The Bay Area's latest beer craze: pickles

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

We find ourselves, in the summer of 2025, in a pickle vortex. Whole Foods is selling pickle kombucha, the New York Times is instructing its readers in making pickle lemonade, and Salt & Straw is churning out pickle sorbet. The publication Inside Hook declared the pickle margarita (another Times recipe) the drink of the summer.
One briny beer was made for this moment, literally. 'This couldn't have come at a better time,' said Josh Jancewicz, founder of Donna's Pickle Beer, which recently became available in Northern California. 'We're for sure in a pickle zeitgeist.'
Headquartered in Los Angeles and brewed in Milwaukee, Donna's Pickle Beer is growing quickly. When Jancewicz commissioned the first batch in April 2023, it was for about 400 cases. Now he's selling 5,000 to 7,000 cases a month. In the few months that it's been available in the Bay Area, it's built a presence: The beer is available at San Francisco locations of Gus's Community Market and Whole Foods, plus the bars True Laurel and Trick Dog, where Jancewicz used to bartend. (Trick Dog co-founder Scott Baird is a partner in Donna's Pickle Beer.) It's rolling out in Oakland soon.
Jancewicz named the beer after his mother, Donna, and put an apocryphal origin story on the back of the cans and the website: Donna was backstage at Madison Square Garden eating pickles from a jar when Mick Jagger pulled her onstage and kissed her with a mouth full of beer. Don't believe it.
The truth is that Jancewicz was working as a mail carrier in Hollywood during the pandemic and felt 'pretty desperate to not do that job anymore,' he said. As he was casting about for entrepreneurial ideas, he tasted a pickle-laced beer from a Texas brewery and thought it 'didn't taste good and didn't look cool.' He figured he could do it better.
He started with the design, sketching out a nostalgic-feeling, green-and-white logo that looked like it could have been the sign for a 1970s Midwestern dive bar. 'I just knew that it needed to look like it had always been around,' said Jancewicz. He wanted people to see it on a shelf and think, 'How have I never noticed it?'
Then he needed someone to produce it for him. The first 20 breweries that he contacted gave him a resounding 'no.' Finally he found Pilot Project in Milwaukee, an incubator for startup brewers. The team there dialed in the recipe according to Jancewicz's specification that it taste 'like you poured your favorite pickle brine into a beer.' The base is a simple lager (Jancewicz wanted 'something with no flavor, that people could drink two, three, four of'), with a proprietary brine. No cucumbers are harmed in the process: To avoid creating excessive vegetable waste, they make the brine with an organic cucumber essence.
The result is not shy. Donna's is unapologetically pickley, heavy on the vinegar and the dill. If you're a pickle person — apparently we're all pickle people now — you'll probably find it delicious. It's priced in line with standard craft beer, about $12.99-$13.99 for a six-pack in stores, or about $6-$7 per can in a bar.
Although the Donna's Pickle Beer company is still a workforce of one — just Jancewicz, who kept a day job until three months ago — the founder has big aspirations for the brand. (Donna comes along for occasional promotional events, as a volunteer.) He's trying to raise funding from friends and family, and hopes to secure venture capital eventually. Jancewicz has spinoff products in mind like canned micheladas, shandys and, he noted excitedly, actual pickles: 'Hopefully I have a nice little pickle factory in the Midwest someday.'