Moving to San Jose!

Welcome to SJ. You have money left over for Beer after you pay $4000/month for rent? ha. I don't know of any groups that do bottle shares. If you find out let me know. I do have a fresh bottle of Pliny in my fridge that I could trade if you are interested. There is the Sudzers that I know meets at Steins fairly regularly. They are a home brew club.

 

Let me guess - they all work at Google? LOL

 

Actually, not really, at least when I was went to a couple of meetings. Worts of Wisdom is more the Google/LinkedIn crowd I think.

 

It was more a joke about Stein's.

 

Stein's is already its own joke - I swear they don't clean their lines, which is too bad.

 

That may explain why some of the beer I've had there was not at all like what I expected.

 

Welcome to SJ. The good news is that there are good places to get great beer, but the bad news is that craft breweries are not on the list. In the Almaden area, you may want to check out Britannia Arms (sports bar). Harry Hofbrau House is another good spot for craft beer. Downtown has ISO, Good Karma, and Original Gravity (all within a couple of blocks).

If you want to go south to Morgan Hill, I would check out El Toro Brewery. Hermitage and Strike are close to each other in SJ.

Check out SF Beer Week in late January. The schedule will show a lot of places in the South Bay (and all of the Bay Area) for craft beer.

 

I second the rec on the downtown area. I often hop on the light rail (from north Sunnyvale) to get there, and try to get the last one back (though often miss and end up Ubering it LOL).

Why would you mention Hermitage and Strike and leave out Santa Clara Valley Brewing (which I think is superior to both)?

I guess ChickenWing knew the way to San Jose.

 

I think shares happen semi-often at Sante Adairius (SARA) as well (or at least they used to).

Moved away from SJ earlier this year but for my time and money, wife and I generally preferred to drive over the hill to Santa Cruz area and hit SARA, Beer Thirty, and Aptos St BBQ. Those three places places pretty much blow everything in SJ out of the water, imo, though it is a 35-40 min drive from Almaden, when there is no traffic. So you'll just need to plan those excursions accordingly because heading that way can regularly be a huge CF.

We lived a couple minutes from Harry's Hofbrau in west SJ, they occasionally had some good stuff on but I'd honestly be more inclined to just drink a beer at home than hang out there. It's really a crappy old cafeteria style restaurant with very mediocre food. ISO beer, Original Gravity, and Good Karma downtown are all decent. ISO is a good bottle shop and bar with a great outdoor area; we went there most often of the downtown places (though they regularly represent items on their taplist online that they don't have). Original Gravity is a cool spot and I liked the outdoor area there too, but I found the food was pretty hit or miss and generally, I thought the quality of their tap list was not up to par with ISO. The last time we went in for lunch on a weekday, we were basically the only ones there, and our food was terrible (my wife ordered a grilled cheese and the cheese wasn't hot or melted). I took it back and the cook was PISSED and gave me a bunch of crap which obviously made no sense. Ordering beer there was a pain too if at all crowded because of the cramped area that the pours came from. Good Karma is a really chill spot and they regularly have PtE, which you won't find anywhere else downtown except for Wine Affairs at a crazy inflated price. All these places downtown are easy walking distance between one another, which is a bonus.

 

No more shares at SARA. They got a little talking to from ABC and now ask folks not to open outside bottles.

 

I forgot? Yep. Should have included Santa Clara Valley.

 

If you go over the hill, I would add Discretion to the list.

Don't go to Harry's and Original Gravity for the food. Harry's is definitely not a great hangout place. However, being married with children, it's a decent spot to feed the family and get craft beer. Can't do that at ISO and Gravity. Still, I don't go to Harry's too often (2-3 times a year; usually for special events).

 

I go to Harrry's fairly frequently because its like 5 min from my house. On Black Friday they had Bourbon County on tap 15 and 14 and Bottles. Also had Pliny on tap. They are good about updating on BeerMenus. They always have a few Fieldwork brews too...which is a brewery in Berkeley I really like. Yes definitely go to SARA in Capitola as others have mentioned. Good to see there are others in the South Bay that enjoy beer. It seems things are getting better around here as far as places to drink. Oh and for the OP there is a new tap room at the Whole Foods on Blossom Hill. I haven't been there because that is not my hood, but you should check it out.

 

South Winchester BBQ is not to be missed either, just opened up on edge of Campbell in San Jose. Same owners as Aptos St, with the accompanying excellent BBQ and tap list. Whole foods downtown has a brewery that is pretty solid as well.

 

Cool!

 

From Almaden you should have easy access to the Alum Rock line. From there you can get to the breweries with a 1-2 mile walk from the line. Santa Clara, Hermitage and Strike are all pretty close to each other. Farther up the line is downtown where there's all the previously mentioned places such as ISO, OG, Good Karma, O'Flahertys, Mission Creek, etc. If you switch lines downtown, you can get onto the Mountain View line and there's a number of good places farther up in Sunnyvale/Mountain view. I used to live down there and that was my main DUI avoidance strategy.

When you are driving, you have several additional options within San Jose. Harry's Hofbrau is top notch in terms of selection. In the Milpitas area there's Stuft Pizza that gets a lot of good stuff. Winchester BBQ was mentioned. There's also a Yardhouse at Santana Row (honestly the only place in that snooty shithole I ever go to). Best bottle shops in the immediate area are Cask n Flask, Santa Clara Liquors, Santa Clara Wine Club, Royal Liquors and Maplewood Liquors.

There's a good number of additional options within a 1-2 hour drive of the area as well.

 

The best brewery in San Jose has to be Mission Creek at the Whole Foods on Alameda next to the Sharks stadium. Santa Clara Valley isn't bad either. Almanac, although they label their bottles with "San Jose, CA" tags don't have a taproom.

Luckily, as others have already mentioned, we're within an hour or so radius of Sante Adairius in Capitola, Rare Barrel/Sierra Nevada Torpedo Room/Fieldwork in Berkeley, Cellarmaker in San Francisco, Faction in Alameda, Altamont in Livermore, Drake's in San Leandro.

Not to mention Russian River is 2 hours away and has a great happy hour all day Sunday (~$3 Plinys)

They're all well worth the trip.

 

Oh man I saw their tap list on Yelp!!! Awesome stuff you never see around here. Thanks so much for that info. Definitely going there very soon.