Damian Fagan Kept Redesigning the Brewery

The label looked suspiciously good. At a San Francisco homebrew club, Jesse Friedman saw the bottle Damian Fagan had brought and assumed it came from a real brewery. The beer was homemade. The label was the work of a professional graphic designer who apparently saw no reason an experiment should dress like one. Friedman later called the encounter “love at first homebrew sight.” It was a joke with the shape of a business plan.

Fagan and Friedman had met around 2007, trading homemade beers and tasting commercial ones with the club. Their experiments could wander. Fagan once recalled arriving with fig beer or puréed turnip beer, ideas he conceded were “not always great.” The productive instinct was not perfection. It was the willingness to make a thing, put it in front of people, and find out what survived contact.

By 2010, the two had a sharper premise. Bay Area restaurants proudly named the farms behind their tomatoes, peaches, and chickens. Beer, made from grain, hops, fruit, yeast, and water, was usually presented without that agricultural biography. Fagan and Friedman wanted to use the language of the farmers market in the brewhouse. Their motto compressed the argument to three words: Beer is agriculture.

The idea is to have “Northern California in a bottle.”Damian Fagan

The first brief was a bottle

The inaugural Almanac release began with a Belgian-style golden ale and four varieties of blackberries from Sonoma County. The beer rested in red-wine barrels for eleven months. Friends and family helped bottle 309 cases in May 2011. Then Fagan and Friedman drove around the Bay Area, selling the beer to shops and restaurants a case at a time.

That first batch already contained the company’s early grammar: a place, a harvest, a patient process, and packaging that made the story legible before the cork came out. The name Almanac referred to the Farmer’s Almanac, a record organized by seasons. Each release could function as its own entry. Blackberries from Sebastopol, peaches from Fresno, blueberries from Chico - the ingredient list doubled as a California map.

The approach found an audience among restaurants and drinkers interested in barrel-aged sours, farmhouse ales, and beer at the dinner table. At first Almanac did not own a brewhouse. It contracted production elsewhere and built a cellar that eventually held more than a thousand oak barrels. The arrangement made the brand look established while the operation remained light on fixed equipment. Design did more than decorate the product. It helped a brewery without a brewery communicate coherence.

From borrowed tanks to a naval building

Fagan handled day-to-day operations while Friedman led brewing. By 2013, the project had grown enough for both founders to leave their day jobs. A Mission District taproom followed in 2017. The larger commitment came in 2018, when Almanac opened its own 30,000-square-foot brewery and taproom at Alameda Point, on the former naval air station.

For a business founded on the romance of farms, the new address was intriguingly industrial: old military infrastructure, broad concrete, aircraft-scale dimensions, and the Bay nearby. It also put Almanac among a cluster of beverage makers at Spirits Alley. Fagan has said he was drawn to places where breweries, distilleries, and wineries create a neighborhood people travel to visit. The production site could become a social anchor, not only a factory.

The building changed what Almanac could control. Beer could now be brewed, aged, packaged, poured, and explained in one place. The physical experience became part of the product. Then, in March 2020, that room abruptly stopped functioning as intended.

When the room closed, the system moved

Fagan described the first shelter-in-place order plainly: the team panicked. The taproom closed. Wholesalers canceled or reduced orders. Almanac had invested in its own canning line, but it had no direct-to-consumer online business. Within 72 hours, the company built one.

The store sent beer across California. The Alameda site shifted toward canned beer to go and contactless pickup. Social channels that once introduced releases now directed transactions. Combined, the online store and pickup business generated more revenue through the closed taproom than the room had produced while open, Fagan said at the time. A Safeway placement across Northern California added another route to customers.

The episode revealed a pattern in Fagan’s work. The company’s core idea could remain recognizable while its delivery mechanism changed quickly. Almanac did not need to choose between conviction and adaptation. It needed to know which parts belonged to each category.

The beer stopped being the whole occasion

A few years later, Fagan made the change visible with paint. He covered the words “Beer Co.” on the enormous Almanac logos outside the Alameda building. Later came a new word: Adventureland. Inside and outside, the venue accumulated arcade games, food, movie nights, parties, live entertainment, and areas where children could play. A large sandbox sits among stacked barrels. Dogs are welcome. The most popular order, according to a 2025 profile, was a nonalcoholic kids’ slushie.

Fagan said he no longer viewed Almanac as a craft brewery. He disliked “taproom” because the word made the concept too narrow. His preferred description was a gathering place for the community. That language widened the customer from a beer drinker to a group deciding where everyone could spend an afternoon.

I hate the word taproom, because it’s such a narrow concept.Damian Fagan

The operational insight is hiding in the sandbox. A specialist product can attract enthusiasts, but a hospitable setting must resolve several people’s needs at once. One guest wants a hazy IPA. Another wants wine or kombucha. A child wants motion. A dog needs outdoor space. A large group needs room without a reservation puzzle. Almanac’s newer model packages those negotiations into the venue.

Beer remains present, but its job has changed. Early Almanac asked a bottle to hold the complete story of a farm and season. Adventureland asks the beverage to support a longer social story. The company still makes oak-aged sours and IPAs. It also hosts birthday parties, baby showers, food vendors, and, on occasion, live wrestling. People can come for the room and discover the beer, reversing the original sequence.

West Oakland tests the second version

The West Oakland Clubhouse, opened at Prescott Market in 2025, carries that logic into a restored turn-of-the-century brick-and-timber building. Almanac anchors a food hall rather than operating in isolation. The space includes an immersive mural, redwood furniture, a living wall, and a 300-person outdoor beer garden with an Airstream bar and another sandbox.

In its first two months, sales ran at roughly twice Fagan’s projection. He has said he hopes to build six or seven Almanac outposts in the next few years. That ambition turns the clubhouse into a prototype. The question is no longer whether the Alameda building can draw a crowd. It is which elements make the experience portable: varied drinks, food nearby, play, weather-friendly space, events, local texture, and permission to linger.

The early farm collaborations gave each beer a specific origin. The newer spaces need the same local specificity or they risk becoming a formula. West Oakland’s food vendors, market setting, neighborhood events, and Ballers fans provide a different context from Alameda Point. Fagan’s design challenge has expanded again: repeat the operating system without copying the room.

The latest experiment is nearly invisible

In March 2025, a representative from Berkeley-based Aircapture walked into Almanac with a proposal: install machines in the brewery parking lot that pull carbon dioxide from ambient air, then liquefy and purify it for beverage use. Almanac was skeptical. The operations team spent months checking the claims and working through the commercial details.

The partnership launched in 2026. One unit captures the gas; another prepares it for food-grade use. Almanac pays by the pound for the resulting carbon dioxide, which goes into the familiar work of giving beer its bubbles. Fagan said the system initially carbonated 20 percent of Almanac’s beer and that the company planned to reach 100 percent by the end of the year.

The technology has a tidy narrative, but Almanac’s due diligence is the more revealing detail. Fagan’s public response to the first pitch was disbelief, followed by conversations, vetting, and a trial. The same person who once brought turnip beer to a club still likes experiments. The operator now surrounds the experiment with a process.

The designer never left

Fagan’s career can look like a departure from graphic design into beer. It reads more coherently as an expansion of the object being designed. First it was a label. Then it was the relationship between a bottle and a farm, the portfolio on a shelf, the route to market, a 30,000-square-foot building, a family’s afternoon, and a supply loop for carbonation.

Each expansion created more variables and fewer purely aesthetic answers. A label can promise welcome. A room has to deliver it. A brand can talk about community. A schedule of food trucks, enough tables, a sandbox, safe circulation, and a drink for the person who does not want beer make the claim concrete.

There is an irony in Almanac’s path. The company began by insisting that consumers should look behind beer and notice its agricultural origins. Now Fagan asks them to look beyond beer again, this time toward the social use of the place serving it. In both cases, the beverage becomes part of a wider system.

The polished homebrew label was the first clue. Fagan did not merely want to make beer. He wanted to frame an experience clearly enough that another person could enter it. Fifteen years of Almanac revisions have made the frame much larger. The next version may be one of six or seven gathering places. It may be a pint carbonated by the air outside. It will almost certainly arrive with another edit.