A typical Bay Area beer run

This was the typical bay area beer run. A typical Thursday evening for me: The Caltrain up from Palo Alto into the City. The last blast of work before the evening. A quick walk from 4th Street down to City beers; it’s Halloween so I start with a Pumpkin Porter from Midnight Sun. It’s like all the best pumpkin beers: Low on spices and pumpkin and high on the base beer. The woman next to me is classic American and starts talking at me, I try to ignore her and get on with the crossword. She leaves, I move onto a fantastic Black IPA from the Bruery, again failing to get a decent score on the crossword.

I do cryptic crosswords — only the easy ones — and I do them badly. It’s a strangely unique thing but even getting one or two clues without any assistance (I use fifteen squared to get all the clues) I feel is a great achievement. Typically I can get about half the clues, today I manage 11/15 which is fine.

Onwards to Cellarmaker. A new brewery in SOMA that has fully impressed me. The taplist is relatively low on ABV (max is about 6%), the quality of the beers is absurdly high. I grab a half pint of the stout and fill my one litre growler with a blonde ale. The stout is absurd. Utterly bonkers. Hands down the best sessionable stout I’ve had in the US. Moreso: The closest I’ve ever come to drinking this kind of beer in the bay area. Nothing flashy, nothing out of place: a crystallisation of what makes a 5% stout so great.

A popular topic on message boards is “what’s the next trend in craft beer”. The clear answer is “Quality Beer” and this brewery has it in spades — some of the beers have missed the mark a little (the peach sour was a little off, the Grisette was fine but unremarkable, the first batch of the porter needed a little work) but. BUT. The quality is high. And 1 litre growlers are the ideal size for this format. I love growlers but 64oz of beer is a lot to take in.

And then onwards. Off to Healthy Spirits to pick up my beer club collection. Solid bottles as ever — lots of familiar faces, loads of the best of the best of British beers. And that wonderous moment when you see the beer that you will always buy a bottle of: Thornbridge’s Bracia. Thornbridge (as I have gushed in the past) define modern British brewing to me: Bracia is no exception: A Dark Ale infused with a beautiful honey flavour. It’s bought and I travel with the Halloween people home. I eat fish tacos at home with TNG and our new cat whilst polishing off the Bracia. It’s pretty much heaven.

This is one side of the Bay Area beer scene for me. I love my homeland but here I feel that the doors to a incredible world of beer are open to me.

But I’m just a boring old beerdy dude that buys and drinks beer. The other thing that sums up Bay Area beer for me are a quintet of incredible beer writers here: Ashley, Kim, Jen, Jay and Brian. I’ve never met any of them but they sum up the high quality of beer writing/analysis/introspection in the bay area. Irrerevant, razor sharp and far more knowledgable than I would ever be. Whenever I need to reminded how awesome the beer is here, they’re there. They condense the essence of beer culture in the US: Measured, Balanced and Fun.

In a world where established bloggers can throw out casually sexist statements, Brewers can compare their beers to Mexican Rape and bottles with naked women on can be opened without batting an eyelid. The beer world can sometimes feel like it’s stuck in a hipster version of the 70s — where women should only drink halves and beer is a man’s game with all the puerile (or innuedo as it’s masked) rhetoric can appear. But the best way to deal with it I sometimes feel is to ignore it — to focus on the drink rather than the hyperbole. This focus is epitomised by the bay area quintet above: The beer speaks for itself, the writers just channel it and say it how I wish I could: with clarity and intelligence.

I’ll stick to this Bracia and keep myself to myself. But the Bay Area feels magical to me. The beer is great, the brewers are awesome and the writers are fantastic. Cheers.