Stone's best-known brand is Arrogant Bastard Ale, a beer whose name and marketing persona lean into a provocation that the craft beer world found both irritating and irresistible. Craft beer reviewers at RateBeer and BeerAdvocate rated Stone as a world-class brewery, and BeerAdvocate's readers voted it the number-one 'All Time Top Brewery on Planet Earth' — the kind of superlative that means something among devoted drinkers and almost nothing to anyone else, but that circulates in enthusiast communities with genuine force.

Arrogant Bastard Ale has been described as a 'watershed beer' that 'put San Diego on the craft brew map.' That framing positions Stone as central to what became one of the most recognized craft beer regions in the country, a cluster of San Diego County breweries — many of them hops-forward, many of them now nationally distributed — that emerged from the same coastal California culture that produced Stone.

In 2006, Stone relocated from its original San Marcos facility to a custom-designed brewery in Escondido, 10 miles to the east. The Escondido campus grew into something more than a production facility: the site includes Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens, an 8,500-square-foot restaurant with a large outdoor patio and an acre of gardens. The brewery produced 325,645 US beer barrels in 2015.

A second World Bistro opened in May 2013 at Liberty Station in San Diego's Point Loma neighborhood, occupying the former mess hall and several historic buildings of the former Naval Training Center. At 23,500 square feet with seating for 700, it was a statement about how far Stone had traveled from its San Marcos strip-mall origins. Stone Company Stores in Oceanside, Pasadena, and Little Italy completed the footprint across the region.

Stone's expansion beyond California accelerated in 2014. The company announced a new brewery in Richmond, Virginia — its first in the eastern United States — beating out Columbus and Norfolk. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe made the formal announcement in October 2014. The Stone Company Store Richmond opened in March 2016; brewing began that July.

Europe followed. A 100-hectoliter brewery in Berlin Mariendorf went into operation in June 2016, distributing Stone IPA and Arrogant Bastard Ale across 14 European countries. Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens Berlin opened the same year. In April 2019, the entire Berlin operation was sold to BrewDog, the Scottish craft beer company — an early sign that the economics of international craft brewery operations don't always work as planned.

In Napa, a tap room opened in May 2018 in the historic Borrero building downtown — a 10-barrel system that served local customers while the main production remained in Escondido.

In June 2022, Sapporo Breweries announced an agreement to purchase Stone Brewing for $168 million. The sale closed in August 2022, with the Stone brewery taking on production of Sapporo beers in California for distribution across North America. Stone Distributing became its own independent company. The deal valued a brewery that had started with a small San Marcos facility at roughly three hundred times the scale of its origins.

In January 2025, Sapporo announced a $91 million impairment charge on the goodwill of the Stone acquisition — an accounting acknowledgment that the purchase price had exceeded what the business subsequently warranted. In April 2026, Sapporo announced it was selling Stone Brewing to Firestone Walker Brewing and Duvel Moortgat USA, with the deal expected to close in mid-2026. Stone Brewing had filed a lawsuit against MillerCoors in February 2018, alleging that the makers of Keystone beer were attempting to co-opt the Stone name through packaging that emphasized the word 'Stone.' The litigation marked a moment when the craft category had grown large enough to protect its turf through the courts as well as through its hops.