Joe Merchant is the lead meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office. He has a master’s degree in space engineering from Michigan. And he can’t stop laughing.

“Hey Joe, it’s Grant Marek, I’m a reporter at SFGATE and calling with a bit of an unusual request,” I offer.

“OK,” he replies back.

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“It’s ‘Fogust’ in San Francisco,” I acknowledge, referring to San Francisco’s unseasonal, fog-filled final month of summer. “So I’m naturally trying to find the foggiest bar in the city.”

After he finally composes himself, Merchant takes a deep breath and gets back to business: The answer to my question is only going to be found in the northwest corner of the city.

“Even if you look at the satellite right now, the eastern half of the city is not under stratus nearly as much as western half,” he says, referring to the persistent marine stratus layer of fog that sits just off the Pacific. “It’s probably any place close to the Golden Gate Bridge or farther west of that.”

Merchant doesn’t have much more beyond that, but it’s a start.

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File: San Francisco City Football Club’s mascot, Foggy.

Like Lombard Street or the bison in Golden Gate Park, there’s something about Fogust that has always felt so uniquely San Francisco. Almost nowhere else in America can you enjoy a pint while peering out a fog-filled window in August, bundled up while most of the rest of the country wrestles with an end-of-summer heat dome. Finding the bar that most embodies that feels almost essential the more I think about it.

To wit: Over the next week, my innocuous question turns into a somewhat serious investigation. I talk to a fog academic, a fog data scientist and even San Francisco City Football Club’s mascot Foggy (unhelpful, but fun nonetheless), intent on finding an answer. I figure the first thing I need is an understanding of what “foggiest” even means.

My first stop is Sara Baguskas, an associate professor in the School of the Environment at San Francisco State University who helped establish a multi-university fog-monitoring network in 2025 called the Pacific Coastal Fog Research Project. I figured if anyone would have a definitive definition of what exactly qualifies as fog, it’s going to be her.

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Well, I figured wrong.

“There is a definition,” Baguskas says. “And also, we’re working on it.”

Baguskas’ nonanswer can best be explained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fog glossary, which includes not one, but thirteen definitions of fog. They range from some you’ve probably heard of (tule fog, ground fog) to some you probably haven’t (ice fog, sea fog) to some you absolutely haven’t (radiation fog, advection fog, evaporation-mixing fog). There’s also something called a fog bow, which has officially been added to my fog bucket list.

Customers enter the Dubliner on West Portal Avenue in San Francisco, on Sunday, Aug. 16, 2026. According to San Francisco City Football Club’s mascot, Foggy, this is the foggiest bar in San Francisco.

NOAA defines straight-up, regular ol’ fog as “water droplets suspended in the air at the Earth’s surface,” but according to all of the Bay Area scientists I talk to, the consensus instead seems to be more along the lines of the Supreme........

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