My five year plan is to visit, and thereby sample the wares of, every microbrewery in the state of California. I include the ‘big boy” craft brewers since the goal is drinking beer not business profiling. That being said, if they have multiple breweries, I consider one stop at one brewery a fulfillment of my goal.*

These are my personal ramblings about beer and should, in no way, be construed as the last word on either the subject or locations mentioned. And, since we are in the disclaimer business, let me just say two things... one, it is a lot easier to start up a webpage than an actual brewery and, two, when you are going headfirst into Chapter 11 the last thing you worry about is closing out your website. Combine that with the general uncertainty of the information highway and you won’t be overly dismayed when you track down a brewery and find it either DOA or something completely different as they say.

All these dire warnings and disclaimers will, of course, fall by the wayside every time you find that cozy little brewpub in some out-of-the-way burg where the food is good and the beer is great…

*See the amendment to this plan at the bottom of the February 26,2012 blog post...

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

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.
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