’s beers – divided into stouts and ales – show similar signs of craftsmanship, if somewhat inconsistently.

A Vietnamese Coffee Stout was everything we’d expected: dark and rich with a strong coffee flavor, foamy but not Cafe Sua Da-style creamy, leaving the door open to future Vietnamese coffee flavor experiments that we’d be genuinely excited to sample. Two other stouts we’d hoped to try, a Peanut Butter Milk Stout and lighter Golden Hour coffee stout, were unfortunately sold out on our visit, so we wound up sampling two ales – GG Blonde, a crisp light ale, and a middle-of-the-road “Lab Beer” with what tasted like a light coffee accent. On our server’s “best” flavor recommendation from three choices, we also sampled a peach Dragon Claw Seltzer, which was lightly fruit-flavored and even more lightly sweetened. Although we preferred the stout to the other drinks, it was a matter of personal taste, and each of the picks on our flight was a solid example of its style.