Barebottle Brewing Company innovates from inside a former granite-cutting factory warehouse in Bernal Heights, one of San Francisco’s quieter residential neighborhoods. Like many of them, it’s perched on a hillside, the towering top of which is a park offering magnificent views of this iconic city squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. Just a few blocks away on flatter land near the bay is San Francisco’s last industrial zone, a fading reminder of the city’s past before the tech boom transformed much of its appearance and character. But as a proud manufacturer of high-quality beer with its equipment purposefully showcased in the center of the tasting room, Barebottle seems like a bridge between that past and the new reality: a city of young working professionals with ever-evolving tastes and interests. In San Francisco, if you’re not innovating, it’s hard to thrive.

Lester Koga (co-founder, brewer, factotum) sits in a comfortable chair in a lounge area of the brewery. At first, his description of the brewery’s approach to innovation sounds, if anything, ordinary.

“Mike Seitz and Ben Sterling–the other founders–and I developed some of the ideas for this brewery from homebrewing. Mike and I homebrewed for about ten years. We’ve been BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) judges for the last six. We would judge homebrew competitions and without fail, the beers that move on to the final round or won their categories were far better than many being made professionally. I kept thinking there must be a better way for these homebrewers who are so passionate to get to the mass market. That’s a role we want to fill as a brewery. We want to take these homebrew ideas and a homebrewer’s innovative approach to doing things, and try to do it here.”

Homebrewers becoming professional is a narrative so common in the U.S. it has become cliche. And taking former homebrew recipes to the professional level is probably more the rule than the exception now. This isn’t innovation; it’s orthodoxy. There must be more to it…

“Basically, we started by working with the San Francisco homebrewers guild. We held a competition where we brewed the winning beer at our brewery. We gave them some guidelines. We found that if you give homebrewers too much latitude for creativity, you end up getting beers all over the map. How do you judge an IPA against a saison? So with our homebrew competitions, we always give constraints. Our first competition was for a “Muir Woods IPA”. We wanted an IPA evocative of that forest. We got 26 different IPAs from the club and whittled it down to the best three. We then produced them on production scale for the taproom, and everybody who came to the taproom got a tasting flight to vote on which was best. The funny thing is, the beer that won–and it won by more votes than the other two combined–was not the one I would have chosen (laughter). The one I liked was an imperial IPA that was deep red in color and smelled just like wet leaves and damp forest with a super-piney taste. The IPA that won was more in the New England-style (see JBT#31): cloudy and citrusy.”

Since then, Barebottle has held five more competitions–once a quarter–with differing style guidelines. It has opened its competition to other guilds from around the SF Bay Area as well. It even hired one of the winners to be a shift brewer. Still, is this really innovation? It’s not an uncommon practice among American breweries. Even in Japan, where homebrewing is technically illegal, there are some breweries that brew the winning beers of underground homebrew competitions. Either way, Koga stresses another reason for doing it besides coming up with good recipes and ideas.

“Brewers and owners don’t always know what’s best. Ask the customer. I think I’ve personally chosen the losing beer every time. I have a different palate as a brewer. I know what I like best, but not necessarily what the rest of the market likes. This is a way to democratize the beer selection. It’s exciting and a good way to get feedback.”

Koga estimates that of the twenty taps in the taproom, one or two of them are pouring homebrew competition beers. The others might be derivatives of past winning beers–they are constantly tweaking recipes and trying new things with them. The others are from his and his partner’s own homebrewing logs–some of those award-winning recipes from their own competition days of the past. Koga’s concept of innovation starts to come into some focus.

One of the most popular beers from this laboratory of sorts is called Galaxy Dust. It derived from an old recipe of Koga’s for a SMaSH beer (see JBT#32) competition in San Francisco. It uses Vermont Ale yeast, which Koga describes as having “stone fruit character”, and Galaxy hops, which he calls “peachy”. Together, they made for a hazy “peach bomb”. The beer was so popular that people started calling and asking about the recipe. Koga readily gave it away.

“People are taken aback sometimes,” says Koga. “But to be honest, the next time we’ll probably change the recipe anyway.”

I ask about his background and its relationship to his brewery, largely because of his name and that a sake-beer hybrid he had produced was what piqued my interest the brewery.

“My parents are from Japan so a lot of flavors from Japan are second-nature to me–for example, we had a tub of miso in the fridge at all times. We had ume (plum) trees in our backyard and my mom would make umeshu (plum-infused shochu) every year. To go on a tangent, there are so many Asian flavors that are unique and vibrant and interesting, but don’t often find their way into beers. And how many Asian brewers or owner-brewers are out there in America that would be familiar with these? Not too many. I’m a big food guy, too. Different flavors are paramount to me. Growing up, my dad would bring home a bag of sea urchins and we’d crack them open with hammers and screwdrivers and pour them over rice. That’s the adventure and spirit of eating that I had growing up, and I feel like there are a lot of interesting Asian flavors that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface with in beer.”

Barebottle’s sake-beer hybrid is one. These are not quite as uncommon as some may think. A handful of Japanese brewers have been producing delicious ones for years (including Konishi Brewing Company’s recent World Beer Cup gold medal winner). And in 2012, at the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, I attended a seminar about it hosted by Kjetil Jikiun, at the time with Nøgne Ø, and Todd Bellomy, who now runs a successful sake brewery in the Boston area called Dovetail Sake. Barebottle worked with Sequoia Sake, a small sake brewery just a few minutes away in the industrial area mentioned earlier.

According to Koga (and also Sequoia Sake owner-brewer Jake Myrick, with whom I double-checked the surprising information), Barebottle started with its “Sparkling Wheat Ale” recipe. The brewers then tried adding some of the byproduct of sake brewing (the lees) in varying conditions of age to the wort. Kasu (mostly dried lees) didn’t work out so well. Myrick confirmed that the one that worked best was slurry taken immediately from the mesh bags they used for the “shizuku” (gravity-drip) method of separating the liquid sake from the fermented rice-mash. Specifically, it was from Sequoia’s sparkling sake that uses a “daiginjo yeast”. They suspected there would still be plenty of live, viable yeast in such fresh slurry and they were right. The yeast gobbled up the sugars in the beer wort and it completely fermented out, resulting in an extremely dry beer. Koga describes it as having both pear and blue-cheese character. He called it “Half Samurai”, which derives from a humorous nickname for his old roommate (and current Barebottle investor) who is half-Japanese, half caucasian.

Another interesting beer Koga developed in this vein is Panda Petals, a saison brewed with Osmanthus tea. Koga discovered its “brightly floral”, fruity character during a trip to China and brought it back for a friend to identify. He eventually started homebrewing with it.

“It pairs beautifully with the esters in the saison and is one of the more delicate beers we make.”

Koga’s visit to China was for business, but not the business of beer. Prior to opening Barebottle with his friends, he was a product manager who handled counterterrorism technologies like airport scanners. For four years he traveled the world, meeting with governments and militaries, but also enjoying the food and beer. He spent a lot of time in Germany, naturally visiting beer gardens. He was struck by how welcoming they were of families, complete with jungle gyms in some of them. That experience left a lasting impression and today, Barebottle’s tasting room is family friendly.

A brewery’s success doesn’t come from good beer alone; there is also a business to run. Koga quips, “95% of our time is spent on everything but making beer.” Given Barebottle’s success these past 16 months, Koga and his partners have clearly parlayed their past experience and expertise into the venture. It turns out Seitz was a project manager at Procter and Gamble, while Sterling has experience as a brand manager at Visa. The three of them first met at Columbia business school while pursuing their MBAs. After graduation, they met again at a friend’s wedding and Mike had brought Charlie Papazian’s “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing” with him. Koga, meanwhile, had brought a business magazine with an article that intrigued him. It concerned crowdsourcing ideas and then creating products of those that won a vote of customers-in-waiting. The two publications were side by side on the table and the idea for Barebottle began to take root. By the time Seitz and Koga were judging in competitions, that idea was growing into a legitimate business plan.

For location, the team used rather granular data analytics. They knew that homebrewers were going to be the leading edge of their customer group. They were also looking for residents with a higher than normal disposable income, higher education levels, creativity (as expressed in type of employment) and a love of food and cooking. Their results showed that San Francisco and Washington DC were far ahead of other cities with those data points. All three already had ties to the area (Koga and Seitz, from their undergraduate studies, Sterling through employment), but they also realized that San Francisco was an underserved market, with surprisingly fewer breweries per capita than other cities. Furthermore, neighborhoods–not the downtown–was where they saw vitality. After a year-long search, they found an appropriate space in Bernal Heights.

The tap list is exquisite, full of variation and interesting interpretations of beer styles. An experimental spirit is on full display. This is especially the case if you look at Barebottle’s past offerings (listed on the website: www.barebottle.com). Many of the beers are variations of the same theme, with something altered like hop variety. It dawns on me that the “innovation” Koga emphasizes is not the stuff of disruption or bold new leaps, per se. It’s the incremental tweaking of one’s approach to achieve higher quality and success. It’s uniting disparate pieces–like demographic data, homebrewing, taproom management–into a coherent business that can evolve. It’s the paradoxical position of recognizing that one’s tastes often do not meet public demand, but nevertheless trusting in those tastes sometimes, too, because innovation readily emerges from the unexpected. Or, in the case of Barebottle, innovation is the expectation. It doesn’t look like Koga, Sterling and Seitz are going to break that any time soon.

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This article was published in Japan Beer Times # () and is among the limited content available online. Order your copy through our online shop or download the digital version from the iTunes store to access the full contents of this issue.