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SF Beer Week is throwing down the gauntlet for Bay Area brewers again, and in doing so is helping raise up its craft brewing community—in other words, doing what beer weeks do best. As festivities take shape for February 10–19, 2023, this annual collective experience organized by the Bay Area Brewers Guild (BABG) tells the story of how guilds can enable their city, state, and regional brewing communities to simultaneously support and challenge one another in the pursuit of brewing excellence.
Even as anticipation mounts with the runup to SFBW, it’s impossible to ignore the adversity that craft beer communities are still facing. Some Bay Area breweries and beer bars, like many elsewhere, have had to close. The rest have displayed stunning grit and resilience.
Throughout, a touchstone has often been a region’s brewers guild, providing a framework for brewers to come together and help each other adapt and sustain supportive activities—collectively, a much-needed salve to this three-year, slow-motion kick in the teeth.
Bay Area Brewers Guild Member Meeting at 21st Amendment, November 2022. Photo: Certain Gravity Photography
Meanwhile, a handful of exciting new breweries have opened in the face of adversity, looking forward to taking part in the iconic festivities.
Phil Emerson, at the new Olfactory Brewing and Blending in San Francisco, says he looks forward to the social and learning opportunities that make SF Beer Week one of his favorite times of the year. “You get to see all your friends from around the Bay, you get to see all the new breweries coming out in the Bay, and you get to see where the trends are shaping up for the year.”
Previously, at the acclaimed Almanac Beer, Emerson had a hand in pulling together many memorable SF Beer Week events. He’s already thinking about February, when he hopes to make new lasting impressions—this time as Olfactory’s cofounder and brewmaster.
And it’s a big stage. Emerson smiles as he recalls how the beer community converges: “I've met some folks that travel from Europe every year just to come out for SF Beer Week.”
All styles welcomed at SF Beer Week. Photo: Tim Carpenter
Pouring to People’s Passions
Emerson’s anecdotal observation is reflected in past numbers, when over 10 percent of SF Beer Week participants were visitors from other countries, and another 12 percent traveled from parts of the United States beyond Northern California.
Photo: Courtesy Clandestine Brewing
A major contribution to wanderlust is the allure of special beers, with 67 percent of SFBW patrons indicating that this hunt was a primary motive. The most famous special release is a beer that predates SFBW—Pliny the Younger—the ever-evolving original triple IPA from Russian River Brewing and a perennial whale. Yet Beer Week is more broadly the high season for scores of thoughtful experiments and other one-off beers often too expensive or esoteric for brewers to attempt the rest of the year.
Timed right, beer weeks provide an unparalleled opportunity for craft beer lovers to take in the best of a region’s beer scene. Planning multi-day itineraries, visiting clusters of breweries, and tracking down sought-after releases have always been big draws for SFBW attendees.
Collaborations in particular draw crowds, but they also play an essential role in cementing bonds among brewery peers. More than 10 percent of beers released during SF Beer Week are collaborations—a staggering number, given that more than 500 releases typically drop during those 10 days.
New Bohemia’s Dan Satterthwaite and Alpha Acid’s Kyle Bozicevic celebrate a new collaboration brew. Photo: Courtesy Alpha Acid Brewing
Official collaborations from BABG members can also up the ante. One tapping in February is sure to do just that: a hazy double IPA organized by the Guild’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, and brewed by Drake’s in partnership with Hella Coastal, Humble Sea, Dokkaebier, S27, Barebottle, and HenHouse. This special brew is a fundraiser for launching a BABG DEI endowment, which UC Davis would administer to providing education opportunities for under-represented groups interested in pursuing careers in beer.
Building a Better Beer Week
Shawn O’Sullivan, cofounder of 21st Amendment Brewery, remembers being inspired by the first Philly Beer Week, which offered up a roadmap for what could be done in San Francisco. With several marquee events, including The Bistro’s world-famous Double IPA fest returning February 11, already taking place on two February weekends, the timing for SF Beer Week in 2009 seemed preordained.
21st Amendment’s Shaun O’Sullivan (left) shares a laugh with the 21A crew at SF Beer Week’s East Bay Kick Off. Photo: Courtesy 21st Amendment Brewery
A small group of beer insiders put out the call to celebrate and elevate beer with quality beer activities and “no pint nights!” More than 150 ambitious events took place and, when the dust settled, the depth of support for the local beer scene was obvious.
As SFBW grew, so too did the Guild. Joanne Marino, who cofounded Austin Beer Week and previously worked with the Texas Craft Brewers Guild, has shepherded the Guild through a regional expansion since being hired as executive director in 2015. Chapters were formed—San Francisco, East Bay, North Bay, Silicon Valley and the Coast—in part to maintain unique local identities—but also to keep SFBW, always a regional event, whole.
As such, by SFBW 2020, more than 1,000 events unfolded around the greater Bay Area. The 2020 Opening Gala, a large homecoming event first organized over a decade earlier, featured 130 Bay breweries and more than 400 releases.
“Celebrating SF Beer Week is about living in the moment. A good number of beers poured in any given year will never, ever be brewed again,” Marino says. “Beyond the beer? It’s a beautiful reunion, when you reconnect, compare notes, break liquid bread.”
Drake’s DeVonne Buckingham and Armistice’s Alex Zobel sharing not just beer, but stories and perspectives at SF Beek Week. Photo: Carly Susral
Then, as we know, things were upended. In the face of two hard-hitting winter surges, opening festivities shifted to more intimate venues across the Bay Area.
These more localized events, dubbed SFBW Kick Offs, proved a successful pivot, with people thirsty for fresh draft beer and hungry for human interaction again.
O’Sullivan, whose brewery hosted East Bay’s event last year, returning February 10, remembers how good it felt. “My mask was off. I'm hugging people. We're here!”
Kicking Off 2023
With recovery still underway, five Kicks Offs showcasing members of the Bay Area Brewers Guild make encores in 2023, as plans get set for the Opening Gala’s return in 2024.
“The regional Kick Offs are wonderful,” O’Sullivan says. “It's a great opportunity for people in all the different regions to attend a nearby event where they can sample beers from a host of local breweries.”
What events will follow? Part of the excitement each winter is the unfolding mystery. Not just the brewers of the Guild, but dozens of beer-centric restaurants and bars are quietly putting their plans in place.
To Christian Albertson of The Monk’s Kettle restaurant, SF Beer Week provides a focus for those who love good beer. Akin to a wedding anniversary, as he explained, “the day where you make sure that you go out to dinner and say you love each other and everything.”
His restaurant has hosted scores of SFBW events over the years, such as a world-class annual sour showcase. Food pairing, too, is “a big part of what we do and we really like highlighting how well we do it,” Albertson says.
Although multi-course paired beer dinners, the most challenging beer events to host even in normal times, have fallen off the regular Monk’s Kettle line up in recent years, Albertson misses them. So for 2023, plans are in the works for a SF Beer Week dinner at Monk’s newest and larger location in North Bay’s Terra Linda.
Sustaining the Culture
The website at sfbeerweek.org, where craft beer fans track events and fine-tune their bucket lists, also fuels the mission behind SF Beer Week. Revenue from event listing fees and a portion of Kick Off proceeds fund the co-marketing of this regional activity, in which all who participate benefit, while a smaller portion contributes to year-round promotion of the Bay Area craft beer community.
As it should. “A healthy brewers guild makes the brewing culture and the small businesses that sustain that culture stronger, more vibrant, more inclusive and more engaged in the community at large,” Marino says.
Hearing each other out at a Bay Area Brewers Guild Member Meeting at 21st Amendment. Photo: Certain Gravity Photography
Members of nonprofit trade associations representing small and regional independent craft breweries share a common mission to help and support each other. A guild facilitates knowledge sharing for improved business and brewing skills, marketplace promotion, and protection, and trade efficiencies around ingredients, products, and services. Guilds work to lift up local economies and encourage diversity. Central to the mission are ongoing initiatives—such as SFBW—to educate consumers about their local craft beer scenes, in this case, across the greater Bay Area.
Emerson, eager to have people experience his new beers from Olfactory, is keenly aware of the outreach piece and the Guild’s value in “bringing awareness to craft brands in the Bay, letting people know what breweries exist, and creating a space that's not about competition.”
Marino emphasizes that the best way for people who love craft beer to support the work of the Guild is to attend SF Beer Week events.
“Come play with us,” she says. “Enjoying your local brewers guild’s events and strengthening these creative small businesses has got to be the happiest form of activism—making the world a little better just by having better fun.”
The Laughing Monk crew knows how to appreciate the moment. Photo: Certain Gravity Photography
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