SF’s hottest new taproom pours the city’s ‘coldest beers’

Welcome to Swig City, where we point you toward can’t-miss drinks at the best bars, restaurants, and kolsch-loving craft breweries in the city. Cheers!

Standard Deviant, whose trio of owners slyly boast that their gold-medal-winning Kolsch is the coldest-tasting in town, is now the latest craft brewery to join the city’s beer renaissance. The maker of Tree People IPA, Helmet Head blond, and several increasingly popular nitro beers has opened its second taproom, at Dogpatch’s burgeoning Pier 70.

Co-owners Mark DeVito, Paul Duatschek, and Pete Vitt bring a tongue-in-cheek joviality to every interaction. When I visited, I couldn’t get one question out of my mouth without being amicably interrupted by one of the owners. “We don’t talk without beers in our hands,” DeVito insisted. 

So we cheers’d over a glass of barrel-aged rosé-saison, a seasonal “wine-beer” for which Duatschek procured zinfandel juice from near Clear Lake. It’s a pink-amber, lightly effervescent co-fermentation that ages in French oak for five months, producing a full-bodied beer, like a farmhouse saison, that goes down easy, like a summery rosé.

Beer temperature aside, Standard Deviant is undeniably cool. The mothership, which opened in 2016 on an industrial block of 14th Street — DeVito calls the neighborhood “LoSoNoMishMa,” a mashup of the Lower Haight, SoMa, the Mission, and Market Street — quickly became a popular after-work hangout. 

Standard Deviant cemented its reputation for affable excellence through collabs with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (its Hop on Muni IPA involved a Beer Week pub crawl) and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (the low-alcohol Helmet Head is designed to allow cyclists to throw back a couple and ride home safely). The taproom itself became a home for chili cook-offs and Trump impeachment drink specials, as well as the starting point of an annual 5K run that involves downing a Kolsch at a different bar every mile, a kind of mini Bay to Breakers.

But the Pier 70 taproom is a different animal. It’s high-ceilinged and airy, with padel courts and a soon-to-open Breadbelly bakery in the same building. It may be a smidge too nice, at least to start. “We need time to scuff it up,” DeVito says, noting that 14th Street has a “patina of divey-ness” that developed over the years. “We’ll beat it in,” Duatschek adds. “We’re starting to get stickers everywhere.” 

Indeed, less than two weeks in, lived-in character is already accumulating. The walls are filling up with “Naked Gun” fan art, schedules for SF City Football Club’s soccer games at Kezar Stadium, and pennants that just say “Happy.” A bucket of green caps from bottles of the herbal digestive Underberg is filling up steadily. Lines on a wind-whipped Thursday afternoon extended out the door. The digital menu, styled like a train-station arrivals board, read “Thank You Let’s Rage.” 

Production will take place at both sites, with Pier 70’s fermentation tanks handling the big sellers and 14th Street skewing toward one-offs and experiments like a creamy, caffeinated “horch-tado” that combines horchata with Four Barrel cold brew. (The spelling has not yet been finalized.) Overall, 20 beers are available at any given time, an array that Duatschek describes as light, drinkable beers from around the world.

There’s a hazy IPA, but only one. It is Kolsch — that crisp, subtle, balanced, German style — that will lead them to victory, in every sense. “It’s one of my favorite beers, ever, on the entire planet,” Duatschek says, “and I want to make it exactly like they make it in Cologne. It’s almost a perfect beer.” He sources the Hallertau hops from a farm in Germany, and, having won top honors this month at the California State Fair, is having trouble keeping up with demand. The beer might be cold, but this brewery has never been hotter.