San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Magnolia tries to bloom anew
Remodeled Dogpatch site opens
What was once Magnolia Brewing Co.’s Smokestack barbecue joint in Dogpatch has been fully reimagined into a restaurant and indoor beer garden — and it is open for business.
This is the latest stage of the beloved San Francisco brewery’s big overhaul, following a complicated saga in which it filed for bankruptcy and eventually sold to New Belgium Brewing of Fort Collins, Colo.
The deal was a particularly involved one for new owners Dick Cantwell and Kim Jordan. Magnolia’s founder, Dave McLean, had approached Jordan in 2017 as his 20-year-old company was attempting to navigate serious financial hardships following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in 2015.
Cantwell, meanwhile, had been devising a business plan with Oud Beersel, a renowned Belgian lambic blendery that’s over a century old, to build a similar operation in the U.S. But the Magnolia offer necessarily enveloped him too, not just because he and Jordan have both known McLean a long time and together have decades of industry expertise, but also because, as it happens, they’re a couple.
New Belgium was able to buy Magnolia out of bankruptcy for just $2.7 million. “(The offer) gave (New Belgium) an opportunity to learn at a price tag that wasn’t betting the farm,” Jordan says. “It’s not that it’s not a reach for us, but it’s not a reach that’s devastating if things don’t go well.”
Jordan continues: “The thing for us was: How do you bring a brand’s presence to another state and try to partner … and have the sense that you’re rooted in another community? That’s what we’re still learning.”
Cantwell and Jordan are part of this community, though: They have lived in the Haight area since 2012 and are well-acquainted with Magnolia as the local neighborhood brewpub. Still, Jordan was concerned about how a Coloradobased brewery would go over with the Magnolia pub’s longtime customers.
Yet they also sensed an untapped opportunity. As they saw it, Magnolia, an English-style brewpub known for malty sessionstyle ales and cask beers, needed to adapt into something more dynamic and better suited to compete with buzzy contemporary breweries.
“Initially, I wanted to be respectful of the accomplishments of Magnolia and its strengths and of Dave’s vision in creating it, (but) I do feel like it was a brand in need of refreshing,” Cantwell says, noting that the company is keeping some of Magnolia’s flagship beers, like the Blue Bell Bitter. “I didn’t want it to seem like we were coming in here to burn it all down.”
But they slowly came to realize that in order to make Magnolia into a viable business again, they would need to make substantial changes earlier than expected. After all, Jordan says, “the first form of sustainability is financial.”
When it came to changing Magnolia, “we wanted to take our time,” she says. “We started with the beers. We started brewing a bigger variety, changing offerings, so it wouldn’t just be charcuterie and English pub-centric.”
The first step: Cantwell felt it was time to introduce more popular styles, even beers that would have seemed uncharacteristic for Magnolia a few years ago. More experimental hoppy beers, red ales and brut IPAs landed on the brewpub menu. With some help from Oud Beersel, the brewery also introduced a plan to bring in a coolship and foeders for the production of sour beers at the Dogpatch facility.
They also came to the difficult decision to part with founder McLean in June; he had helped with the “continuity” of the transition, Cantwell says. McLean was by then getting immersed in his next project, a craft malting facility in Alameda called Admiral Maltings.
“We knew we couldn’t afford to keep Dave on as a full-time salaried employee at the level he was,” Cantwell says. “(But) we wanted to make sure he was the steward of that brand into its next phase.”
That next phase was reimagining the Dogpatch location. Fitted with a 30barrel system (much larger than the Haight Street brewpub’s seven-barrel system) and with square footage for a 30-barrel capacity coolship, foeders and oak barrels, the new space presented opportunities for souring and spontaneous fermentation.
Still, it remained challenging to determine how to marry the spirit of the old Haight Street Magnolia with the new plans under way in Dogpatch.
“You can imagine there’s a bit of terror in that process,” Jordan says. “You don’t want to (do the same thing). Conversely, you don’t want it to be so different that people are uncomfortable.”
One major difference between the old Smokestack and the new Magnolia Dogpatch: no more barbecue. Although brisket and pulled pork were the hallmarks of Smokestack, Jordan and Cantwell decided the logistics were too difficult — “like beer, it’s a batch process,” Jordan explained.
Instead, chef Laurance Gordon (Mikkeller, Belga) developed a menu of pairable, modern American fare — burgers, roast chicken and desserts meant to complement, but not duplicate, Magnolia’s Haight Street classic brewpub offerings.
The main dining room of Magnolia Dogpatch will function as a family-friendly restaurant with table service while paying tribute to the rock ’n’ roll San Francisco of the ’60s that helped define Magnolia’s original upper Haight location.
“The real intention is we didn’t want it to feel like a typical brewery,” says designer Hannah Collins. “It already is very industrial. It already had all the bones, but we thought, ‘How can we make it feel more San Francisco, a little more feminine, a little less typical?’ ”
The opposite room, through a glass-window wall from the dining area, functions as an indoor beer garden, with a large television screen, wooden bleachers and a Frank Stella-inspired mural. In the garden, food will be served in biodegradable bowls.
Because it expects to draw a sports-watching crowd, Magnolia Dogpatch will soon open for brunch and lunch in addition to dinner. The wine list will be expanded and cocktails will be introduced down the line as well. To Cantwell and Jordan, the new owners, the expanded hours represent an untapped opportunity as the neighborhood grows more populated.
“When (Smokestack) opened, it was this cave-y enclave, and it was appealing because of that,” Cantwell says. “By not having a TV it was clearly not a sports bar. But now we’ve got the Warriors six blocks away, and to not have a TV would send an antagonistic message. We want to welcome that crowd, too.”
Magnolia Dogpatch, 2505 3rd St., San Francisco, www.magnoliabrewing.com/ dogpatch. Open 5 to 11 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, until midnight Friday-Saturday.