About

Site header & photo by Troy McClure SF, header art by Andy Lowlife.

The Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park, AT&T Park, the Academy of Sciences, the Curran Theater, Bloomingdale’s, Chinatown, cable cars… I could go on and on about Things You Should Do in San Francisco.

But I won’t.  That’s plenty well covered elsewhere.

This site is to help you find and consume beer the best beer San Francisco and the Bay Area have to offer.

There are many general resources one can use (listed on the sidebar), but if you’re unfamiliar with the various beer destinations in the Bay Area, it’s nearly impossible to tell what to expect when you get to one.  If you’re looking for a place to have an anniversary dinner, you won’t want to go to a dive like Toronado.  If you and your old high school buddies want to get hammered, you won’t want to go upscale at La Trappe.  I want to help you, dear reader, find the right beer bar for your mood.  If you want to drink a Pliny the Elder while a dog sleeps on your foot and the Kills blast over the sound system, I will get you there.  If you want a nice sit-down dinner with organic, locally-produced foods and recommended beer pairings, I will get you there as well.

We here in the Bay Area are a bit spoiled when it comes to beer. Even the dinkiest corner store will have a pretty respectable selection of craft beer. Keeping that (and my own laziness) in mind, I’m being picky as to what I include on this site. Lots of places might have far better selections than a comparable bar in another part of the country, but if I included all of them, the site would be bursting at the seams, and this site wouldn’t be any more useful than any the random list of beer bars. So while I like and use sites like Beer Mapping and RateBeer all the time, I think most of them cast too large a net. If you just want an Anchor Steam or something, you can walk into any corner store or shithole dive and get one, no problem. I’m sending you places that’re worth the trip.

Speaking of the trip, Muni (within San Francisco) and BART (SF and the East Bay) are good, despite the local pastime of bitching about them. And this site is about how to drink beer. Keeping this in mind, I’ve included public transit information and a Google Map of the location in every post. Google Maps has a “Public Transit” option in the left column that works very well in San Francisco. It’ll tell you exactly where you can catch a bus/train, where to transfer, where to get off, and how much it’ll cost you, so you don’t have to drive drunk (it’s a big enough pain in the ass to drive here sober, anyway). Plus, cabs (of which there are five) are fairly pricey around here, so taking Muni or BART will save you some beer money.

I’ve also added a “While you’re in the neighborhood” section at the bottom of each post. If it turns out you’re not really digging the place you’re at, there might somewhere within a few blocks worth a looksee, and I’ll list them here.  They might not be fantastic beer bars (and I might not consider them worthy enough of a proper post) but I won’t recommend anything that has nothing to offer a beer lover.

Contact:

I’m on Gmail, Google Talk, and AIM as “troymccluresf.”