The Bay Area is home to excellent craft beer. But transportation can be a hassle — biking after a few brews isn’t safe, and driving is out of the question. Even with a designated driver, parking is still a struggle (plus it means someone has to miss out on the fun).
Enter the blog BeerByBART. Started by husband-and-wife team Steve Shapiro and Gail Ann Williams, the site “is aimed at getting appreciators of good beer to explore venues in the San Francisco Bay Area that feature great beer safely. Period.”
Williams and Shapiro are longtime San Franciscans and die-hard beer lovers. They both had a “mild interest in unusual and flavorful beers” in college, as Williams told me via email. “Then in 2002 we went hiking in Norway and found to our surprise that we were craving IPA.” She added, “That was when we learned we were beer people. We started going to local festivals and meeting brewers and beer writers, and we got hooked on the community just as much as the amazing brews.” Williams said the inspiration for BeerByBART came in 2007 at a small festival at The Bistro in Hayward, when she and Shapiro talked about the kind of website they’d like if they were traveling in Europe — namely, one that addressed how to get to festivals without renting a car. They started BeerByBART later that year (with both locals and tourists in mind) and now also write a column for the Celebrator Beer News online magazine.
A venue looking to qualify for BeerByBART has to meet the following criteria: first, it has to be a local pub that brews its own beer, or be a bar or restaurant that has a great selection of top local, regional and/or unique imported beers. Next, the staff has to be knowledgeable and allow patrons to taste new beers. Venues should ideally also offer smaller glasses for “a nearly proportional fraction of the price of a pint.” Lastly, but most importantly, all pubs must be within about one mile of a major form of transportation.
For the more intense brewsky lovers among us, Williams and Shapiro also write about their beer-drinking exploits on a subsection of the blog, covering everything from out-of-town tasting trips to beer-festival adventures to new brewery openings to home-brew experiments.
What do they see as the next big thing for BART and the Bay Area beer scene? “[W]hile major construction out to Livermore will add some great beer destinations — that town is blossoming with craft-beer spots — spending a little on making the [BART] system user friendly would make us happy,” Williams wrote. “London and New York have older systems, but they have addressed some of those challenges better. We should have a world-class transit system to match our world-class craft beer scene!”
