One of SF’s most famous brewers launches new beer label

San Francisco’s OG craft beermaker has reentered the chat.

Dave McLean, who founded the famed brewpub Magnolia Brewing in 1997 and sold it to Colorado-based New Belgium two decades later, has announced he’s starting a new company, Hidden Splendor Beer. Fans of the bearded, bespectacled brewer’s piney, malt-forward beers can expect to see Hidden Splendor offerings on draft “here and there at bars and restaurants” this summer, McLean wrote in an email to supporters. A restaurant and pub will open by the fall at an unspecified spot in San Rafael. 

Driven by easy-drinking lagers and pilsners, taprooms and brewpubs are suddenly popping up all over San Francisco, from the Haight to the Sunset to Pier 39. After years of contraction and consolidation in the craft beer industry, optimism has taken hold in Beer Land — and now a local legend has decided to throw his hat back into the ring.

McLean says it wasn’t nostalgia that spurred him to launch Hidden Splendor but favorable economic trends. In his view, the way forward for an oversaturated industry clobbered by the rise of hard seltzers is to keep production small-scale and distribution local. “There’s been a lot of handwringing,” he says, “but I feel optimistic about what I do best: create experiences around beer.” 

That ethos applies not only to the product but to the manner in which it’s dispensed. Hidden Splendor is teasing beer nerd-beloved cask-conditioning, nitro pours, side-pull faucets, traditional kölsch service, and gravity kegs. (If none of these inside-baseball terms sounds familiar, don’t worry, you’ll still have fun.)

Although Magnolia’s bestseller has long been its Proving Ground IPA, McLean built his reputation largely on English-style ales. These days, the beer pendulum seems to be swinging away from excessively hoppy products and back in his direction. “I’m not hop-averse — there will be IPAs,” McLean says. “Those aren’t that dissimilar in concept from the British ales I’ve always loved brewing.” He also plans to release a Czech pilsner and lagers made with American hops.

McLean is something of a traditionalist, with great respect for classic methods. So there probably won’t be too many hazies under the Hidden Splendor label — with one wheaty, yeasty exception. “Hefeweizen is the one beer that’s historically been allowed and intended to be hazy,” he says. “And I don’t mind making those.”

Magnolia’s tenure was rocky — the sale to New Belgium was precipitated by a Chapter 11 filing in 2015 — but while McLean, 55, relocated to Marin County, he never left the industry. He founded Haight Street cocktail bar The Alembic in 2006 and cofounded Alameda malt house Admiral Maltings in 2017. He’s still part of the latter operation, which produces one of the four main components of beer (the others are yeast, hops, and, of course, water). McLean says he’ll “still contribute as much as I can” to artisanal malt, “but I can’t wait to become an Admiral customer.”

In a sense, Hidden Splendor has already begun to emerge. For SF Beer Week in February, it teamed up with Harmonic Brewing on a New World pale ale called Hands of Time, and McLean says partnerships with Dogpatch’s Olfactory Brewing and Lafayette’s Headlands will come out over the next several months 

McLean promises this will continue. “Plenty of collaboration beers brewed with friends” was a bullet point in his email, along with “quality sound and obsessively curated music” and “a team that loves to talk about beer.” And that is something we can all lift a glass to.