An Anecdote, Over a Beer

It would be easy to miss the Speakeasy Brewery. The building, which shares turf with light industry (The San Francisco Examiner’s printing press is a close neighbor), doesn’t have a written sign. Instead, a pair of shifty eyes painted red, black, and large above the building’s sole front door mark the brewery’s entrance.

At its weekly happy hour (Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m.) it doesn’t sell beer. Rather, it sells tokens (printed with the emblematic criminal-looking eyes) for three dollars each. Inside, one token buys a pint of the brewery’s mobster-themed beer: Prohibition Ale and The Old Godfather Lager, to name two.

At happy hour, the crowd inside is, alas, homogenous. Twenty-something white kids, most of them bicycle enthusiasts and many of them new residents, are gathered inside and within the brewery’s “yard”—an area of the street enclosed in twice-as-high-as-me chain-link fences.

“Never the Twain Shall Meet”

Along Evans Road, at the bottom of Hunters View Hill, The speakeasy brewery is a neighbor to many of Bayview’s HUD housing complexes. Jim Ansbro, who frequents the happy hour, recounts a story about trying to encourage the brewery’s neighbors to come and mingle a bit.

“I offered them a free beer the first time they came,” Ansbro says. “Nobody came.”

Ansbro pauses.

“Well, three of them came. But that’s not very many for a free beer,” he says.