When we last checked in with Crooked City Cider, the one-woman cider company was getting settled into its tasting space that it shares with Two Mile Wines in the 25th Street Collective. Dana Bushouse’s ciders had been gradually creeping onto tap lists around Oakland and she’s been hosting pop-up events with her friends from Forebears Meadery.
Now, Crooked City is getting poised for expansion.
Bushouse has signed on with Oakland-based Mindful Distributors, which has enabled her to grow her brewing and distribution capacity; her ciders can now be found in bars as far out as Danville, Livermore and San Francisco.
She’s now distributing her fourth large-batch cider called Yes Please!, for which she ground up 400 pounds of fresh California satsuma mandarins, peels, seeds and all, and fermented them with the apple juice. “I’m thrilled with the way it turned out,” Bushouse said. Yes Please! joins her three standard ciders — Straight Up Oakland Dry, Ginger Bomb and Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop – in wide release.
A Crooked City taproom is also in the works. Bushouse is in final lease negotiations for a space in Jack London Square, where she hopes to have 25 ciders on tap from around the world. The taproom will continue to cidery’s speakeasy theme, with a jail cell-styled photo booth a “lounge-y feel,” she said.
But while she continues to sort out the minutiae of the lease language, Bushouse will keep her home base in Uptown. She’s hoping to add more collaboration events with local artists, food makers and performers.
Over in West Oakland, James Syhabout’s Linden Street reboot is getting ready to open next month.
The new brewery, called Old Kan Beer & Co. (Old Kan is an anagram of Oakland), replaces Linden Street Brewery, which left the space at the end of last year. Adam Lamoreaux, the founder of Linden Street, who left the brewery in 2014, is on board as the head brewer at Old Kan. He’ll be focusing primarily on classic beer styles, similar to those he brewed for Linden.
Also on deck for the space is a new iteration of the restaurant formerly known as The Dock at Linden Street. According to Eater, the new restaurant will retain its beer-friendly food menu but will keep things more casual than The Dock eventually became. Burgers, sandwiches and sausages are all planned for the menu.
Syhabout and Lamoreaux also hope to bring in live music, plus wholesale and retail sales of Old Kan. The restaurant will open sometime this year, according to Eater.
As we reported last fall, the changes at Linden Street seemed to have been spurred by the sale of the building that houses both the brewery and restaurant to Pandion Investments and Cyrus Etemad (Los Angeles’s Highland Park Bowling Alley in Los Angeles and Portland’s Hawthorne Theatre). The building has been renamed the Standard Underground Building.
As far as Linden Street Brewery is concerned, it has been renamed Oakland United Beerworks. It is moving into a new, larger space across the street from the Oakland Amtrak station. There, it will brew the same beers as at Linden Street, and will likely add more seasonal and collaboration brews as well.
This post was updated after publication to reflect new information on Linden Street Brewery.
