Hope you had a great week — and ready for a SF weekend. Here's local craft maker Home Base’s stab at a dream weekend in SF, and obviously found it hard to limit themselves so please save some of these gems for next time: 

Home Base's Home Base is in Southwest Berkeley, an industrial area that is home to many artists, manufacturers, and other craft beverage producers. We can't believe our luck that we don't have to walk more than a block to Sesame Tiny Bakery for a sweet treat or take lunch meetings at Viks Chaat or Standard Fare. One of our favorite places to grab coffee is CoRo - The cafe is an extension of its co-roasting facility is our dream for a future distillery - a home for emerging brands to get started, scale production, collaborate, market, and support one another. And it serves delicious drinks!

If we're not at our warehouse, it might be because we are picking up ingredients for a new batch of our bitter liqueurs or sourcing flowers and garnishes for an upcoming event at one of the Bay Area's incredible, year-round farmers markets. You can find one pretty much every day of the week, but our favorites are the North Berkeley market on Thursdays, the Old Oakland Friday market, and the large and beautiful markets in Downtown Berkeley or Oakland's Grand Lake Splash Pad on Saturdays. If we're with out-of-towners or our young families, we'll often hop on the ferry to San Francisco's Ferry Building Farmers market run by Foodwise, and enjoy the delights and restaurants after shopping the market. 

Also accessible by ferry are some of our favorite only-in-the-bay destinations in Alameda. The north end of the island is another craft beverage hotbed with urban wineries, breweries, and distilleries like St. George - with a stunning tasting room and distillery tours. A short walk away is Admiral Maltings, California's first malt house since the 1980's, and the first opportunity for craft brewers and distillers to get California grown AND malted grains. It's where we get malted barley and malted wheat for our Single Malt and Bourbon whiskies, but aside from a great malt house tour we love grabbing a beer and a bite from The Rake, the attached bar where only beverages made with Admiral Malt are served (including Home Base!). You can watch the grains malting through the bar's windows or grab a seat outside to enjoy our almost always sunny weather. 

For dinner, drinks, and more, we often end up in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, where there are so many shops, cuisines and watering holes. We love poking our heads into the shops in Temescal Alley or rummaging through the bins at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. When it's time to sit we head to Roses' Taproom for spritzes, beers, or snacks, or save our appetites for any of the amazing restaurants including Hawking Bird, Marafuku, and Daytrip. North Light remains one of our favorite patios to enjoy an expertly crafted cocktail (or their new sister martini dive-bar Tallboy) and the convenience store U&I Liquors in the middle of it all sells Home Base bottles for you to take home. 

This doesn't even scratch the surface of our favorite places to walk, drink, and dine, so we hope everyone will reach out for ideas and recommendations, we love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Samantha and Ali

Home Base

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Challenge: Anywhere you go, ask any staff member if they have 3 recommendations for their favorite local sustainable spots. Secret of getting in the know!

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Home Base Spirits

Home Base Spirits, a female-owned and sustainable business, believes whiskey should be fun, made with premium ingredients, and accessible for everyone. (Well, everyone over the age of 21.) We strive to be transparent about our process, ingredients, and mission: to celebrate spirits as an agricultural product by both sourcing and producing locally, and to create delicious spirits everyone can enjoy.

Founders Alexandra and Samantha Blatteis are twins born and raised in Oakland—their home base.

Home Base Spirits is committed to transparency about their process, ingredients, and mission. They source and produce locally, and work to support local agrarian economies and the land stewards farming ecologically. 

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