Inside The Lair Of The Kouign-Amann: Starter Bakery In Berkeley

Brian Wood pulls out a stiff, pale yellow rectangular slab from a baking rack. It’s thin, flat and sandwiched between two sheets of parchment paper, but it’s large enough that Wood needs to hold it up with two hands. We’re standing in a dimly-lit refrigerated room surrounded by racks of unbaked laminated pastries, but this approximately two-foot-long sheet isn’t made of dough. This, he explains, is a five-pound sheet of unsalted butter, a key ingredient for the butter croissant, the most popular offering produced by his wholesale pastry and bread business, Starter Bakery.

This August, Wood moved his eight-year-old company and its 55 employees from a 1,400-square-foot space in Oakland to its new digs in Berkeley, a 13,000-square-foot facility within the old Pyramid Alehouse building at 901 Gilman St. Starter Bakery shares the former brewery with others, like Ripple, Blue Bottle and HERE North America, as well as a soon-to-be Tesla service center.

The part of the building Starter occupies once housed Pyramid’s gigantic brew tanks, so when Wood signed the lease, with the help of Berkeley’s Kava Massih Architects, he was able to design the space from scratch for his purposes. Walls were added; floors, once sloped inward for spilled beer to flow into a trenched drain, were leveled; and a second floor loft was built. Upstairs are offices and underneath, there’s a contained room for mixing dough, a process that kicks up a lot of flour dust into the air.

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