Seven Stills Brewery and Distillery

Seven Stills Brewery and Distillery is the San Francisco craft spirits operation founded in 2013 by Tim Obert and Clint Potter — and the first and only brewery-distillery to operate inside the city of San Francisco's 7×7-mile boundary. The "Seven Stills" name itself references the city's seven signature hills, anchoring the brand's editorial identity in the broader San Francisco geographic and cultural context. Obert and Potter became friends as students at UC Santa Cruz and began brewing and distilling for fun at Potter's parents' Novato home, eventually scaling the bootstrapped garage operation into the integrated commercial brewery-distillery that defines the brand today. The Seven Stills production model is genuinely distinctive in American craft distilling. The brewery side produces craft beer, and the distillery side then distills selected craft beers — produced both in-house and through collaborations with other Bay Area breweries — into whiskey. The result is a portfolio of beer-distilled whiskeys with flavor profiles that pull directly from the source beer's brewing-tradition character: hopped whiskeys distilled from IPA bases, chocolate-and-coffee-character whiskeys distilled from stout bases, fruit-forward whiskeys distilled from saison bases, and the broader spectrum of beer-influenced spirit character that no standard grain-mash distilling operation can produce. The 2014 Gold Medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition for Chocasmoke Whiskey put Seven S…