The Conference Gods dictated that I once again return to San Francisco for several days of doing tech stuff which I extended into a weekend excursion to do the tourist thing. This gave me an opportunity to return to breweries recently discovered (and described previously) and to investigate some new ones.

I, of course, returned to Gordon-Biersch, accompanied by my sometime travel compatriot, whom I will call Steve. G-B had their usual excellent line-up of Export, Märzen, and Dunkel, as well as an Oktoberfest (different from their Märzen) as their special. The Oktoberfest seemed to be a well-kept secret. Not listed on their beer list and unknown to the waitresses, I was only able to determine its existence by listening in to what the regulars were ordering.

I also took the opportunity to return to the Twenty Tank Brewery and was pleased to discover it much improved over my last visit. I had their Heifer Weissen (served from a tap with a cow on the handle, of course) to start, followed by the IPA; the first, a very respectable American wheat and the former very much improved from my previous tasting of it. Having suffered through a long day of meetings, Steve and I were ready to call it an evening following dinner (the food at Twenty Tanks is uniformly good). However, the recently-arrived-and-still-operating-on-Chicago-time woman I travel with goaded us into staying. I consequently soldiered through a few more beers (their amber and the porter; thumbs up on both) before I demanded a strategic retreat.

Doing the tourist sightseeing thing the next day, we discovered Jack's on Embarcadero at Fisherman's Wharf. We went into Jack's completely at random. The woman I travel with having begun to demand shrimp for lunch, I steered us towards the first restaurant that advertised both seafood and beer. Once inside, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the beer advertised on the outside translated into something like 50 taps of micros on the inside. I took the opportunity to try an Anchor wheat on draft (good as expected) and followed this with a Pintail Ale (I liked the name and the beer). While there was a temptation to spend a long afternoon hunkered down in the cool, dark confines of Jack's, working our way through their beer list, additional tourist stuff remained to be done and we left.

That night we walked down to the Cafe Pacifica, a restaurant/brewery located in the financial district. What we found there was one of the more bizarre brewpubs I have been in. The Cafe Pacifica specializes in nuovo-japanese/chinese cuisine with the decor leaning heavily towards glass and chrome. The rather up-scale interior is in sharp contrast to the small (3 bbl, by my estimate) brewery tucked in a corner by the entrance; a contrast increased by the fact that one has to thread their way through the brewery's heat exchanger, filter, and various ancillary plumbing to get into the restaurant. We arrived at 8:30 and, upon learning that the restaurant closed at 9:00 (on a Saturday night!), opted out of dinner, but did try the beer. The in-house brewery is somehow connected with the Sankt Gallen Brewery of Chatsworth, CA, but whether the pleasant amber ale I had was brewed on premises or at Sankt Gallen, our barkeep could not enlighten us. The bar closed and we left, leaving the Cafe Pacifica an enigma to be explained at a later date.

I should conclude by pointing out that, while I did not get a chance to visit it, the Toronado was universally recommended by locals as the beer bar to visit in San Francisco. It is located on Haight Street in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury district (for those of you in need of a flashback) and supposedly boasts one of the largest selections of microbrews on tap in the Bay area.