The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [36]
By that point I was beginning to believe what I’d heard in all those San Francisco beer bars. We finished with what Hunt called a “Norwegian farmhouse beer” by the name of Uncle Fudd, named for a song lyric Johnny Cash made famous (“The Tennessee Stud”). It’s ale made with rye grain and branches of the Thuja tree, a cousin of Western Red Cedar. The result? At that hour of the day, after tasting about a dozen of Hunt’s concoctions, my palate was fairly shot. But there was something intangible in that beer, like the others, something compelling, if radically unfamiliar. Maybe, as Hunt might say, it’s just moonlight. Who knows what he’ll come up with next? This is brewing as alchemy. Hunt’s mystic approach, otherworldly skill, and mischievous persona give Moonlight an inescapable aura. Look for it.
LA TRAPPE CAFÉ
800 Greenwich St. • San Francisco, CA 94133 (415) 440-8727 • latrappecafe.com • Established: 2007
SCENE & STORY
Amid the tacky red sauce joints of North Beach, there’s a salve for the soul at the corner of Mason and Greenwich: a broad list of good Belgian ales and an array of classic Belgian dishes, like moules à la bière and well-made waterzooi, a seafood stew made of manila clams, mussels, and shrimp served over a piece of grilled sea bass. Skip the blah upstairs and immediately head to the subterranean bowels for 19 taps of beer and a 250-plus bottle menu, the best possible antidote to Fisherman’s Wharf tourist overload. It’s also right on the Powell cable car line, for an escape up into Chinatown or up over the hill toward Market Street and the Ferry Building, and some of San Francisco’s best beer bars and breweries.
PHILOSOPHY
La Trappe proclaims a zero-tolerance for the plastic kegs some bars and breweries have been using for convenience, believing them to have adverse effects on beer.
KEY BEER
On draft, North Coast La Merle (7.9% ABV) is a Californian take on the Belgian style of saison. The Fort Bragg brewer’s version is wheaty and hazy gold with a lemony, slightly herbal kick.
ZEITGEIST
199 Valencia at Dubose • San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 255-7505 • zeitgeistsf.com • Established: 1986
SCENE & STORY
Zeitgeist is a biker-style dive bar with decaying, red-shingled walls, razor wire fences, and a vista of a highway overpass. On entering, it is normal for most to feel somewhat apprehensive. Then you scan the beer list of more than forty taps, pick out something inordinately good and cheap, and amble outside on a vast patio with picnic-style tables lined up in the gravel. On warm nights the garden fills up with lanky bike messengers, big-bearded musicians, and energetic beer fanatics taking advantage of the reasonable prices and cheap burgers and dogs off the grill.
PHILOSOPHY
Officially, it’s “Warm Beer and Cold Women,” but it’s not all really so bad. Don’t take photos, though, of anyone or anything but your own friends. You can get the boot for that.
KEY BEER
Moonlight Death & Taxes Black Beer—inevitably.
21st AMENDMENT
563 2nd St. • San Francisco, CA 94107 • (415) 369-0900 21st-amendment.com • Established: 2000
SCENE & STORY
It would be all too easy to dismiss this brewery on the basis that they make a popular canned beer intentionally laden with chunks of watermelon and contract brew some of their beer (in general, this means using excess capacity in other companies’ breweries rather than brew and ship from a single location to save money). But freewheeling founders Nico Freccia and Shaun O’Sullivan—who met in a brewing class at UC Davis—are producing a whole range of great beers in cans, and their huge, loft-like brewpub and beer garden complex in San Francisco’s South Park area (south of Market Street, a couple of blocks from the San Francisco Giants Stadium) is the kind of place anyone would feel at home drinking some flavorful,