About the Brewery Faction Brewing has been part of Alameda’s beer scene since 2013, pouring from a taproom on the old Naval Air Station side of the island with one of the better Bay views in Bay Area brewing. The setting is memorable, but the beer has always been the point: clean, expressive, hop-forward, and built with enough balance that you can drink the whole pint without needing a nap or a palate reset. Faction makes a range of styles, but pale ales and IPAs are clearly where the brewery shines. Their beers tend to favor clarity, crispness, and direct hop character over haze-for-haze’s-sake or overbuilt sweetness. For Doctorbird, that makes them an easy fit: local-ish, flavorful, unfussy, and very good at delivering the kind of hoppy beer people actually want to come back to.