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…