If you stopped by Cellarmaker’s popular pizza location Tuesday to pick up pizza and a couple of four-packs, you many have noticed a void. Not a gigantic void, but perhaps a surprising one. The space where the brewhouse and fermentors had been tucked in stood wide open and bare today.
[Where was the missing equipment?
On Monday the stainless steel vessels had been sighted on the sidewalk by a sharp-eyed observer.]
Head brewer and co-founder Tim Sciascia said brewing onsite at the second location hadn’t made sense financially. “We are selling it to someone. It was planned well before Covid.”
To the casual visitor, the Cellarmaker House of Pizza on Mission Street has seemed a little too small since it opened, like many popular SF eateries. Sometimes there would be a line of people outside waiting to get one of the tables.
This second Cellarmaker spot was originally built out as a compact brewpub by its former owners as Old Bus Tavern. When Cellarmaker took over the facility, the idea was to brew pilot batches on the second brewing system. Both food and beer from the new premises would be on the menu along with many more beers from the original Cellarmaker location on Howard Street. The kitchen was vital to the successful concept, turning out highly regarded Detroit Style Pizzas.
The most pressing problem with the floor plan was not visible to diners and drinkers. It was the almost laughable size of the kitchen. Now there’s room to do something about the situation.
“We will turn that area into more kitchen space,” Sciascia confirmed.
This is an challenging time to make moves for business efficiency. 2020 is, as Sciascia puts it, “Not the time to be frivolous.”
However, the changes in the business environment have motivated another move. “We just bought a canning line,” he explained, “which was a crazy purchase, but we believe there was no better time than now.”
Currently, Cellarmaker is open for food pickup and/or beer to go at the Cellarmaker House of Pizza. (All beer is being made at the original location on Howard Street, now open for production only — there are no beer sales there.)
And if you are elsewhere in California, or even if you’re in SF but have patience and don’t feel like dropping by, Cellarmaker also has cans available for shipping. See their website. (No, sadly, a pizza can’t be shipped, but the beers are how the community fell in love with Cellarmaker in the first place.)
[“It’s Essential” to support our local breweries — while we escape home to a Simcoe Galaxy far far away, via a dry, Cellarmaker-style Hazy West Coast IPA.]
Explore Beer By BART: Use our destination list of some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places and their related transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving. (As soon as we subdue Covid-19!)
Beer by BART 