27-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
The Bay Area's geekiest craft brewery distanced itself from beer. It's never been more popular
Toddlers are climbing a plastic slide in the middle of a gigantic sandbox at Almanac Adventureland in Alameda, their parents slurping frosé at picnic tables nearby. Indoors, kids are springing up and down in a bouncy house, while adolescents are frantically twitching their wrists at the pinball machines.
If it weren't for all the stainless-steel beer tanks, you might think this is Chuck E. Cheese, not a brewery.
'We don't view Almanac as a craft brewery anymore,' said Damian Fagan, CEO of what was formerly known as Almanac Beer Co. 'Those days have gone.'
About a year and a half ago, he painted over the 'Beer Co.' part of the 25-foot logos that adorned the sides of this 30,000-square-foot building. He added 'Adventureland' to the logos a few weeks back.
Fagan now prefers to view Almanac as a 'gathering place for the community,' a hub for families, birthday parties, baby showers, even live wrestling events. 'I hate the word taproom, because it's such a narrow concept,' Fagan said. The most popular order is the nonalcoholic kids' slushie.
He's brought this same approach to Almanac's second location, which he calls the West Oakland Clubhouse, at the newly opened food hall Prescott Market. There, too, Almanac has installed a sandbox, plus kids' games and an Airstream trailer that frequently operates as a 'mimosa hydration station.' Fagan hopes to open six or seven Almanac outposts within the next few years.
At a time when craft breweries are struggling and some of the Bay Area's most illustrious names are merging to stay afloat, Almanac presents a fascinating case study in total metamorphosis. Over its 15 years in business, Almanac went from one of the Bay Area's geekiest craft beer projects to possibly its most populist — with an approach that deliberately downplays the role of the beer. 'When Almanac first started, the beer was the moment,' said executive vice president of sales Kevin Scoles. 'And now we feel like we want beer to be part of the moment.'
The approach appears to be working. Unlike many of its peers, Almanac is profitable, according to Scoles, and those profits are growing. In its first two months, sales at the West Oakland Clubhouse have been roughly double what Fagan had projected. Adventureland sees up to 3,000 visitors on Saturdays, Scoles said, which he believes could make it Northern California's busiest taproom — or, if not a taproom, whatever it is.
Outside the echo chamber
This is not the first time that Almanac has reinvented itself. Fagan thinks of Almanac as having three distinct life phases. The current phase, 3.0, is the one in which it stopped calling itself a brewery and installed the sandboxes. That's a response to the changing nature of the craft beer market, Fagan said.
Nationwide, craft beer sales declined 3.3% last year, according to research firm Circana. 'A lot of craft breweries right now are scratching their heads saying, 'Gosh, what I was doing in 2016 isn't working,' but then they just double down,' Fagan said. They'll brew a beer with a new hops variety from New Zealand, 'but they don't understand that consumers are absolutely fatigued. They just don't want it.'
The mission that drives Almanac now is to make beer for 'the 90%,' Scoles said, not the 10% of craft beer obsessives who care about IBUs (bitterness) and pH (acidity).
That manifests in the family-friendly taprooms, but also in the beer itself: Where Almanac originally produced only barrel-aged beers, and mostly fruited sours, its calling card is now a hazy IPA called Love, which comprises 40% of its production. It once targeted high-end restaurants; now Fagan focuses on chains like Safeway and Costco (for whom Almanac is brewing a proprietary IPA, Gold Star Love).
'We're trying to play outside the craft beer echo chamber,' said Scoles.
Almanac 1.0
The echo chamber looked like a fine place to be in 2010, when Fagan and a friend he'd met in a San Francisco homebrew club, Jesse Friedman, started making beer together. Both loved barrel-aged beers, especially Belgian styles. They also saw an opportunity to marry the then-surging craft beer scene with the Bay Area's farm-to-table ethos.
Fagan and Friedman initially called their project Old Oak, but changed it once they learned that Angostura held that trademark for a Trinidadian rum. Almanac was a fitting replacement, an expression of their focus on farmers. For the first two years, they released a new beer every quarter, almost all of them incorporating fruit from a single California farm. They were buying blackberries from Sebastopol, blueberries from Chico, peaches from Fresno. It was still a hobby; they sold all of Almanac's beers in 750ml bottles, the standard size for wine, for $17-$20 — expensive for beer. They hosted beer-pairing dinners at Flour + Water and Lazy Bear. This was a brewery for the rarefied.
It was successful enough that Fagan, the CEO, and Friedman, the brewmaster, quit their day jobs in 2013. While contract-brewing at Hermitage in San Jose, they began plotting the move to their own facility in Alameda, imagining a brewery dedicated exclusively to slow, thoughtful barrel-aged beers.
Meanwhile, Almanac opened a taproom — really, it was a restaurant — in the Mission District in 2017. It was fully aligned with the ingredient-driven brewing philosophy, serving plum-infused farmhouse ale alongside housemade pork rillettes with pickled kohlrabi.
The Mission restaurant 'was fun, but really it was a distraction, and certainly from a business perspective it was a resounding failure,' said Fagan. 'We've never lost more money than when we had that open.'
Something needed to change, Fagan feared. The sour beer market had felt like it was theirs for the taking in 2010; now there were 30 other high-quality local sour beers on the shelves. Between the time Almanac signed its lease in Alameda in 2016 and opened the doors there in 2018, the brewery's sour beer sales plunged by around 80%. 'When we moved into Alameda there was this sudden realization that this is a completely different animal,' he said. They had a 10-year, $60,000-a-month lease, having raised millions of dollars from outside investors and borrowed a few more million from the bank. They were in over their heads.
What drinkers wanted nowadays were fresh beers, the catch-all term for non-sours, Fagan thought. Two months after they opened the Alameda brewery to the public, Friedman left the company. 'Jesse and I had pretty divergent visions,' said Fagan, not only about the types of beers they should brew but also about the business structure. Friedman declined to comment for this story.
This was Almanac 2.0: pivoting to IPA.
'If I hadn't made that decision, we probably wouldn't still be here,' Fagan said. 'Things were pretty dire for a while.' They closed the Mission restaurant in 2019.
Fagan made some adjustments that he said were 'anathema' in the craft beer scene at the time: getting into chain stores, switching from bottles to cans and diminishing the number of one-off beers Almanac brewed. Now, the brewery would focus on a few perennially available products, like Love IPA. 'If you talked about flagships or core beers in 2018, you got laughed out of the room,' he said.
It may not have been cool, but it worked. What was a 3,000-barrel production in 2018 grew to a 20,000-barrel output today. Almanac got out into the world, opening a 'Love Shack' stand at the minor league San Jose Giants ballpark and sponsoring new independent baseball team the Oakland Ballers.
Things have really picked up in the last year with the Adventureland rebranding and the West Oakland opening — Almanac 3.0. Now, the menu above the bars is comprised mostly of 'light' (lagers and the like) and 'hoppy' (IPAs of various types) beers; flagships like Hugs, a creamy, banana-inflected hefeweizen, appear alongside taproom exclusives like Sandlot, a hoppy West Coast pilsner. 'Fruity and tart,' the sours, are almost a footnote. Almanac still sells a good amount of sour beer, Scoles said, especially its fruit-packed Sournova. It's in a can, not a bottle. But 'Love is what pays for our health insurance.'
The defining feature of this era, however, is the increasing distance that Fagan is putting between Almanac and beer. Don't want to drink beer? There's plenty else to do and consume here. Fagan stopped drinking three years ago. 'The whole Adventureland concept,' he said, 'is designed to mentally cue people that this is not a taproom visit.'
