Taylor Guitar Tour

Taylor guitar offers free factory tours weekdays at 1pm, where guests get to see the entire process of making guitars from wood selection to final assembly.  You can sign up as early as 12:30pm, which is highly recommended as tours fill up.  

Taylor is a wonderful company, makes excellent guitars, and is located in San Diego county (at 1980 Gillespie Way in El Cajon, California.).

The factory is so large that bikes are used by employees to get from  one building to another.

The owner, Bob Taylor, is considered a visionary regarding acoustic guitars.  Taylor received the award for corporate excellence for working with other countries on sustainable wood practices and environmental protection.  

Wait, who's the wise guy?

Eric!

The bracing on the back of the soundboard helps add rigidity and enhance the acoustics, without adding too much extra weight.

The sticker in the upper left hand corner is an RF ID chip which carries all of the information about the guitar.  It is used during production, and remains in the guitar after production.  It can be scanned to determine ownership and product specifications.  (So don't steal a Taylor guitar... or a banjo for that matter!)

600 guitars are shipped from the factory daily, 200 of those are made here while the other 400 are made in Tecate.  The Tecate factory allows the business to keep their costs lower for certain models.  Some guitar models, like the Baby Taylor, are made exclusively in Tecate.  

There is also a warehouse in Amsterdam although no guitars are produced there, they ship and repair guitars for countries in Europe.

Afterwards we went to Alpine Beer Co Pub for beer and food.  Alpine Beer is regularly on tap at our local tap rooms, and it is always amazingly delicious.  Every beer we sampled was yummy, and is unavailable to us elsewhere.

The actual brewery is down the street so we decided to go there next to try out some different beers, and just take a looksy.

The production area is on the smaller side, compared to other breweries.  It is amazing that they are so well known.

The tasting room is located next to this quirky bookstore.