With a focus on California fruit and the mindset of a winemaker, Almanac Beer Company’s brewmaster, Jesse Friedman, is turning out sour beers that embrace diversity.
Jesse Friedman, the cofounder and brewmaster at San Francisco’s Almanac Beer Company, met his business partner Damian Fagan at a homebrew club that sampled a variety of homemade and commercially made beers. Friedman, who at the time was working in the technology industry and beer blogging in his spare time, noticed the savvy label on Fagan’s beer and assumed it came from a craft brewing company. As it turns out though, Fagan was a professional graphic designer who put commercial-grade labels on all of his homebrews.
“It was love at first homebrew sight,” Friedman remembers. In 2010 the duo committed to an exclusive brewing relationship when they launched Almanac Beer Company in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. In addition to a series of fresh (non-barrel-aged) beers that include a gose, a saison, and an IPA, Almanac produces an impressive lineup of barrel-aged and blended beers from its cellar of 1,700 oak barrels and counting. A number of these barrel-aged beers are sour.