SF’s beer scene has lost steam. This brewery continues to thrive

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Jim Woods, cofounder of Woods Beer and Wine Co., believes beer is getting sweeter. He even coined a tongue-in-cheek phrase to describe the phenomenon of encroaching sugariness: the “frappucino palate.” 

It’s a trend Woods has been pushing back on since 2012, when he and partner Matt Coelho opened Woods Cerveceria off Dolores Park. Inside that small taproom, they served empanadas and MateVeza, a West Coast-style IPA brewed with the caffeine-heavy Argentine herb known as yerba maté. 

At a time when craft breweries were mostly cavernous industrial spaces with fermentation tanks prominently displayed, opening the Cerveceria was an experimental, almost avant-garde move. But in the 12 years since, Woods Beer and Wine has continued to forge its own path, steadily expanding to five outposts. (A San Anselmo location, Woods’ first outside of San Francisco proper, is coming soon. A former location on Treasure Island closed several months ago.)

This comes at a time when taproom after taproom — Barrel Head, Colorado-based New Belgium, and Seven Stills — have vanished, sometimes taking the parent brewery down with them. Throw in Anchor Brewing’s ongoing limbo, and you have an industry in tatters.

Although each Woods location looks and feels different from the others, they all showcase offerings that are conspicuously crisp and dry — a far cry from Starbucks’ saccharine ice-blended coffee drinks and any beers brewed in their image. “We’re constantly trying to push our customers into drier beers that are more balanced and go better with food,” Woods said. 

Woods’ newest outpost in Cole Valley opened earlier this month in the former Cafe Reverie, a beloved neighborhood staple that closed early last year after 21 years. Woods transformed the interior into a booth-filled space with minimalist diner vibes and an emphasis on coziness.

“When beer was ascendant, people would be down to go to a light-manufacturing neighborhood and sit on an upside-down keg in a space with no HVAC,” Woods said. “Now that beer is in a mature phase of growth, you have to have welcoming, comfortable spaces.” 

Food service, featuring a smashburger and hot dog partnership with Uptown Oakland cult hit Lovely’s, began Thursday. The Cole Valley location also has a bucolic, double-wide patio newly hooked up with gas-powered heat lamps. The sound of N Judah trains exiting the Sunset Tunnel was audible as customers with dogs and laptops sipped from 16-ounce cans of Morpho, a ruby-red hibiscus ale made with bay leaf and yerba maté, or glasses of a pale orange grenache blend.

Herbaceousness is a constant across Woods’ products, having long distinguished them from the competition — sometimes in counterintuitive ways. Take honey, for instance. If you thought including some in a beer recipe would sweeten the finished product, you’d be incorrect. “If you add honey to beer, it dries it out because it’s highly fermentable,” Woods said, noting that one of his bestsellers is Local Honey, an ale with notes of eucalyptus, yarrow, and lavender.

Another fan favorite is Retro Pilsner, an unfiltered kellerbier with its yeast in suspension that Woods says took him back to the roots of brewing. Woods’ patrons often go back and forth between beer and wine — or hew right down the middle with Divine Origins, the brewer’s award-winning line of “oenobeers,” or beer-wine hybrids, like an albariño blonde ale. “Someone going from a mixed fermentation saison to an orange wine to a chillable carbonic red — the palate for some of the beers we’re brewing is pretty in line with the wines we’re making,” he said.

Although Woods makes IPAs — a hop-heavy style other San Francisco brewers are beginning to shun — its relatively small size spares it from the market pressure to crank out five or six varieties. Midsize breweries are becoming homogeneous or getting snuffed out, Woods said. Rather than try to become the next Sierra Nevada and operate at an economy of scale, he’s happy to stay quirky and small.

“You saw this race to get to 100,000 barrels because everything penciled out” at that production level, he said, “but we can remain independent and actually be profitable. We’re the masters of our own destiny.”