Toronado Saved by New Ownership, Preserving San Francisco Beer Landmark

Toronado did not disappear from San Francisco’s beer map after all. The Haight Street institution found new ownership in longtime customer Bill Lewis and his brother-in-law, Wall Pringle, a rescue that preserved one of the city’s defining beer bars and kept a longtime reference point for good-beer drinkers intact.

Founder Dave Keene, who opened Toronado in 1987, will remain connected to the bar as an ambassador. Keene said, “I want to properly pass the torch.” Lewis said he wants to sustain Toronado “for the next 40 years.” The bar is expected to keep operating as usual during the ownership transfer, with no immediate changes planned to staff, programming, or overall direction.

That continuity matters because Toronado has always been more than a place to pour pints. With 50 taps, three cask handpulls, and 90-plus cans and bottles, it became one of the original American craft-beer bars, the sort of place where brewers, distributors, and drinkers treated the list like a living snapshot of what beer could be. Its annual Barleywine Festival, running for more than three decades and closely tied to San Francisco Beer Week, helped elevate barleywine far beyond a niche style and nudged brewers to make beers worthy of the lineup.

The sale also ended a long stretch of uncertainty that began when Keene put the bar up for sale in January 2025 after announcing his retirement. A previous sale effort involving cryptocurrency investor Orion Parrott fell through before the Lewis-Pringle deal came together, leaving the bar’s future in doubt for months. The fact that a regular customer ended up buying it gave the outcome a different kind of weight, especially in a beer scene where beloved rooms often vanish under rent pressure, ownership churn, or simple market fatigue.

For the Bay Area beer community, Toronado’s survival was bigger than one address on Haight Street. It kept alive a bar that helped define craft beer culture in San Francisco, the kind of place where cask ale, barrel-aged barleywine, and a sharp eye for curation still mattered. In an era when so many drinkers default to packaged beer at home, Toronado remained proof that a great beer bar can still shape taste, discovery, and memory all at once.