SF Cider Fest pours the party with crisp sips and fall vibes

San Francisco is a land overflowing with beverage festivals. I wanted coffee at Fort Mason this weekend but that party turned me away at the door. So instead I found cider, and good thing, too.

The San Francisco Fall Cider Fest turned out to be the most adorable salute to autumn — and it didn’t feel like the chaos we heard about at SF Coffee Festival. Just cute people, parties, drinks, plaid fashion and pumpkin vibes.

SPARK Social SF is an 18,000-square-foot space that offers a rotating selection of 16 food vendors, fire pits, a sangria bar, and a double-decker bus for events in Mission Bay. For Saturday’s event, organizers decked the bus in fall leaves, pumpkins, and hay stacks, and the cider was flowing like the salmon of Capistrano.

And the cider party was packed — but like, perfectly. No one bumped into each other and everyone who wanted a seat had one. The Night Owls band gave us classics like Joan Jett, Backstreet Boys, and The Cranberries — songs that you’re probably not going to put on in your car in 2024 but go great with booze.

A $45 ticket provided unlimited pours of over 30 ciders in addition to all the vendor accoutrements. Big players brought their best cider game — like Fort Point (who does not only make beer how dare you!) to tiny one-man-show operations like Sincere Cider, owned and operated by 25-year Bay Area local Bex Pezzullo.

Bex is cool. One of those easy people you feel immediately comfortable with, like you can tell them anything. After a breakup in 2019, Bex started cooking up boozy drinks in her garage in Oakland, popping her cherry with wine.

“I made the world’s worst wine,” says Bex. Undeterred by her lack of success, but without the resources to continue her wine-making hobby outside of harvest season, she moved on to a more evergreen beverage.

“So then I made some really shitty beer, and I was like, I don’t want to do this either.”

Fortuitously for Bex, the restaurant group that she worked for at the time knew an apple farmer in the Delta, and Bex started a grass-roots sourcing operation. “I was going up and grabbing apples and bringing them down to the garage where I would make it in different yeast strains and apple blends. I’d give it away, give feedback, and just really geeked out on it and fell into it.”

I wasn’t expecting too much from Bex’s cider after this story, but you guys — Sincere Cider changed who I am as a drinker. Her cider was crisp, clean, sweet like that gallon of zero-proof juice you would slam at Apple Hill when you were a kid, but not sugary. This was it. I became a cider person. Getting rejected at the coffee festival was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Gourmet candy apples by Far West were complimentary, and the pumpkin pie eating contest was giving Americana comfort vibes. Arman Tafazzoli from San Francisco ended up with a “Pie Gobbler” sash on a dare from his friends. When the band announced that there would be a speed-eating pumpkin pie contest, the group used an iPhone dice app to see if anyone’s first roll was snake eyes, which in this group means you’re obligated to the dare. Tafazzoli rolled snake eyes. A man of his word, he entered the contest.

“When the timer started I just put my head down and got to work. I finished in just over 90 seconds but I was feeling the effects of the pie and the cider for much longer,” he said.

It’s only been 48 hours but it looks like Tafazzoli’s new moniker, “The Pie Gobbler,” may be a permanent fixure of the group.

One non-autumn themed activation that caught my eye was a graffiti room put on by a company called 1AM. I spoke with graffiti artist Colt Platt who told me that the gallery was doing art shows at their brick-and-mortar for 16 years until the apartments above them caught on fire. Now they do Saturday classes, open to the public, and Platt is at Spark most days, typically doing private and corporate classes.

Platt teaches them a little bit about spray painting and then lets them loose. “At the end, we come together and paint a graffiti piece together,” said Platt. “You get to have fun, use the paint in a less-structured way. Then at the end, you get to make a tote bag. And it’s a custom piece of art that you leave with.”

Nearing closing hour, I decided to give my new found love of cider another go — see if it was a fluke. I went to Gowan’s, an Anderson Valley operation that owns their own orchard and produce everything end-to-end. I held my glass out realizing I don’t know how to order cider.

“Which one do you want, he asked, motioning back and forth between 2 spouts. I shrugged. “Sweet?” he asked? “Yes.” He poured me their Rosé Cider, made with actual rosé wine in it. I know this is a “shit white people say” trope but this stuff is dangerous.

Cider has a different effect on people than beer, wine, and hard liquor. It’s like the booze equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte. I’m glad I have a new go-to drink that perfectly matches the cozy fall vibes. Walking out of SPARK Social SF, cider in hand, I felt ready to embrace the season — no over-caffeinated chaos required.

Courtney Muro is a San Francisco-based content strategist, producer, designer, and creator.

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