More than just brews, San Francisco Beer Week is a celebration of community

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — It’s a rainy afternoon in early February, and Sayre Piotrkowski, executive director of the Bay Area Brewers Guild, is deciding what to drink.

He chooses a Chingadera Machine made by Temescal Brewing, an Oakland-based brewery. He takes an inquisitive first sip, then a look of recognition falls over his face. Hello, old friend.

Chingadera Machine is a Keller-style Italian Pils. Piotrkowski says it’s a brew that anyone in the current beer biz will understand the inspiration behind.

For those without that requisite knowledge: Keller is the German word for “cellar.” Keller-style beers are tapped directly from the conditioning tank, a process which gives the beer a crisp aroma and more “hop character,” as Piotrkowski puts it.

As for Italian Pils, Piotrkowski explains how Italians, drawing on German pilsners, used dry hops that bring out aromas like lychee and jasmine tea. The first Italian Pils — Tipopils from Birrificio Italiano, released in the mid-1990s — is the mother that now finds her distinct children all over the world.

When Tipopils hit the beer world, it “was like a shockwave among cool beer people,” Piotrkowski says. These days, though, beer history “moves so fast.”

“Now there's, like, West Coast Pilsner and New Zealand Pilsner, which even take greater steps towards contemporary India Pale Ale brewing than Italian Pilsner did,” he continues with the enthusiasm of someone who could talk for days about beer. “Italian Pilsner really was this moment where two seemingly antithetical beer styles got reconciled in a cool way.”

One imagines Piotrkowski has a story like this for every beer he drinks. Besides being a certified advanced cicerone — the beer equivalent of a sommelier — he’s also one of the leads behind San Francisco Beer Week. 

Now in its 17th year, San Francisco Beer Week is a sprawling, multiday smorgasbord featuring many of the best craft breweries in the Bay Area. It’s a festival, Piotrkowski hopes, that will one day rival some of the biggest beer events in the world.

During SF Beer Week, which begins on Feb. 20 and runs through March 1, beer lovers can rub shoulders with a variety of seemingly incongruous culinary and social ideas. 

A beer and dim sum pairing? Sounds good. A parade celebrating Black history and culture in California? Absolutely. Beer and speed dating? Sure, why not.

More than just beer, SF Beer Week is about community. Organizers hope to break down old misconceptions about what beer is and who gets to enjoy it.

Using the dim sum event as an example, Piotrkowski tries to capture the ethos behind the fest.

“What do you drink with a soup dumpling? You know, I have no idea,” he says. “There's no scholarship on it.”

Beermakers Cameron McDonald and Jesse Hayter started making beer because they wanted a place to drink and hang with their friends that was close to home. 

They now own Enterprise Brewing, which opened its first taproom in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood in 2023. With a turntable behind the bar and a small record collection for sale, Enterprise has a “Cheers” vibe — but with better beer. 

“We kind of get to be in the community that we're already part of and support all those bars and restaurants that we love,” McDonald said. You might say it’s the kind of place where everybody knows your name.

Enterprise is hosting an afterparty following Beer Week’s premier event at Salesforce Park on Saturday, Feb. 21. The taproom is also hosting a collaboration based around ube or purple yam, with Enterprise brewing a “one-of-a-kind” ube beer and next-door Rize Up Bakery making an ube loaf filled with ube jam and inspired by a beloved Filipino dessert.

Bay Area brewing is an evolving experiment, where not just styles of beer but the basic elements of it — yeast, grain, hops — are constantly being tinkered with and refined.

One of Enterprise’s beers, a copper ale, is made with barley malt from Admiral Maltings. A craft malthouse in Alameda, Admiral Maltings uses a traditional floor-drying method on its malt — one of the few places in the country to do so. 

The company malts barley, wheat, rye and oats. In a large building, maltsters use rakes to spread the grains on a cooled and impeccably clean concrete floor. The process allows for close monitoring of germination and enhanced flavor.

Ron Silberstein, co-founder and proprietor of Admiral Maltings, says he’s been interested in malting barley for years, dating back to when he ran a brewery and restaurant in San Francisco called the ThirstyBear Brewing Company. (Before that, Silberstein was a immigration lawyer, including on a major case in the 1990s that helped establish LGBTQ+ identity as a valid basis for asylum claims.)

Silberstein says ThirstyBear was the first and only certified organic brewery in the city — a surprising distinction that made him curious how exactly beer was made.

“It led me down the intriguing path of asking why, with over 1,200 breweries in California, was there not a single brewery using California-grown barley that was malted in California,” he said. 

At Admiral Malting, Silberstein works with farmers in the Sacramento Valley and in Tulelake, a remote town in Siskiyou County near the Oregon border. In an interview, he extolled barley’s virtues: Not only is it drought-resistant and therefore a great crop for California, it’s an underappreciated part of the beer supply chain.

“Beer is agriculture,” he said. “No farmer, no barley; no barley, no malt; no malt, no beer.” 

Many beer drinkers are enthusiastic about craft brews, Silberstein said, and yet are disconnected from their ingredients. If they can name one, it’s likely hops.

“Hops is the salt on the potato,” he says. “Malt is the potato.”

In the past few years, the Bay Area has lost some of its best-known craft beer brands, including 21st Amendment and San Francisco’s quintessential brewery, Anchor Brewing Company.

Piotrkowski says the industry is in a bit of a convulsion. As he sipped on his Chingadera Machine, he mused about changes in the local beer scene, many of them positive. 

The past decade has seen a wave of new breweries open in the region, including Faction Brewing in Alameda, Original Pattern Brewing Co. in Oakland and Humble Sea in Santa Cruz. Ghost Town — also based in Oakland and what Piotrkowski calls “arguably one of the best breweries in the country” — has expanded. 

“The beer quality is just getting so much better, so fast,” he said. “People start going into breweries and spending money, [and] those breweries become financially viable things. They keep getting better and better at what they do.”

Piotrkowski sees the growth of beer regionalism as “a return to what beer has always been.” Historically, he notes, people drank beer from their local community, not from global supply chains. 

These days, an avid beer drinker might sport a sweatshirt for a local brewery the way they wear a hat from their favorite sports team, not just for a bit of hometown pride but as a real marker of group identity. “It is part and parcel to what breweries are,” Piotrkowski said, and it’s what San Francisco Beer Week is all about.