Almanac Beer Co‘s San Francisco tap room is a must-do when in SF. We’ve long loved their barrel-aged beers in bottles and on draught at our local bar, Beer Gonzo, so to be actually setting foot in Almanac’s bar was a bit of a dream. It’s not their actual brewing premises, those are in Alameda and although we might squeeze in a visit on our way to Oakland airport on our way home we thought we’d best take a belt and braces approach and make sure we visited here just in case – the things we do for you, dear reader… The SF tap room is a cute size and funky with decoration like ‘a gents’ as Simon calls says (he means they use those horizontal metro tiles on the walls <rolls eyes at him>). We chose a flight using the special build-your-own-flight card to give the waitress – not too much squabbling! So flight 1:

• Loud! DIPA: hazy with Denali and Mosaic hops
• Coconut Noir Stout; imperial with coconut undertones
• Proof of Concept; farmhouse aged in oak, with Mosaic, Cascade, Denali, and Centennial hops
• Vanilla Cherry Dogpatch; sour red, aged in wine barrels

We ordered a second flight, by which time tired-out teens had arrived so we perused the robust food menu (portions are huge, we’ve seen them come past us and most people are getting half boxed up to take home at the end). We chose a cheese plate to keep us going – it comes with the best sourdough bread ever, from Josey Baker; it’s so good I am contemplating a special visit to the bakery to eat more. Flight 2:

• Astounding Enterprises: imperial sour red aged in oak with merlot grapes, raspberries, caco, and vanilla. Beer of the night.
• Interstellar Apricot: sour farmhouse
• Low Hanging Fruit: Collab with Dunloe Brewing, Berliner Weiss with peaches
• Sunshine & Opportunity: mixed fermentation farmhouse.

Almanac brew a massive range of beers, one look at their To-Go fridge confirms that. But nagged by the kids we sadly conclude that we can’t squeeze any more beer in to us, so we take our leave waving goodbye to the fridge and hoping we can visit the Alameda premises later on our trip. Postscript: We drunk so much that our dinner was a tube of Pringles each, the dirty shame of it…