KEY BEER
Two dollars gets you a “mystery beer,” but this is usually a can of bland American lager. Better with your pizza would be the ultrarare hybrid-style Belgian IPA called XX Bitter from Brasserie De Ranke (6.2% ABV), which has a melony roundness but finishes dry and bitter, with an herbal afterglow.
TORONADO
547 Haight St. • San Francisco, CA 94117 (415) 863-2276 • toronado.com • Established: 1986
SCENE & STORY
Farther down the Haight into the Fillmore, Toronado abides. It’s been open for over twenty years, and has the dust and clutter to show for it, but what’s more important is behind the bar. Or behind the antlers, tap handles, and other ephemera . . . somewhere. Despite its tiny size, you’re not likely to find many better beer lists (including rarities and aged beers) anywhere in California. It’s one of those bars that emit a tractor beam for serious beer lovers, and, one day, they find it. Some never seem to leave, growing long beards and huddling over their barley wine with contented grins. True, certain bartenders ignore you if you ask for the wrong beer, or one that just blew. And the crowds, during special cask nights and tastings, resemble a rugby scrum. But in the end it’s worth it. Beer lovers the world over know Toronado, and to visit it is to enter into a kind of covenant with them. Recently affiliated bars Toronado San Diego and Toronado Seattle have joined the brotherhood, too.
PHILOSOPHY
Drink big or go home. All the great northern, central, and Southern Californian beer makers are represented here, with special focus on barley wines and other high-alcohol styles. Order with authority.
KEY BEER
From January to April at least, look for Almanac’s Valencia Gold, a tasty, 8.5% ABV Golden Ale brewed with—you guessed it—valencia oranges and orange blossom honey. And there’s always a good fresh IPA on tap from Alpine, Stone, Green Flash, or other Cali hophead mainstays.
ANCHOR BREWING CO.
1705 Mariposa St. • San Francisco, CA 9410 (415) 863-8350 • anchorbrewing.com • Established: 1896
SCENE & STORY
Founded as Anchor in 1896, this is a shrine for any self-respecting beer pilgrim for one reason: the brewhouse. It’s a thing of beauty, all gleaming copper kettles and creamy tile work; to tour the facility and see the brewers working in their white work suits (in the unhippified fashion of traditional German brewers) is to see a true classic in action. Facing closure after a string of half-interested owners from the end of Prohibition to 1965, this brewery found new life in the hands of a young Stanford graduate named Fritz Maytag (great-great-grandson of the man who founded the Maytag appliance company), who bought it in 1965 and helped kick-start the American craft beer revolution. Anchor is famous, of course, for Anchor Steam Beer, a kind of ale-lager hybrid also known as California Common. There’s no steam used in the brewing process; the word refers to the hissing sound old wooden kegs used to make when aging.
Maytag developed several beers before selling the company in 2010, including Old Foghorn, a viscous, almost brandy-like barley wine; a Christmas ale with a secret yearly changing recipe; and a light, brightly spiced summer wheat beer, among others. He also added a microdistillery, with housemade gin and rye whisky, and tirelessly publicized America’s craft brewing revolution. It’s one of the best brewery tours in America, and it’s not to be missed.
PHILOSOPHY
Old-world sophistication with quiet, unpretentious skill. But let’s not forget the impact of international financiers. The new owners, the entrepreneurs who created Skyy Vodka, have been doing Anchor’s heritage justice, and introduced some excellent new beers in recent years. In 2013, they announced plans to add a 212,000-square-foot brewery at Pier 48 with production and distribution facilities, a restaurant, museum, educational center, and other attractions.
KEY BEER
Liberty Ale (6% ABV) was first brewed in 1975 to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere. It has a Champagne-like dryness and aromatic, crisp finish that goes well with local foods like Dungeness crab and sourdough bread.
LA TRAPPE CAFÉ
800 Greenwich St. • San Francisco, CA 94133 • (415) 440-8727 • latrappecafe.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
Amid the tacky red sauce joints of North Beach, there’s a salve for the soul at the corner of Mason and Greenwich: a broad list of good Belgian ales and an array of classic Belgian dishes, like moules à la bière and well-made waterzooi, a seafood stew made of manila clams, mussels, and shrimp served over a piece of grilled sea bass. Skip the blah upstairs and immediately head to the subterranean bowels for nineteen taps of beer and a 250-plus bottle menu, the best possible antidote to Fisherman’s Wharf tourist overload. It’s also right on the Powell cable car line; hop on for an escape up into Chinatown or up over the hill toward Market Street and the Ferry Building, and some of San Francisco’s best beer bars and breweries.
PHILOSOPHY
La Trappe proclaims a zero-tolerance for the plastic kegs some bars and breweries have been using for convenience, believing them to have adverse effects on beer.
KEY BEER
On draft, North Coast La Merle (7.9% ABV) is an underrated Californian take on the Belgian style of saison. The Fort Bragg brewer’s version is wheaty and hazy gold with a lemony, slightly herbal kick.
ZEITGEIST
199 Valencia at Dubose • San Francisco, CA 94103 • (415) 255-7505 • zeitgeistsf.com • Established: 1986
SCENE & STORY
Zeitgeist is a biker-style dive bar with decaying, red-shingled walls, razor wire fences, and a vista of a highway overpass. On entering, it is normal for most to feel somewhat apprehensive. Then you scan the beer list of more than forty taps, pick out something inordinately good and cheap, and amble outside on a vast patio with picnic-style tables lined up in the gravel. On warm nights the garden fills up with lanky bike messengers, big-bearded musicians, and energetic beer fanatics taking advantage of the reasonable prices and cheap burgers and dogs off the grill.
PHILOSOPHY
Officially, it’s “Warm Beer and Cold Women,” but it’s not all really so bad. Don’t take photos, though, of anyone or anything but your own friends. You can get the boot for that.
KEY BEER
Moonlight Death & Taxes Black Beer—inevitably.
21ST AMENDMENT
563 2nd St. • San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 369-0900 • 21st-amendment.com • Established: 2000
San Leandro Location: 2010 Williams St.
San Leandro, CA 94577 • (510) 595-2111
SCENE & STORY
It would be too easy to dismiss this brewery on the basis that they make a popular canned beer infused with watermelon and used to contract brew all their beer (in general, this means using excess capacity in other companies’ breweries to save money, rather than brew and ship from a single location). But free-wheeling founders Nico Freccia and Shaun O’Sullivan—who met in a brewing class at UC Davis—are producing a whole range of great beers in cans, and their huge, loft-like brewpub and beer garden complex in San Francisco’s South Park area (south of Market Street, a couple of blocks from the San Francisco Giants Stadium) is the kind of place anyone would feel at home drinking. When, after three years and untold millions of dollars in investment, they opened their 95,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art San Leandro location near the Oakland airport in 2015, the beer world raised a collective glass. Found in and around the huge facility: a vast tasting room, beer garden, as well as a (planned, at time of press) restaurant, “floating bars” and a treehouse bar overlooking the production floor. Well done, guys.
PHILOSOPHY
Freedom to brew. Named for the constitutional amendment that abolished Prohibition, 21st Amendment embodies good-natured fun, and the cans (their only packaging) have inspired names and label art.
KEY BEER
21st Amendment Back in Black IPA combines the evergreen pine of ample hops with the dark cocoa and coffee flavors (and onyx hue) of darkly roasted barley. Also kn
own as Cascadian Dark Ale and Black IPA, this style—India Black Ale—is the latest brewing to be recognized by the Association of Brewers, and in 2010, 21st Amendment released the first year-round version available in cans, their chosen packaging. It’s got all the vintage attitude of AC/DC’s Bon Scott in his prime, but not so much bite you can’t have more than one. And don’t miss Bitter American, their 4.4% ABV sipper. It’s delicious stuff.
THE ALEMBIC BAR
1725 Haight St. • San Francisco, CA 94117 (415) 666-0822 • alembicbar.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
The Alembic isn’t a beer bar per se, but it is the brainchild of Magnolia’s David McLean, so it has a considered list and the décor—a warm, dark, enveloping interior and exposed-bulb lighting—to go with it. San Franciscans have come to expect nothing less from the hirsute Deadhead turned craft beer lover. The Alembic has ten taps and thirty bottled selections, many hard-to-find Belgians, and high-end gastropub fare like sweetbreads, duck kebabs, and foie gras. In 2015 McLean and Co. were expanding seating and adding a number of other guest amenities.
PHILOSOPHY
Neo-nineteenth-century urban chic meets locavore food and drink.
KEY BEER
Beer cocktails have been around for a long time now, but recently have been getting more attention. Most interesting for beer lovers here is a pair of cocktails using beer: the Vice Grip, a mixture of coffee-flavored rum liqueur and red wine topped with foam made from Marin Brewing Company’s Point Reyes Porter, a smooth, rich brew; or the tart-sweet Pale Horse, made with cachaça, lemon, and caramelized pale ale syrup.
THE MONK’S KETTLE
3141 16th St. • San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 865-9523 • monkskettle.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
Monk’s has something of the classic beer bar feel—dark woods, low light, sparkling clean glassware—but the menu is tuned in to the “delights and prejudices” of ambitious farm-to-table cooking more than most (to borrow a phrase from the title of one of James Beard’s classic books). Expect house-cured ham and hand-ground sausage, braised pork belly and beef cheek, and suggested menu pairings from the twenty-four-tap, 180 bottle list, with a special stash of vintage beers stored in a temperature-controlled cellar (twenty-five to sixty dollars and up, depending on size and year).
PHILOSOPHY
Seasonality is everything: the small, producer-driven beer list morphs with the calendar, just like the heirloom fruits and vegetables.
KEY BEER
Burning Oak Lager, a German-style black lager of 5.2% ABV from Linden Street Brewery in Oakland, is nearly opaque, with notes of char and smoke mingled with a faint sweetness and light spicy hops.
THE TRAPPIST
460 8th St. • Oakland, CA 94607 (510) 238-8900 • thetrappist.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
Sometimes the best bars are in the most unlikely places. Just a short hop east across the bay on the BART train delivers you right down the block from the Trappist. Despite the somewhat forlorn downtown Oakland location, it’s the kind of bar you’d plan a vacation around. You’ll feel it when you walk through the “front bar” door and enter a narrow space with exposed brick, gorgeous dark wood trim, white-and-black tile floors, and vintage lighting. Then you consider the twenty-eight rotating taps, with another 100 to 130 bottled selections. Once you have a beer in hand, it’s time to wander back past barrels on end (ersatz tables), the stained-glass doors leading to the bathrooms, and into the warmly lit “back bar,” with deep green trim, wainscoted ceiling, and a lovely old bar of its own. Back in front there’s a line of smiling faces at the bar, and perhaps a great California band’s song playing—the rootsy anthem “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros on a recent visit—and you realize this is exactly where you want to be.
PHILOSOPHY
Belgian beer, speakeasy style. They opened a second location in the nice Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland in 2013: a specialty beer café and bottleshop, with nine taps and ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall. And lately their annual Sour/Bitter festival has been gaining steam.
KEY BEER
Moonlight’s Reality Czeck, a 4.8% ABV pilsner. It may not be Belgian style but is very rare and very good, like this bar.
THE RARE BARREL
940 Parker St. • Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 984-6585 • therarebarrel.com • Established: 2013
SCENE & STORY
Without a doubt one of the most talked about entrants into the West Coast beer scene in recent years, the Rare Barrel is all-sour blending operation based in a warehouse in Berkeley, where brewmaster and blender Jay Goodwin (formerly of the Bruery) and his business partner (and former roommate) Alex Wallash ferment, age, blend, and bottle some of the best sour beers in the United States. Inside, more than 850 barrels are meticulously arranged around a stand of shining tanks. Goodwin sources the wort—or unfermented beer—from four base styles of pale, gold, red, and dark brewed locally by breweries with extra production capacity. After the liquid is trucked to the headquarters, the beer is primary fermented in steel, then racked to oak barrels with wild yeast and cultures, like Brettanomyces (wild yeast), or “brett,” and Lactobacillus, aged, sometimes with fruit and other adjuncts, and later bottled. The process can take from several months to a year or more. It’s not an easy way to make beer, but the results speak for themselves. Patience is a virtue.
PHILOSOPHY
All sour, all the time, in balance. It’s no easy task. “You need to match the acids and flavors of two things that grow themselves—yeast and fruit,” Goodwin told me. “It’s like trying to raise two kids who get along perfectly.”
KEY BEER
Attendees of the 2014 World Beer Cup in Denver gasped in proud and envious amazement as the Rare Barrel’s very first release—the funky, raspberry-kissed Ensorcelled—was named a gold medalist in American-style sour ale category. About seven months later they took gold again in the same category, this time at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival with Cosmic Dust, a sparkling, faintly rosy sour golden ale with hibiscus. Hit the tasting room on the weekend to see what’s pouring, but bottles to go are almost always sold out.
A BEER WITH
BRIAN HUNT, MOONLIGHT BREWING COMPANY
3350 Coffey Ln., Suite A • Santa Rosa, CA 95403 • moonlightbrewing.com (707) 528-2537 • Open Saturdays 2-7 p.m.
In the fall of 2009, almost as soon as I’d arrived in the Bay Area, I began hearing about a man named Brian Hunt of Sonoma County’s Moonlight Brewery in the hushed, reverential tones normally reserved for exiled Tibetan leaders. He doesn’t allow visitors. He’s like a mad scientist. He brews the best beer in the whole Bay Area. He’s really cranky. No one visits Brian Hunt.
The last statement is basically true. But because I had some help from my friend Sean Paxton, a.k.a. the Home Brew Chef, I had the chance to meet the man behind Death & Taxes, a silky 5% ABV black lager on tap in San Francisco’s best beer bars. And while I don’t recommend driving up his dirt road outside the hamlet of Windsor unless he’s expecting you, he’s not the crank some had made him out to be.
No indeed. What I found at Moonlight was sort of everything and nothing I’d been expecting, a crucible of California’s future brewing ingenuity and a potent symbol of its roots. His brewery, founded in 1992, is tiny, packed improbably to the ceiling of a former tractor barn. Steel tanks called grundies precariously crowd around the kettles and tables strewn with tools and parts.
And in the middle of it all, Hunt—a graduate of UC Davis’s fermentation science master’s degree program and a self-described dropout from the industrial brewing world—holds court on his creations with a combination of pride and prejudice (toward those who would classify his beers in rigid styles, mainly). He’s Moonlight’s only full-time employee, and brews about 1,000 barrels per year, available in only about seventy-five locations around the Bay Area, which he personally keeps supplied. In any case, we tried his whole repertoi
re, retiring to a set of Adirondack chairs near some anemic-looking hop trellises. Lambs baa’d in the distance. This was a farm brewery if there ever was one. Hunt’s beers were a revelation: some rock solid classic, others wildly inventive, nearly all delicious.
What Hunt is trying to do, in his own cantankerous way, is shake things up. He bristles at the notion his beers can be classified into set styles, scoffing at what he considers hidebound conventions of acceptable brewing norms. He’s the guy who stands up during brewing conferences of industry types and asks the probing questions everyone’s thinking but doesn’t quite have the guts to ask.
First came the jet-black Death & Taxes, which is as light as an American canned lager like Budweiser but vastly more flavorful, bursting with tangy hops and roasted malts. Then we moved on to a spicy, clean Reality Czech and bready Lunatic Lager, another black lager called Bony Fingers, and an IPA-like offering, Twist of Fate California Style Bitter.
But with the next beers Hunt veered into terra incognita. Hunt is doing something few brewers in America would ever consider: making completely unhopped beers, to test the possibilities of using other plants to spice and balance flavors. It’s a bit like attempting to make gin without juniper, but to the fifty-four-year-old provocateur, such rules mean nothing. We tasted his Artemis, an ale spiced with mugwort, bee balm, and wild bergamot that tasted a bit like pencil wood (in a good way). Working for Tips, an ale spiced with redwood needles, was one of those beers you don’t forget—ever—and its garnet color had me mesmerized.
By that point I was beginning to believe what I’d heard in all those San Francisco beer bars. We finished with what Hunt called a “Norwegian farmhouse beer” by the name of Uncle Fudd, named for a song lyric Johnny Cash made famous (“The Tennessee Stud”). It’s ale made with rye grain and branches of the Thuja tree, a cousin of Western Red Cedar. The result? At that hour of the day, after tasting about a dozen of Hunt’s concoctions, my palate was fairly shot. But there was something intangible in that beer, like the others, something compelling, if radically unfamiliar. Maybe, as Hunt might say, it’s just moonlight. Who knows what he’ll come up with next? This is brewing as alchemy. Hunt’s mystic approach, otherworldly skill, and mischievous persona give Moonlight an inescapable aura. Look for it.
The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition) Page 11