The NorCal Brewery Tour - part 3

Brian, enjoying the day's offering of
"Hell or High Watermelon"

Today’s post will conclude my three-post series about the brewery visits Mary and I made during our recent vacation to Northern California.  This post is about 21^st Amendment, which is located in the SOMA area of San Francisco, near Giants Stadium, while the previous posts were about Bear Republic, North Coast, Russian River, and Anderson Valley.

The stop at 21^st Amendment was a not exactly but kind of an ad hoc affair, thrown into my friend Brian’s “50-cent” tour of San Francisco.  There will be a future post about the tour, and while this stop alone was worth at least 25 cents, he didn’t charge us extra.  As a tip, I’ve decided to throw in this photo of him enjoying a glass of “Hell or High Watermelon” outside at the brewery, and also, I’ll remind him: Don’t play in the freeway.

Obligatory deckel.

(For a preview of my future post about Brian's 50-cent tour, you can check out Brian’s blog post about the day here:  http://breakfastatepiphany.blogspot.com/2014/06/dotties-true-blue-cafe.html)

This brewery is pretty well known, even around my local in Bethesda, because the beer finds its way to a distributor in Maryland and so Jay and Sonoo carry it (heck, I just bought a sixpack of it there last night!).  A friend raved about the watermelon wheat beer last year, and I’ve tried some of the other offerings as well – so of all the breweries, this was my “must see” – thanks again to Brian.

When our friend Cathy first moved out to San Francisco in the early 1990’s, she took an apartment in SOMA near where the old Embarcadero Freeway stood.  We went to dinner near there – as it turns out, Brian parked on a street we remembered from those old days, so we had a good run of memories going for us during the stop.

The brew list.

Apparently, the weekends – I’m assuming these are non-game weekends, since you can see Giants Stadium only three or four blocks away – are a time for the brewers to come out and do demonstrations of small batches.  They had a five-gallon set-up going and were brewing one of those trendy beer-wine combinations, and they had samples of a wheat marzen they had brewed a few weeks before, so we tried it. 

All good; but while the wheat marzen is not one I am likely to try brewing myself for a while, I do plan to make a watermelon wheat this summer (in time for Independence Day), and I have a kit for the beer-wine combo, which I plan to do during July.

Their taproom has a great urban feel to it, so it would make for a good stop practically any sunny day in San Francisco.  Then again, if it happened to be a foggy or rainy day, you could also stop in for one of their dubbels or maybe a stout.  The food offerings looked pretty good as well.

21st Amendment's Taproom.

Here’s the link to 21^st Amendment:  http://21st-amendment.com/

This wraps up the brewery series.  Next week I’ll continue with selected posts from the vacation – and hopefully, I’ll have my first post of the year on the Luray-Page County Farmers Market.