Beverages

Bottle Rock: Napa Festival's Attempt To Combine Food, Wine, and Music Falls Short

It seems like a good idea on paper: Throw a music festival in wine country where guests can go wine-tasting and sample some of the region's best restaurants in between musical acts. That was the focus of Bottle Rock, a new festival thrown in a park in downtown Napa that combines stadium-filling rock ... More >>

Equator and Ma'velous Team Up for Glimpse at Best Coffee in America

Ma'velous, that glimmering trove of coffees and gorgeous gizmos by Civic Center, is bringing in an extra special bounty to its already very special menu. But if you blink, you'll miss it. The goods? Granja La Esperanza Geisha, a lot of a rare and celebrated varietal roasted by Caitlin McCarthy-Garci ... More >>

Matchmaking At The 2013 Oyster Wine Competition

Every year I look forward to judging the Pacific Coast Oyster Wine Competition put on by Taylor Shellfish Farms and oyster expert Jon Rowley. The setup is simple: through an extensive selection process, Rowley and a team of preliminary judges comb through 124 California, Oregon, and Washington wines ... More >>

Drink of the Week: Hunting with the Woodsman at Bloodhound

When Bloodhound opened in 2008 (making it 36 in dog years), that stretch of Folsom was a rather lonely one with a few outlier clubs and leather shops. The bar's success and longevity is certainly due in part to the bartending skills that owner Dylan O'Brien honed over the years, but also because it ... More >>

Cocktail Culture: Evolving Beyond Beards and Suspenders Into Something Weirder Still

Saint Frank: Bringing the Story of Coffee to Russian Hill

Saint Frank to Bring Story of Coffee to Russian Hill

The past two years have proven San Francisco to be fairly fertile ground for craft coffee. Armfuls of small roasters and "Third Wave" cafés are popping open monthly, and their missions are clear: to teach us to love coffee as we love wine -- to care about where it comes from and the prolific subtle ... More >>

Coffee Culture Will Combine Fro-Yo and Espresso in the FiDi

If you've been part of the daily midday mass exodus to the Curry Up Now truck in the FiDi, you've probably passed a mysterious and jazzy storefront on Bush Street with the name "Coffee Cultures" stamped across the front window. The upcoming café is a new venture from Jason Paul, former co-owner o ... More >>

Drink 2013: Sour Beer Gets Its Due

Drink 2013: Small Batch is the Second Coming of Local Wine

Drink 2013: Wine Listings

Drink 2013: Beer Listings

Drink of the Week: The Viceroy at Cantina

Few spirits that have the potential to incite the kind of heated debate that pisco, the South American unaged grape based brandy, is capable of. Should you ever have the misfortune of asking a Chilean and a Peruvian about the origins of pisco, you would quickly find yourself with no answer and in th ... More >>

Beer of the Week: Magnolia Brewery Quadlibet for Tenderfeet

The bad news is that SF Beer Week has come and gone. The good news? You're probably a lot less hungover. Wait, we still have another week of Strong Beer Month? Ok, scratch that last thing we said about fewer hangovers. The good news is that there's still gobs of delicious beer to consume throughout ... More >>

SF Beer Week: Thursday Event Roundup

All right, Lothario, we already know what you're thinking. It's Valentine's Day and you want to woo that special someone while enjoying the bounty of SF Beer Week. It's your lucky day. The beer week schedule has more beer and chocolate pairing events than you can shake a long-stemmed rose at. But, w ... More >>

SF Beer Week: Tuesday Event Roundup

If it hasn't become obvious already, SF Beer Week isn't simply a celebration of San Francisco beer, or even Bay Area beer in general. While the calendar surely has a local focus (and rightly so), many breweries from throughout California, neighboring states, and even other countries have traveled ma ... More >>

Our Three Favorite Mixology Parodies, in Honor of This Week's Review

In this week's review, I called out new Mission hot spot Trick Dog for coming dangerously close to being a parody of the worst kind of mixology bar (it isn't, by the way, because the food and drinks are almost uniformly awesome). This was very much on my mind during my visits, partially because the ... More >>

New Albion: Historic Local Ale Comes Back to Life

Why American Craft Beer is Better Than Ever: A Brewer's Manifesto

When someone says "I don't like beer" my reaction is almost always the same: "Challenge accepted!" It's not that the so-called beer-hater doesn't like beer -- it's that they don't like any of the beers they've had up until now. Chances are, it's been a pretty narrow selection of what's out there. ... More >>

Beer of the Week: Boston Beer Company Revives Historic New Albion Ale

All right class, it's time for a history lesson. Can anybody tell me which brewery is acknowledged as the first modern microbrewery in the United States? If you answered New Albion Brewing Company, you get an A. Does somebody know where the brewery was located? Yes, right in our backyard in Sonoma! ... More >>

Drink of the Week: Know Your Sparkling Wine

The end of the year brings many things: family, parties, and lots of sparkling wine. While we love cocktails, it's this time of year we simply give in to any and all excuses for bubbly. It's like wine that got bedazzled. While our mental image of sparkling wine mostly stays fixed on Champagne, the ... More >>

Drink of the Week: Puttin' on the Bix

Veering off Montgomery onto Gold Street, a little, almost nondescript alley, feels like slipping into a hidden passageway. Walking along it I get the thrill of being in on a secret, what I imagine was half the fun of prohibition era speakeasies. The tidy little street doesn't stand out for any parti ... More >>

Bear in Heaven: Show Preview

Good For the Wallet, Good for the Glass: Talking Holiday Wines With Bi-Rite's Trac Le

There are fine wines. And then there are the ones to bust out on a near-daily basis: end of the day. Your widescreen TV is glowing. Maybe your friends are headed over. Or you decided to cozy up with that furry pet of yours... all relevant cases for a glass or two of decent and not overpriced wine. T ... More >>

Fall Cocktails: Two Exceptional Drinks at Presidio Social Club

Drink of the Week: Apple Brandy Sour at Presidio Social Club

With apple season in full force, and the weather kicking its final throws of Indian Summer, the cold weather cocktail season officially begins. At Presidio Social Club, bar manager Tim Stookey is adding two new drinks to the line up designed to unfog our lenses for a bit. The fall leaf red Picante ... More >>

Where to Celebrate Oktoberfest in S.F.

It's the most magical time of the year, at least for those of us who love liters of German beer flowing like water: Oktoberfest! Like the good festival city it is, San Francisco has plenty of options for celebrating the traditional German party, from the official Oktoberfest by the Bay to more sedat ... More >>

Annals of Sad Press Releases: The Jellinator

Occasionally we receive a press release so sweet and misguided that we feel it's our professional duty to share it. Case in point: The Jellinator, a new kitchen gadget invented by a husband-and-wife team who claim to be "quite the jello shot enthusiasts," and have come up with a solution to ease the ... More >>

Taylor's Tonics Unveils The Fizzary Soda Pop & Candy Shop

The Fizzary opened on August 27 in the Mission District, where it shares a block with Mission Pie. Nostalgic candies beckon from tables around the room. The varied confectionery assortment offers things like swirled candy sticks in flavors that veer toward the grown up (horehound), Necco wafers in ... More >>

The Wine Detective: Maureen Downey Reveals Forged Bottles

Wine and Dine

Wine and Dine

Beer of the Week: Firestone Walker Double DBA

In today's booming craft beer renaissance, there are plenty of breweries whose reputation is staked on brewing one style of beer particularly well. Some brewers make a name for themselves by almost exclusively brewing dry, West Coast IPAs. Others amass a following with a sludgy imperial stout that p ... More >>

Joie de Vine

S.F., You Have Some Damn Fine Arnold Palmers

Every six months I resolve to kick my Diet Coke habit and develop a short-lived enthusiasm for a caffeinated mid-afternoon alternative. You name it, I've tried it: kombucha, yerba mate, iced tea, BibiCaffe, cold-brewed coffee, on and on. Eventually I always drift back to the real thing. This time i ... More >>

BBQ & Wine: Pairings for Your Holiday Grilling

A mid-week 4th of July timing either means you'll have a lot of mid-week BBQ days, or almost none at all. So we'll suggest some wines from our recent tastings to cover you from a quick prep on the light side to a heavy-weight overnight marinade big meat bonanza. Light Pick - For a light BBQ leanin ... More >>

Gary Farrell's New Wines: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Russian River

Early high-end wine efforts in Napa focused on Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay while Sonoma experimented with Chardonnay and Zinfandel. Around 1970 a few visionaries planted Pinot Noir in Russian River's cooler regions. Gary Farrell was one of them. Many assumed great pinot noir couldn't be produ ... More >>

Summer Guide: Classic Cocktails Are Alive and Well in S.F.

Sommelier Q & A with Urban Tavern's Steve Kleinfeld

Steve Kleinfeld C.S., General Manager of Urban Tavern, has built a wine list focused on wines with a sustainable focus to serve his mix of local and hotel guests. We have five questions for Sommeliers, and we hit him with them -- and then we can't resist dishing a bit below about his answers. Stev ... More >>

Drink of the Week: Golden Gate 75th Celebration in Cocktails

With the official 75th Anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge this weekend, the festivities will also come in cocktail form.* At Aurea inside the Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill, they're serving the St. Charles Punch ($12, Pierre Ferrand Ambre Cognac, Fonsecca Terra Bella Organic Rub ... More >>

James Freeman, Blue Bottle Coffee Founder, Just Wrote the Book on Coffee

Any good San Franciscan knows how to muse over a cup of coffee. We can't help but remembering fondly the coffee drinkers at Four Barrel who continued sipping obliviously as two burglars used this hipster hotspot as an attempted escape route last November. I've sat in many a coffee shop, eavesdr ... More >>

Top Sommelier Tips with Gabriele Originario of La Mar

Sommeliers spend all day with wine, and are a great resource for new finds. They're the "friend on the inside" that can help you suss out the best values on their wine lists. With that in mind, we've come up with a short suite of questions that we're posing to some of our favorite area sommeliers to ... More >>

San Francisco's 10 Best Wine Lists

San Francisco is one of the best places in the world to drink young wines, particularly those with attitude, from many different places. Sommeliers here are passionate and their wine lists reflect it. We don't have many older wines on lists because restaurants turn over so quickly that they don't ... More >>

The Ice Cream Bar: Old-Fashioned Soda Fountain Goes Modern

Wine of the Week: Pine Ridge's $9.99 Crowd Pleaser/Polarizer

Pine Ridge is one of those Napa brands that people have collected and saved since before Napa wines became the rage across the 1% that actually have cellars to store wine in. The producer brought French thinking and balance to California wine making, producing great wines that became greater with ti ... More >>

Wine of the Week: La Sirena's Moscato Azul and Syrah Santa Ynez

​ Heidi Barrett's family has been making wine in Napa long before the valley became a world-renowned wine destination. Barrett is one of Napa's rock-star winemakers, best known for bringing in perfect scores from some critics for her work at Screaming Eagle. If you don't care about Napa, or rock ... More >>

Ritual's Tex Bohlin Talks Competitive Coffee and Raw Steak Whip Cream

​​​​In an effort to chart the ever-expanding specialty coffee scene in the Bay Area, we've been engaging a selection of local coffee personalities to pick their brains about why coffee and why now.  With the 2012 Regional Barista Championship occurring this past weekend, we spoke to Rit ... More >>

Drink: Wild Spirits: Small-Batch Bay Area Distillers Take Big Risks

Drink: Buying Wine: Finding Great Bottles and Advice in S.F.

Josiah Baldivino, Lead Sommelier of Michael Mina, Dishes About Wine

​SFoodie's Ben Narasin sat down with Josiah Baldivino, Lead Sommelier of Michael Mina, to talk about wine. You moved here from NYC, so what differences do you see between how people order wine on the left coast versus the right? People order a lot more local things out here, and they're quick to ... More >>