WISHING YOU HOLIDAY GOOD BEER

Up until now I have only posted visits to actual breweries where I could sip their samples straight from the source, as it were.  Here I am going to wander off the beaten path for a moment but if you read on I am sure you will forgive me for this wee diversion.

What with our beer-centric son-in-law coming for Christmas I felt compelled to encourage Santa to fill his stocking with bottles of beer that he couldn’t get easily in his home state of Idaho… two of his favorites from Russian River Brewing and one from a small brewing company out in the wilds of Magalia, CA.  Knowing that three bottles of beer would hardly wet our respective whistles I also stocked up on a sampling of bottles from Santa Cruz breweries.

Okay, that all disappeared by the end of Christmas Day so we made a quick pilgrimage around the corner to AJ’s… a gas station mini-mart on the outside but a rarified gem on the inside where you can find organic, local foods, maybe some halal goat meat by the pound and a really swell selection of micro beers.

Perhaps you are wondering why we do this with such dedication… above and beyond the part where we get to drink beer.  By poking around in the recesses of the brewing industry you find yourself tasting the artistic dabblings of people who can think “outside of the keg” as it were.  Everybody knows that you drink beer when you eat oysters, right?  But it takes a clever duck to pull off using the oysters in the beer and skipping the middle ground.  If you are land-locked, then maybe oyster beer seems down right nasty… but if you have every slurped the liquor from underneath a truly fresh raw oyster on the half shell then you know that this is not going to be a bottle of fish flavored lite beer.

Some outstanding, some less than remarkable but all are now history…

FLYING DOG BREWERY   Fredrick, MD

Raging Bitch Belgian IPA

Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout

DOGFISH BREWING CO.  Milton, DE

Chicory Stout

PORT BREWING CO.  San Marcos, CA

Mongo IPA

RUSSIAN RVER BREWING CO.  Santa Rosa, CA

Damnation Golden Ale

Pliney the Elder

FEATHER RIVER BREWING CO.  Magalia, CA

Raging Rapids Ale

GRAND TETON BREWING CO.  Jackson Hole, WY

Sweetgrass American Pale Ale

SANTA CRUZ ALE WORKS  Santa Cruz, CA

IPA

Dark night Imperial Stout

SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAIN BREWING Santa Cruz, CA

Amber Ale

Devout Stout

Well, sure, that was fun but, hey, the beer is all gone again. Luckily there is a small mecca - an oasis if you will - in downtown Santa Cruz.  The aptly named 99 Bottles of Beer offers just that.  Between a long row of taps and an envious bottle cooler they do, indeed, proffer an actual count that exceeds 100 choices of the brewer’s art. Yes, you can get Coors Light and, yes, you can get a $20 Chimay not to mention pretty much everything in between.

We hit the taps for a couple of hours and then bought a varietal six-pack of take away for dinner and dessert.

Firestone Walker Velvet Merlin 

Firestone Walker Double Barrel Ale  Paso Robles, CA

Old Speckled Hen  Suffolk, England

Anchor Steam Beer  San Francisco,  CA

Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA  San Francisco,  CA

St. Peter’s Cream Stout  Suffolk, England

Abita Turbo Dog English Brown Ale  Abita Springs, LA

Guinness Black Lager  Dublin, Ireland

Shipyard Monkey Fist IPA  Portland, ME

Eye of the Hawk  Mendocino, CA

Uncommon Brewers Casserly Pale Ale 

Uncommon Brewers Siamese Twin Ale  Santa Cruz, CA

Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron  Milton, DE

Anderson Valley Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout  Booneville, CA

Its an ugly job but someone has to step up…

OOPS, SORRY 'BOUT THAT

Yeah, I know. I have been more than a little remiss about posting my beer conquests. But with art shows to get ready for, the lovely Tama having major surgery and the impending holidays... well, it ain't much of an excuse but its all you're gonna get.

In the ensuing months I have made three separate forays into beer country in September, October and early December... and here they are.

GONE OUT EAST

One thing you learn on a project like this… it’s true, size doesn’t matter.  About a hundred miles west of Quincy you can visit a brewery that is now pushing the limits of calling themselves a micro… I’ve already posted my opinion on that one. About twenty miles east of Quincy you can find the antipodal option for the serious beer lover. 

Out on highway 70, pretty much across the highway from the town of Blairsden, sits Undercover Aleworks.  Look for the sandwich board out on the side of the highway saying they are open and tootle up the winding driveway into the trees.  Small but dedicated to craftsmanship in every detail this small brewery seems to contravene some basic laws of physics by being larger inside than outside – you among the trees, the beer among your tastebuds. 

These are people who take beer seriously and life with more than a bit of whimsy, making the whole visit a chance to stop and smell the fermentation.  A curious tangle of local ordinances prevents them from serving food (even though Susan has been a restaurateur for years…) but they have no problem with you bringing in a picnic to wash down with a few of their beers.  I had already gorged myself on Mexican food just up the road so I was happy just to suck down a couple of pints. I started with Deep Cover Ale, an old favorite from local bar taps and then, because I wasn’t driving. I ordered up a pint of Transplant Saison, a specialty brew celebrating a local friend’s recent successful surgery.

There isn’t much to do here except savor the beer and listen to the wind wandering through tall trees but it is remarkably hard to get back off your butt and get on with your business… what a great legacy for a brewery.

GET THEE BEHIND ME CABIN FEVER

‘Tuther day we decided that Tama had just about enough of languishing around the house recovering from her surgery so we planned a little weekend run up around Petaluma.

Along with some casual antique gawking and visits to local bakeries and cheese makers, I managed to find a couple of breweries that needed my attention.

First stop was in Sebastopol at the HopMonk Tavern, one of three area branches. This is a spacious bar & restaurant with a steady line-up of local and national performers on weekends.  We hit there in the early afternoon and the bar was still well littered with straggling lunchers and such.  They offer a long line of taps with a strong variety of local micro guest beers, but, being on a mission as it were, I ordered their own Hopmonk Tavern Ale.  A lovely, well crafted beer with all those things your mouth asks for in ale. It was perfect for washing down those bar bite fries we also ordered.  I probably could have spent much of the afternoon working my way down the tap line but, hey, this was a road trip…

Well, we wandered many miles and sampled artesianal cheeses, went looking for Tippy Hedren at Bodega Bay, gobbled pastries from tiny bakeries and finally headed back toward the golden gate.  By the time we got back to Petaluma we realized that we weren’t quite ready to drive home so we got ourselves a room, rested up and went out looking for dinner and another notch on my brewery list.

A little research and a little reconnaissance got us to Dempsey’s Ale House.  Unfortunately having no plan left us on their doorstep at dinner time on a Saturday night in the big city.  The place was hopping, so we left our name with the hostess and went to try and find a place at the bar.  In no time at all someone already at the bar got the call that their table was ready so we parked our carcasses on the bar stools and I reviewed my options.  By name alone I settled on a pint of their seasonally offered 707 Wet Hop Ale… again with the pleasant surprise that hopping beer is no longer a blood sport.  It was a nice blend of fresh hops and lots of malt… livelier than a lot of beers and a joy to slurp down. 

By now our hostess was looking for us, but we had already eyeballed the menu and decided that we would move on for dinner.  Not that the food didn’t look and sound great, but after you have hit a hundred or more brewpubs you find that there is a little too much common denominator in their menus and the thought of another round of BBQ Ribs or Beer Battered Fish & Chips (two of my perennial favs…) just doesn’t make the grade anymore.  So it was back across the street from our motel for a hole in the wall Mexican place and a couple of bottles of Modelo Especial.

YET ANOTHER GOOD REASON TO VISIT OROVILLE

Okay, let me say that when I first moved to California, up in the north end of the state, Butte Creek was my  “go to” grocery store beer.  Secondly, let me remind you all that I have said many times that there are two kinds of brewpubs… breweries that serve food and restaurants that also make beer.

When you go to check out a brewery inside a casino, well, your first thought is that it is just another hook to entertain gamblers.  So imagine my delight when I stopped in Oroville to check Feather Falls Casino Brewing Co. off my list. It was just gone lunchtime and the bar had just opened so service was slow starting… nobody’s fault but mine.  As soon as the gal behind the bar got her prep done everything moved rapidly into first class.  

I ordered a pint of Ocktober Fest Marszen because, hey, it was the two buck daily special. Knowing I had to drive another 70 miles up the canyon I also ordered a big bowl of clam chowder with bread for lunch. Excellent but no surprise there… casino food is always good. The beer was also excellent, delightfully so, and in talking to the bartender I found out why.  Seems that their brewmaster is Roland Allen, the guy who brewed and owned Butte Creek Brewing (and, coincidentally, the first stop on my quest to visit all the California microbreweries…)  Once I found out that little fact I felt compelled to order a pint of their award winning Black Jack Brew Sweet Stout.  Even better than the Marszen and I left a happy, happy man once again.

Even if you don’t have a fist full of dollar bills to feed the slot machines, if you are passing through Oroville I strongly suggest you add the couple of miles to your odometer and sidebar yourself in for a beer and a bite.

WINE COUNTRY MY ASS...

Well, I had planned to just buckle down (up?) and hustle straight home from Quincy… but the best laid plans, eh?  I did well over the “back side” to Oroville and arrived about quarter to eight in the AM… a wee bit too early to make a stop at the Feather Falls Casino Brewery so I will save that for a later drive-by.  70 to 99 to Sacramento and I-80 west and I was skimming right along. 

But then ‘long about Vacaville the headwind suddenly got very gusty and the taillights began to multiply rapidly.  I couldn’t face a long drive through the hideous east bay concrete corridor so, spotting a sign suggesting highway 12 and Napa as an alternate, I opted for a shot across the Golden Gate and straight south to San Jose. 

Motoring along on the fringes of wine country I stopped for a highway flagger at an intersection and, while stretching my neck, my gaze fell upon those magic words, “Brewery”.  Almost without aid my trusty van wheeled right and into the parking lot of Napa Smith Brewery.

Again just a wee bit before the sun crossed the yardarm, so I had the bar to myself with the exception of the barkeep and two of the brewers on an early lunch break.  Had a nice chat with them all while sampling their current seasonal offering, a pint of Ewan Paine Scottish Ale.  I am a big fan of Scottish ales and this was an extremely good one so the time passed quickly and conversation, turning as it often does in this situation, touched on the brewer’s arts and my personal quest.  This led to a suggestion that I might want to avail myself of the offerings just up the road in Sonoma.

Now Sonoma is generally know for wines and tourists and the scant 11 miles of roadway was more than generously sprinkled with both.  The town itself is one of those classic coastal farm towns centered around a square with a park and a surround of old building facades.  

Now days, of course, the buildings have given over from hardware stores and millineries and feature an endless parade of art galleries and tasting rooms, but a short drive down a side street gets you into the “real” part of town and The Sonoma Springs Brewery.  

This is a small, no frills set-up with a Jerry Garcia look-alike brewmaster and the bar and a few two-tops cheek by jowl with the array of hoses and buckets and other stainless steel accoutrements of the zymurgist’s art. 

They don’t serve food, other than peanuts, and they didn’t open for another 20 minutes so what could I do but wander across the street to the lovely, ramshackled taqueria y tortillaria and wolf down a small plate of tacos al pastor… ummmm. 

Okay, one o’clock had come and the bar was, indeed, open for my custom. Reviewing the chalkboard I settled on a pint of Enchanted Forest Black IPA which turned out to be a lovely black lager (a perennial favorite…) nicely hopped (all through the process…) to give it the bite of a good, traditional IPA.  Once again I find that brewers are choosing to make good IPA’s instead of the kind of crap that seems to be mostly based on a dare.

Having miles to go before I was home I passed on another beer and motored my way southward.  There are still more breweries in the neighborhood but I wanted to get home and needed my wits about me to negotiate 101 through San Francisco so I will rest easy knowing that with a free weekend and a designated driver I can handily check them all off my bucket of beer list.

ROMMEL DRIVES DEEP INTO THE HIGH SIERRAS

Having it in my mind to do a little road trip to Quincy in the new van it seemed only logical to include a few more of those elusive California breweries. 

This, then, goes a long way toward explaining why I was in Lodi, CA at 11 o’clock on a Monday morning… waiting to have a breakfast beer at the Lodi Beer Co.

Located in a grand old building in the midst of a picturesque part of Old Town, it is a well appointed brewpub and restaurant. I was too late (personally) for breakfast and had too many miles to go to justify a nap-inducing, multi-beer lunch so I just ordered a pint of beer and had a nice long chat with the bartender and the only other customer at the bar.

I got into this brewery tour game because I was in a rut, beer-wise, and I needed a good motivation to keep trying something new. I have had a grudge against American made IPA’s for a couple of years now (sorry, but a bushel of hops at the end does not and IPA make…) but of late, in keeping with my original mission, I have sampled them now and again with occasional nice results… like now, for instance.  Throwing caution to the wind I ordered their Triple IPA and was quite content with my choice… good hopping all the way through so there was something to taste besides an excess of shrubbery.  Although the name Lodi brings on facial tics and the odd raised eyebrow in conversation, I would go back to this spot and eat and drink more without a second thought.

Saddling up once more after a thrift store incident next door to the brewery, I hit the dusty trail for the other side of East Jesus in search of Jack Russell Brewing.  Off the beaten path north of the town of Camino (‘tuther side of Placerville…) it took some serious commitment and navigational skills to get there (can’t have the aliens using our road signs to aid in their invasion plans…) but it was well worth it in the end.

Again, it was early on a Monday in the apple country “off season” so I had the bar and server all to myself.  People have so much more time to talk the finer points of beer if they aren’t in the middle of a Friday Happy Hour, don’t you know.  As I said, it is apple country so I felt compelled, again against my standard judgment, to take a shot at their Harvest Apple Ale.  Not some “beer cooler” concoction for beer drinkers who don’t like beer, this one is more like the Asian beers that have a faint back-of-the-throat hint of good apple cider along with the full compliment of regular, yummy beer flavors.

Well, the sun was wending its way toward the yardarm by this point so I fired up my chariot and sent myself scurrying up highway 49 and Gold Country.  There is a vineyard/brewery at Coloma, where Sutter found all that gold, but they are only open Thursday through Sunday.  I drove in anyway and ran into the guy, but no amount of hint nor suggestion could induce him to pour me a taste on a Monday… just somewhere I will need to return to later on in my odyssey.

A few more miles up the road and I was in Auburn where the late hour induced me to get a room at the Motel 6 before heading out for a lovely dinner and a couple of pints at the Auburn Ale House. I started out with their Shanghai Stout with my dinner of flash seared Ahi tuna and deep fried dill pickles and had a pint of Auburn Export Lager for desert.

A good day’s work and now time for a little boob-tube and a well earned rest.

IN SEARCH OF THE ELUSIVE BREW

So it is a tradition here at Casa Boltoonski to leave town on our birthdays in search of fun and frolic elsewhere. A chance to get far from the madding crowd. A chance to sample something new. When it started in Idaho, years back, a chance to sample anything new…

At the dawning of my dotage I developed the habit of finding a loop of microbreweries within the grasp of my extended birthday weekend and this year was no exception… we left town Wednesday last and headed in a southeasterly direction with out first stop (after breakfast at Norma’s in Watsonville…) to be the John Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

After a lovely and highly recommended time there I discovered that Californians seem loath to build roadways running east over the coastal range from highway 1. Short of driving halfway to Santa Barbara we had no choice but to retrace our footsteps back to Hollister and across the low divide to Los Banos and beyond.

Issue #2… not being as “up” on my California geography as I perhaps should have, I placed Yosemite much farther south, taking with it the hordes of campers filling up every available campsite in its surrounding environs. Okay, screw it, we checked into a Motel 6 in Fresno and headed for a cold beer… really the point anyway.

First stop was the Sequoia Brewing Company for a bar bite and a pint of their Irish Stout.  Properly “stouty” without the usual clutter of coffee or chocolate to avoid doing a good job of dark roasting the barley bits, it was a jim dandy introduction to Fresno and a lovely abatement of the early summer heat of the Central Valley.  Parking was easy and, since it was about 3:30 in the afternoon, we were well ahead of the happy hour steam valvers.

Back in the car and off to the other end of town for round two and a visit to the Full Circle Brewing Company.  The other end of town and the other end of the spectrum. . . a decidedly blue collar kind of place in a cavernous warehouse building decorated up the walls only as far as a man could reach.  Fancy print-job appetizer menus are replaced with a stage and dance floor and they sponsor a local women’s roller derby team. I plopped my butt on a stool and ordered a very well crafted pint of no nonsense named Brown Ale and we chatted with the bartender and the elderly brewmeister while we all watched something called “Stupidest Things People Do On Wheels” on the television.

Hot, tired and quenched we headed back to the air-conditioned arms of Morpheus for a nap while the after work crowds thinned out down at Sequoia Brewing where we had decided to dine having been enticed by their Wednesday evenings special of all-you-can-eat ribs washed down with beers I already knew were gonna be good.  First a pint of Tamarack Amber Ale and then the last of the meatie bits and slow smoked beans washed down with a pint of Del Oro Mexican style ale.  As always, beer was all the desert I had room for so we called it a night.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY COUNTRYSIDE

Good morning 62! A lazy start, a few cartoons and a shower and we were off on our adventure once again. Out the driveway, turn left and… oops, isn’t that 2^nd Hand Store open already?  Down the street a few blocks for a breakfast of doughnuts and we are off north thru town toward lovely Merced, California.

50 miles of land that looked way too much like southern Idaho and we were in Merced looking for West 18^th Street and the Firehouse Brewery. We found it easily enough and there was still outdoor seating that looked vaguely line a fire truck, but alas, Firehouse was closed and Bubba’s BBQ Brewhouse was not yet open… just a matter of piss poor timing.

At this point we would have headed for Kelley Brothers Brewing in Manteca, Ca if a little internet wandering the night before had not shown that it, too, was dead and gone… it happens. Once we hit 5 in a row in one day and they were all DOA.

Happily, all of this sorrow and heartbreak was easily washed away by a stop in the tiny town of Turlock.

I have learned that all of the microbrewery world can be divided into 2 distinct categories… beer makers that serve food and restaurants that make beer. Not by any means mutually exclusive but it is almost always one way or the other. I am glad to say that Dust Bowl Brewery is one of those places where they make beer and then back it up with really good food.  We sat out on the sidewalk since there was enough breeze to keep it cool without raising the particulate matter too high and I managed to guzzle down a pint of Galaxy Pale Ale without effort. All the wait staff knew their beer and, as we feasted on freshly in-house made potato chips seasoned with garlic and parmesan cheese, our guy insisted I try their flagship, Hops of Wrath… well, okay, I’ll have a taste.  He then shows up with 3 samplers... their Scotch Ale which was yummie, the aforementioned Hops of Wrath which, though it is an IPA, was properly hopped through the entire brewing process and, therefore tasted like beer and not shrubbery, and a (in my opinion only…) nasty little bit of business called Super Tramp which is fruit infused (I call ‘em beer coolers…)  To compound this crime against nature the fruit of choice was strawberries… oh, the horror.  Good thing I had real beer left to cleanse this abomination from my palate. 

That small incident aside, This place is in my top 10 of the ongoing California Brewtour.

Next stop, Modesto…  A tangle of streets broken up by freeways and rail yards left us wandering aimlessly in circles until Tama’s smart phone led us to St. Stan’s Brewing Company and it’s bar called Heros.  Oh, boy… a sports bar.  Filled with us, an off duty employee and a remarkably indifferent bar maid who couldn’t be bothered to get engaged in a conversation about beer.  No doubt there was some really great sporting paraphernalia among the tons that covered every wall on up into the high ceilinged darkness but for the beer curious… well, they had only 4 hand-made beers and a mile of guest taps that ended with Bud and Coors Light. We split a tasty Thai Chicken salad, I had a pint of Red Sky Ale and we gazed thoughtfully at the two monster TV’s hanging side by side over the bar… your choice of golf or octagon cage fighting.  Ummm, let’s go find Stockton, shall we?

A few more miles (hey, aren’t we lucky that the new car has air conditioning?) got us safely to beautiful, the wrong side of the tracks Stockton and the quest for the elusive Motel 6.  Oh, there it is on the other side of the freeway… gotcha.

A little siesta to beat the heat, a side trip to BevMo for a bottle of Boodles gin and we were off to the Valley Brewing Company for a light birthday dinner (we could still hear BBQ sauce sloshing around our insides…)

Now Valley Brewing is one of those restaurant then brewery kind of places where the guest taps outnumber the in-house ones.  But the food was great, we dined outside, the service was good and the local beers I sampled were tasty and very well crafted.  I started with the intriguingly named Red Neck Red moved to a pint of their London Tavern Bitter and ate my salad with a pint of Luna Blanca.  All this just proves that there is nothing wrong with either side of the 2 categories I mentioned in my earlier blog posting.

There being a Baskin Robbins two doors down, we ate desert in a sugar cone and rolled back to our room for some R&R.

ROCKS, HILLS AND DELTA WATERWAYS

Up early-ish on Friday we headed east on old highway 4 into “Gold Country”  After a brief pause to recharge at the Ranch Coffee Shop (biscuits & gravy, fried baloney sandwich… good stuff like that.) we were off to Arnold and Snowshoe Brewing. Another long and winding road, sea level to 3000 ft. but some damned fine scenery and a welcome relief from pencil straight freeways through endless, flat farmland.  The brewery is a nice bar/restaurant with a killer view but, since we had miles to go before we slept, I had a good, solid pint of Grizzly Brown Ale chatted with the barmaid about beer in general and we rolled back down the hill and ever westward to Antioch and San Francisco.

BYE BYE CALIFORNIA CABBAGE PATCH, ET AL...

Now Antioch probably has a quaint, old part of town somewhere, but we never saw even a glimmer of it.  The route we took was the official Townhouse & Mall version and Schooner’s Brewpub was in a mall and sort of had that mall look about it.  In spite of that my pint of American Cream Ale was very good indeed and so was the big plate of nachos we split to hold us over until San Francisco.

When I called the day before, the hostess couldn’t tell me how to find them and our waitress couldn’t actually tell us how to get back to highway 4 but we made it and soon were motoring south on 680 headed for the Golden Gate.

We stayed with our friends Jodi & Alex out above Golden Gate Park so we naturally went to the Magnolia Pub & Brewery dinner Saturday night (after a big lunch at Roosevelt’s Tamale Parlor of course…)  They bill themselves as a “gastro pub” and I had a plate of Wisconsin bleu sheep cheese,  some spicy coppa meat, sourdough bread and a bowl of sweet pickled peppers and grapes.  I washed it all down with several glasses of their award winning Bonnie Lee Special Bitter.  Good beer, good food, good god I’m a happy man who is ready to sleep in his own bed…

YOU HAVE TO DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE

The lovely Tama and I just spent a weekend in the great, green, mold infused state of Oregon.  The lovely Tama spent Saturday In Corvallis fulfilling the moral obligation of all grad students – helping to interview incoming grad program applicants.  Since, to me, this was right up there with attending the opera while shaving my forehead with a cheese grater, I elected to stay in Eugene with my next older sibling leaving us free to pursue a rainy afternoon of brewery crawling throughout the local environs.  

First up was Oakshire Brewing… strictly a brewery with tasting room, they do leave room beside their loading dock for a local, independent taco truck.  A nice place, but overall they try a wee bit too hard to make a now, happening product. This leads to assaults on your taste buds from ales confused by orange peel, cardamom and the like and stouts make with coffee, free range oatmeal and organic, dark chocolate. These are all lovely tastes, but when you mix too many of them together with a heavy hand of hops what you wind up with is an uninspired train wreck in the back of your mouth.  Let us not forget the Reinheitsgebot the Germans came up with in 1487… if you wanna call it beer then it can only be made with water, hops and barley (they didn’t include yeast originally because nobody had discovered it’s existence yet).  That’s it. End of story. Add anything else and you can make it, but you can’t call it beer.  Must be time to re-read our history books.

From there we drove across town, through a driving but brief hail storm, to visit Ninkasi Brewing.  Now here is a brewery.  Doing a crawl, we were ordering samplers at each establishment.  I tried three or four beers here and will swear by them each and every one.  A lager, a red ale, a stout and a porter that was aged in a bourbon cask… traditionally one of my favorite taste treats.  I know, I know, you wonder how I can rail against flavored beer at one place and rave about beer with bourbon right after. The difference is timing.  They make a good, simple porter (which I sampled without the cask aging first…) and then let it sit in a barrel that lived its former life as a whiskey cask.  This adds some subtle undercurrents of flavor without being forward enough to cancel out something else.  I’m all in favor of running along the cutting edge but not if it destroys the lab rat in the process.

Our final stop of the day was at Hop Valley Brewing Co. which has a restaurant attached to the brewery.  We went with the six glass sampler here and got a nice cross section of their brew palette.  A few of their beers were good but unremarkable, one we were unable to finish a 4 oz. sampler, and a couple were quite good… mostly at the dark side… cask conditioned porter and stout.  My only question is, if you are going to go to the trouble to make organic, locally sourced, free range beer, why would you serve flash frozen, reconstituted french fries?

Those of you who know me or have read the header on this blog will know that my five year plan was to visit every microbrewery in the golden state.  Well, so much for aiming high.

With the influx of breweries who insist on dabbling in the dark arts of fruit flavoring and, god forbid, food pairings, I have made an executive decision to amend my vision. 

I conceived this plan while dwelling in Quincy with its population of 5000. After a year here in Insanity Cruz just the thought of multiple forays into the densely packed hell that is Los Angeles (7500 people per square mile…) only to find beers filled with blueberries or sushi grade tuna or whatever leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and a knot in my belly.  I mean lets face it… 1870 was the last time that LA was the same size as Quincy and back then Quincy had a brewery of its own so why bother?

I’m not some corn-fed beauty from the Midwest longing to be in movin’ pitchers and, even as a child, Disneyland was something to watch on TV and generated absolutely no desire to actually organize a visit.  The California of my childhood was the coastal redwoods, a mission or two and the golden gate bridge tempered with the stories of Sutter’s Mill and the Donner Party.

Armed with this personal view, I intend to sketch a rough line east from Pismo Beach to Needles and cede everything south of it back to Mexico.  Sure we lose the Getty Museum but we get to keep nearly all the trees and Lone Pine where most of the movies of my childhood were filmed anyway.  And hey, that will move Northern California up so it includes the stuff above Sacramento. It’s a win/win situation in my book… are you with me people?