It\u2019s a Sunday afternoon in Alameda, and several of the Bay Area\u2019s most gifted young brewers are gathered at the Rake, the taproom attached to Admiral Maltings, to say farewell to one of their own.<\/p>\n
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Phil Emerson \u2014 founder of San Francisco\u2019s recently shuttered Olfactory Brewing & Blending and former brewmaster at Almanac Beer Co. \u2014 is leaving California for Vermont, where he will soon begin a new brewing job nearly 3,000 miles from a beer community that will miss him.<\/p>\n
The Rake sits beside Almanac at Alameda Point, the former naval base that has evolved into one of the West Coast\u2019s densest hubs for beer, wine and spirits producers. Emerson spent seven years here as Almanac\u2019s brewmaster, helping guide the company through a period of rapid growth while shaping some of its most celebrated recipes.<\/p>\n
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Beer industry insiders and supporters mingle inside the Rake in Alameda, Calif., May 31, 2026.<\/p>\n
Douglas Despres\/For SFGATE<\/p>\n
The mood in the taproom feels familiar. Brewers, beer buyers, taproom managers and longtime supporters of the scene reconnect to laugh, hug, and reminisce over pints of local beer, glasses of homemade sangria and shots of Underberg.<\/p>\n
Two weeks earlier, some of these same faces gathered at Trumer Brewery in Berkeley, where longtime brewmaster Lars Larson shared farewell toasts beneath imposing brewing vessels that will no longer produce his renowned pilsner. Earlier this spring, Trumer\u2019s Texas-based parent company sold the brewery to Firestone Walker Brewing Company, which announced plans to absorb production into its much larger Central Coast facility.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was there from the very beginning, the very first day,\u201d Larson told me several days later.<\/p>\n
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FILE: Lars Larson is the only\u00a0brewmaster Trumer Berkeley has ever had, and one of the last employees on staff as the brewery winds down operations.<\/p>\n
Lester Black\/SFGATE<\/p>\n
Since 2017, the Bay Area has witnessed the closure, consolidation, relocation or acquisition of many of its largest breweries. Speakeasy Ales & Lagers ceased operations before later resuming production in Fresno. 21st Amendment Brewing closed its San Leandro facility before being acquired by Philadelphia-based Evil Genius Beer Company. Bear Republic Brewing shuttered its Healdsburg brewery following its acquisition by Drake\u2019s Brewing, which just announced plans to merge with Figueroa Mountain Brewing and relocate most of its production volume to Buellton \u2014 the same Santa Barbara County city where Trumer beer will now be brewed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And while there are signs that Anchor Brewing may rise again at its historic Potrero Hill location<\/a>, it is unlikely that staffing levels and compensation would return to their previous scale. The result is a Bay Area beer labor market flooded with experienced brewers, cellar workers and industry ambassadors.<\/p>\n Ironically, the closure of these facilities coincides with an unprecedented peak in beer quality for Bay Area consumers. While fewer nationally recognized brands are being produced in the region, the smaller outfits replacing them are producing world-class beer more consistently than ever before. Drinkers today have access to a wider range of technically accomplished, brewery-fresh beer than at any previous point in the region\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n FILE: The sign on the front door of Anchor Brewing Co. in San Francisco.\u00a0<\/p>\n Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Whether it is the parents who pack Almanac\u2019s\u00a0Adventureland campus in Alameda every weekend, the tourists who line up at Humble Sea\u2019s Pier 39 location<\/a> or the locals who carry boxes of June\u2019s Pizza into the Brix Factory tasting room in West Oakland, across the Bay Area, consumers have access to a wider variety of brewery-operated retail spaces than ever before.\u00a0<\/p>\n Beer industry talent is being redistributed from the mid-sized, wholesale-focused breweries like 21st Amendment that once defined the region into smaller, self-distributing, retail-focused operations that now form the craft beer vanguard. In some cases, that shift is elevating already elite breweries to even higher levels. In others, it is pushing experienced beer professionals into part-time work, other industries or out of the Bay Area entirely.<\/p>\n In other words, Bay Area beer is better than ever for consumers, while simultaneously becoming economically unsustainable for many of the people who produce it.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cThe bigger picture of the Bay Area is that the larger breweries \u2014 you don\u2019t want to say [there are] none, but there are very few left,\u201d Larson said. \u201cWhat\u2019s left over are the small, taproom-focused breweries. Those jobs are often jobs for people at the beginning of their careers, as opposed to people who are trying to maintain a family.\u201d<\/p>\n Trumer provided full medical, dental and healthcare benefits, Larson noted, something that is increasingly rare in a Bay Area beer industry shifting toward smaller operations built around self-distribution and direct-to-consumer sales.<\/p>\n FILE: Trumer Berkeley produced all of the brewery\u2019s pilsner that\u2019s sold in the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lester Black\/SFGATE<\/p>\n \u201cTrumer was a farm team for the Bay Area beer industry,\u201d Ryan Frank, an industry veteran now serving as chief operating officer of Headlands Brewing Company, told me, describing the brewery as an unofficial training ground for the region\u2019s production workforce.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Over the years, brewers who developed their skills within Trumer\u2019s meticulously process-driven brewery dispersed throughout the region, carrying those standards with them to other companies. As one of the last remaining regional craft breweries in the East Bay, Trumer offered something most locally focused breweries could not: a place where brewing could provide a relatively comfortable Bay Area livelihood.<\/p>\n Larson is the only brewmaster Trumer Berkeley has ever had. Today, after more than two decades overseeing one of the defining beers of Bay Area drinking culture, he remains among the last employees still on staff, helping supervise the brewery\u2019s decommissioning.<\/p>\n \u201cMy instinct is that I will be looking at beer-adjacent industries,\u201d Larson said when I asked what comes next for him professionally. \u201cThat is the more likely path for me now.\u201d<\/p>\n Larson is hardly alone. From brewery production floors to retail beer counters, even some of the most accomplished people in American beer are struggling to find the kind of long-term careers their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s would seem to warrant.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Nicole Erny, a master cicerone, pours beer behind the bar at Good Times in Oakland, Calif., on June 5, 2026.<\/p>\n Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n Nicole Erny is one of only 29 master cicerones in the world. Over the years, she has contributed to many of the Bay Area\u2019s top beer bars and designed sensory-based quality-assurance programs for some of the region\u2019s most respected breweries. Today, she works part-time at Good Times, a beer and wine shop in North Oakland.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of scary to think about even trying to put myself out there,\u201d Erny told me, \u201cbecause I know breweries can\u2019t afford anything right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n For\u00a0Erny, the current labor market reflects long-simmering structural problems within craft beer itself: physically demanding work, wages that struggle to keep pace with the rising cost of living, and an industry culture in which passion often substitutes for economic stability.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople get paid in Skittles and shred their bodies out of love for the beer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n At the same time, Erny still believes deeply in the kind of face-to-face beer culture the Bay Area does especially well.<\/p>\n \u201cReal beer education happens one-on-one,\u201d she said. \u201cYou give somebody a taste of something adjacent to what they already drink, and suddenly they discover this whole new world. That\u2019s how beer culture got built in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicole Erny, a master cicerone, works as a bartender at Good Times in Oakland, Calif., on June 5, 2026.<\/p>\n Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n The challenge is finding living-wage work in an industry returning to the smaller, more intimate scale she describes. Today, many industry veterans are struggling to find stable employment, even as smaller Bay Area breweries assemble the strongest teams they have ever had.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Few illustrate that shift more clearly than Oakland\u2019s Ghost Town Brewing. Already one of the most decorated breweries in the country over the past several years, Ghost Town has recently added former Drake\u2019s employees, including brewer Kyle Murdock, who spent six years as a lead brewer at the larger regional brewery.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was almost impossible for me to find anybody,\u201d director of brewing operations Justin Burdt told me. \u201cA year ago, we put an ad up, and we only had two people apply.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Ghost Town brewer Kyle Murdock\u00a0keeps an eye on a batch of beer being brewed at Ghost Town Brewery in Oakland, Calif., on June 8, 2026.<\/p>\n Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n Now, suddenly, some of the most experienced production workers in Northern California are available.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cOur SOPs are pretty complicated,\u201d Burdt said, referring to the brewery\u2019s standard operating procedures. \u201cAnd within two weeks, Kyle had it dialed.\u201d<\/p>\n Burdt said the recent closures have reshaped staffing across the Bay Area beer scene far beyond Ghost Town itself. Fellow Oakland breweries like Original Pattern and Cellarmaker have benefited from the sudden availability of experienced brewing talent, as have Emeryville\u2019s Wondrous Brewing and San Francisco\u2019s Barebottle Brewing. Smaller breweries throughout the region are now recruiting workers who likely would have been out of reach just a year or two ago.<\/p>\n Ghost Town brewer Kyle Murdock, left, and director of brewing operations Justin Burdt with barreled beer and beer kegs at Ghost Town Brewery in Oakland, Calif., on June 8, 2026.<\/p>\n Douglas Zimmerman\/SFGATE<\/p>\n Anthony Raggio, Drake\u2019s director of packaging and logistics, jokingly described the shift this way: \u201cWe call Ghost Town \u2018Drake\u2019s North\u2019 and Original Pattern \u2018Drake\u2019s West.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Ryan Frank has watched this transformation from both sides. Before taking his current position at Headlands, Frank previously brewed at both 21st Amendment and Fort Point, two breweries that helped define an earlier era of Bay Area craft beer built around larger batches and rapid wholesale growth.<\/p>\n That model may no longer be economically viable. But the people who built those breweries have not disappeared. Many of them are turning up inside smaller breweries that are finding success in a market that rewards freshness and proximity more than broad distribution and production scale.<\/p>\n Ron Silberstein, co-founder of Admiral Maltings, holds maturing barley in Alameda, Calif., May 31, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n Douglas Despres\/For SFGATE<\/p>\n Headlands is one such company. Over the past two years, the growing brewery has opened three new locations in the East Bay, including one on the UC Berkeley campus<\/a>, while adding talented brewers displaced by closures at 21st Amendment and Heretic.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cThe beers we\u2019ve been making over the past six months are absolutely elevated by the quality of labor that we\u2019ve had access to,\u201d Frank said.<\/p>\n From the beer drinker\u2019s perspective, this may well be the strongest local beer culture the region has ever had. Whether it can continue to attract and retain the talent that made it possible is a more difficult question.<\/p>\n Frank has watched talented people leave beer entirely for more stable industries.<\/p>\n Brennan Fleming, founder of Dunloe Brewing in Davis, removes empty beer kegs on the back side of the Rake in Alameda, Calif., May 31, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n Douglas Despres\/For SFGATE<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know one person who has left brewing for biotech and come back,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Stay informed, and entertained.<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use<\/a> and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n For now, the talent that once powered the Bay Area\u2019s larger breweries is increasingly showing up in the smaller, fresher, more intimate brewery experiences consumers have been gravitating toward for years. Whether the people responsible for that transformation will be able to build sustainable lives here remains to be seen.<\/p>\n Sayre Piotrkowski is an advanced cicerone and has been working in the craft beer industry for more than 20 years. He currently serves as executive director of the Bay Area Brewers Guild and publishes the organization\u2019s weekly newsletter, the Brew Deck<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a Sunday afternoon in Alameda, and several of the Bay Area\u2019s most gifted young brewers are gathered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105,4991],"class_list":["post-360297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-sfgfood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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