Thursday Nights on Clara St., Beer Alchemy Happens

Jesse Friedman/Beer & Nosh

Clara St. Brewing's Bryan Hermannsson.

I met brewers Patrick Horn and Bryan Hermannsson at a craft brew mixer in the test kitchen at Chow.com. Horn, of Pacific Brewing Laboratories, and Hermannsson, of Clara St. Brewing, are the kind of guys that make you realize what a fertile place for craft brewing this area is, and why. Serious home brewers seeking to bust out of the garage, they're the suds equivalent of chefs who turn to pop-ups or food trucks to launch self-expressive eateries. Thursday nights in SOMA, Horn and Hermannsson host a beer open house at Clara St., inviting in guests to taste what they've been working on (I've never been able to wrap up my SFoodie workload early enough to make it, but one of these weeks, I swear...).

Today at Beer & Nosh, blogger Jesse Friedman offers up a photo essay on a Thursday night at Clara St. Friedman:

Born out of a love of brewing, this expanded, kinda-sorta open to the public private homebrew event join Elizabeth Street Brewing as a halfway point between making beers in your kitchen, and actually opening a licensed brewery. The beers are free (it's illegal to sell homebrew to public) and a empty malt extract plastic bucket is placed out to invite donations (all of which gets put right back into the cost of brewing.)