Category: California

It seems like yesterday.

On October 19, 1991, Chris and I walked up College Ave in Rockridge headed to the Cal football game against Washington. We spied a tall blond woman handing beer mats through the windows to passengers on the buses headed to Memorial Stadium. As we passed on foot, she handed us a couple of coasters. One said, “If Cal kicks a field goal, win a free appetizer.” This one moment led to who we are as beer travelers today.

Although we lost the game 24-17, Cal did kick a field goal. Beer mat in hand, we walked back down College Ave and made our first visit to Barclay’s Pub.

With good beer flowing out of each of the 28 taps, Barclay’s quickly became our local. There was much more to Barclay’s than just the beer, though. It was a place where you truly knew everyone.

Within a few years of opening, I started working at Barclay’s as a waitress. Little did I know that it would change our lives forever. Wanting to be a knowledgeable server, I needed a way to better acquaint myself with the beers I was serving. The solution we came up with was going directly to the source, the breweries. Two decades and hundreds of brewery visits later, here we are.

If Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, we left ours in Barclay’s. Even after we moved away, Barclay’s has remained a special part of our lives, especially during Cal football season. Before every Cal home game (this season excluded), we have lunch and a few beers before walking up to the stadium.

As I wrote in a recent post, our pre-game Cal football ritual has been disrupted this year because Memorial Stadium is being remodeled. But this past weekend, twenty years and three days after that very first visit, we were back at Barclays before Cal’s game versus Utah.

The staff has changed and we rarely see the old familiar faces, but Barclay’s is still Barclay’s to us. It’s just as comfortable and homey as it was when we lived in the neighborhood. We’ve made new friends and there’s never a shortage of people to chat with at the bar. Chris and I have decided that if we ever opened a pub, we’d want it to be as neighborly as Barclay’s has always been.

We want to thank our friends at Barclay’s who made the twenty years special for us: Gene, Rowdy, Bill, Chef Bruce, Harry, Jack, Phil, Frannie, and all my regular customers, including Ted and the ultimate frisbee guys who came in every Sunday. Cheers!

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I can’t mention our first visit to Barclay’s without also mentioning the tragedy that befell our neighborhood the following day. The Oakland Hills fire swept across the hills above our neighborhood on October 20, 1991. Like many Rockridge residents we were evacuated. Our friend Jon helped us evacuate, birds and all. At my in-laws house, we watched with horror as the news ran non-stop coverage of the hills engulfed in flames.

We were some of the lucky ones. The fire stopped several hundred yards from our apartment building. Others weren’t so lucky. We raise our glasses to all the firefighters who worked tirelessly to put the fire out. We also want to remember those who lost their lives that terrible day. You are not forgotten.

Ah, the fall season.

More than looking at the date on the calendar or watching the leaves turning colors (we don’t have much change in seasons where we live, anyway), how does one recognize the arrival of fall?

For me it’s the noticeable shortening of daylight, warm days followed by cool nights, and a growing number of pumpkin beers appearing on store shelves. The biggest marker of all, however, is Saturdays focused on Cal football. Beer and football. Now there’s an undeniable sign that fall has arrived.

During college in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s, our ritual included walking the one mile from our apartment to Henry’s at the Durant Hotel near campus. The place would be packed with students and alumni alike, which turned the pub into a roaring sea of blue and gold. At first, our drink of choice was Henry’s signature concoction, the Golden Bear, which if memory serves me, was 151, vodka, and champagne with a splash of orange juice. Two of those and I was ready to endure the oft times disappointing games. Once craft beer came into our lives, we switched to Golden Bear, a lager brewed by the now closed Golden Pacific in Berkeley.

When Barclay’s, a pub in Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood, opened in 1991 we incorporated it into the ritual. We left home, stopped at Barclay’s for a beer or two, continued walking up to Henry’s to have a Golden Bear, and eventually we were off to the stadium. Later, we dropped Henry’s in favor of longer sessions at Barclay’s. All this in time for kick off, which for many years was 12:30pm.

Then came a major shift. In 1994, we moved back down to the Monterey Peninsula, an hour and a half away. So what did we do? Well, we had to maintain the beer-Cal football ritual, so we simply commenced our football days an hour and a half earlier.

During any other time of the year, people might call us rigid, ritualistic, creatures of habit or even perhaps stuck in a rut. However, during football season, no matter what the ritual, it becomes tradition.

For over twenty years we’ve gone to great lengths to maintain our tradition. This year, however, is going to be the biggest challenge ever to our game day routine. With the renovation of Memorial Stadium, the games have been moved to AT&T Park in San Francisco.

So what does this do to our ritual/tradition? Well, so far there’s been only one “home” game. We drove to Fremont and took BART into the City. From there it was pre-game beers at City Beer Store (such a sacrifice) and the Public House (another major sacrifice) and 21^st Amendment post-game. Oh, the suffering we’ve endured so far to maintain our beer-Cal football tradition…*insert Scarlet O’Hara dramatic swoon here*

The next game is USC on Thursday, October 13. We plan to hit the grand opening of the newly expanded City Beer Store for our pre-game beers. And believe me, we’re probably going to need them. But such is the life of a craft beer loving Cal football fan…Go Beers! Uh, I mean Go Bears!