The Best Places To Brew Your Own Beer In The Bay Area, San Francisco

Ferment.Drink.Repeat, aptly abbreviated FDR, proclaims to be a brewery incubator. Located in the Portola District, they are establishing a process to hire award-studded homebrewers, old and new, to make a name for themselves in the hopes of creating their own professional brewery in the future. They use large-scale equipment with complete creative license and have the ability to brand their featured beer in the public taproom. As stated in the video on their CrowdBrewed site, ‘The idea is to allow homebrewers who have paid their dues and shown great brewing capability’ to start developing a ‘future brand’ for themselves.

The Black Sands mission is ‘to spread knowledge, create a community and teach homebrewers that they can make great beer at home.’ In addition to beer, they serve coffee, small plates and a curated selection of wines and meads, all with a strong emphasis on farm-to-table ingredients. Current collaborations include a dark beer brewed with De La Paz Coffee and a robust porter using grains from the meat smoker at 4505 Meats on Divisadero. If you don’t have the chance to check out Black Sands in person, they offer homebrew kits and classes on their website as part of an initiative to ‘open source’ beer.

701 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA, USA