Here’s the text from Toronado’s feed at Instagram.
Beer Week 2025 (Feb. 7 – 16) will be a special occasion for the Toronado family. After 38 years, our owner and founder Dave Keene is retiring and selling the business. This marks the end of an era for the generations of beer drinkers that have shared lives with us. In true Toronado fashion we plan to celebrate Dave’s innumerable contributions to the world craft beer scene with 10 days of great events, great beer and great people. Please join us as we regale 38 years of hazy memories and prepare for many more. As Dave says “Its the people that make the Toronado” and you are our people.
So, what is Toronado?
It’s an institution.
This description comes from a bottle of Cable Car by Lost Abbey Brewing, a beer brewed especially for the legendary San Francisco bar’s 20th anniversary celebration in 2007.
You’ve made it to 547 Haight Street. This destination is more San Francisco than Rice A Roni, Chinatown, and Lombard Street combined. Welcome to Broadway for brewers everywhere. Everyone who is anyone has poured their kegs here. For the last 20 years, this place has launched careers, confirmed legacies, and since 1987 the only name you need to know is David Keene.
Take a seat. Tip Strong. Nod appreciatively and don’t ask stupid questions. Welcome to Big Daddy’s House known to most simply as “The T-Room.” Here the bartenders are fluent in English, German, Flemish, French, Walloon and Czech. But they’re most known for their American Lip Service. Watch it. The lady with the jet black hair behind the bar eats idiots for lunch.
I’ve neither met Keene (born in 1955) nor visited Toronado. However, I’m honored to doff my chapeau in his general direction.
One chronological irony is worthy of note, as Keene launched Toronado during the same month, August of 1987, that I sat foot in Sportstime Pizza for the very first time. Five years later at Rich O’s (the precursor to New Albanian Brewing Company) we were looking to the T-Room and others like it, both in America and abroad, as the inspiration for like-minded efforts at home in New Albany — where the skeptics insisted it couldn’t be done.
By the way, an earnest thanks to those skeptics. It was delightful proving you wrong.
Still later in 1999, seeking a direction for the draft beer event that was to become known as Gravity Head, Toronado was available as a point of reference in the form of its renowned Barleywine Festival.
It is the undisputed champion of barleywine festivals (beginning) at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday morning and continues until the beer runs out the following Sunday.
At Toronado’s web site, the poster at right is accompanied by these words: “Cash Only. ATM onsite. 21+ ID required, even by privilege-laden Boomers.”
Be aware that the Toronado bar is for sale, not closed. The list price apparently is $1.75 million, reminding us yet again that when one steps from the jetway at Muhammad Ali International, they are not in California any more.
For many years the preceding might have served as an amuse-bouche to a preview of Gravity Head in February at NABC, but the event appears to have breathed its last. This is not to be implied as criticism; far from it. In fact, I wrote the Gravity Head obituary at my website all the way back in 2022, conceding that times have changed at both macro and micro (behavioral) levels.
R.I.P. Gravity Head, with a reprise: “I’d stop drinking, but I’m no quitter”
R.I.P. Gravity Head (1999 – 2022).
The period of Gravity Head’s mightiest cultural hegemony coincided with my period of co-ownership at NABC; the buyout was official in 2018, and I take credit for my share of the intellectual property, but hasten to acknowledge that Gravity Head always was a team effort.
(Consequently) my former business partners and co-workers have their reasons for retiring Gravity Head, and to me, their rationale makes perfect sense. Promoting a weeks-long event of any sort strains business-as-usual in an era of thin staffing, and is tantamount to walking a tight rope without a net in terms of placing emphasis on the consumption of highly alcoholic drinks.
In short, it’s hard enough keeping restaurants and bars open during the continually challenging post-pandemic age, much less staging a strong beer festival in a locale where public transit amounts to little beyond rumor. Toronado’s urban placement and the brevity of its barleywine fete might make matters there easier (or not).
Speaking personally, these sorts of highly alcoholic beers interest me far less than before; an Imperial Stout, Baltic Porter or high-octane Trappist here and there, and I’m good. Running in any sense is exhausting, much less running a gravity gauntlet (IYKYK). I’ve traveled full circle, back to those daily beer styles comprising moderate alcohol content and multiple pints, such as ideal to form the lineup of Session Head if there were such a thing.
As for Keene’s impending retirement, it’s easy to decide which Rogue Old Crustacean Barleywine to tap tonight, five- or seven-year-old, compared with the uncertainties inherent in a process of ownership succession.
Best wishes to David Keene. As with the great Larry Bell a while back, I sincerely hope you are about to find your way through the maze to its exit, emerging to enjoy your retirement exactly as you should, and with a few bucks in your pocket.
Hip Hops: Don’t worry, be happy, because Larry found his way through the maze
Previously at “Hip Hops”:
Hip Hops: Trellis Brewing’s decoction, Donum Dei’s chili cookoff, plus no-jive dives (and boozers)
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 
