Big Beer, Part Three

AKA SoCal Brewing. This is loosely related to the OG site's Big Beer, Part 1 and Big Beer, Part 2, in that it's about the fastest growing market for beer: the microbrew and brewpub scene.

Southern California has, in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego, a wide variety of brewpubs and mircrobreweries, complete with tasting rooms and rare collectible special vintage beers. Ryan is the expert here, and over the weekend we enjoyed a quartet in SD county, and another two locations in the OC.

First stop was Green Flash Brewing Co, in San Diego. They offer tasters for a buck each. In the picture below there are 9 different tasters, three each for me, Corrie and Ryan. Getting an early start and drinking tiny cups of beer make it all seem okay.

Next stop was the Ale Smith, and their tasters:

The next place we went that actually had handsome tasters was the next day, Sunday, when Ruan and I went to The Bruery in Placentia, a town in Orange county nestled between Orange and Fullerton. They had sweet snifters and wooden glass holders:

Back to Green Flash, our first spot...I took a picture of their offerings and kettles behind:

The kettles are kinda cool for someone like me to see. I've brewed my own beer before, and know the basic crazy amount of sanitation that's involved. Seeing these kettles, and knowing that these guys are a small operation makes a person appreciate how much beer we as a country drink:

(Full disclosure: I'm drinking beer as I type these very words.) Small operation...

After the stop at the Ale Smith, just down the street from Green Flash in San Diego, we headed over to Ballast Point Brewing. Ballast Point has more distribution in Long Beach than either Green Flash (which just started showing up at my local grocer) or Ale Smith (which I haven't seen before). Their tasting glasses werre nicer than the plastic ones from Ale Smith, but by then I had a hard time remembering to take pictures of those tiny glasses. Here's their big board:

My mom said, upon seeing this picture, Sea Monster and Wahoo Wheat sounded neat. I wanted to say that I sampled both of those. The Sea Monster was an imperial stout with an ABV of 10%. Those words translate in reality to a thick coffee-grounds-and-chocolate syrup with hints of bourbon overtones, like somebody spiked the syrup. The Wahoo Wheat actually had a flavor profile written next to the name: it reads "Thai chili, ginger, lime". The beer was interesting, tasting almost like hefeweizen mixed with chili pepper flavor (but not heat) and lime. It wasn't bad.

Our fourth and last stop on Saturday was a mecca of tiny, super-in-the-cut, mountain breweries. Outside of San Diego, nestled in the mountains is tiny Alpine, CA, home of:

That's probably the best picture from there. We had dinner and their food was better than serviceable, but my level of, eh, inspiration, was pretty elevated.

The next day, while trying to figure out why the hell I'd started drinking tiny beers at noon the day before, I started the same thing again at the Bruery:

The Bruery is interesting in that they've got pretty good distribution even though they're a rather young brewery, and they refuse to brew IPA.

For the few readers I have that don't know, IPA stands for India Pale Ale, a reference to the beers that England would send by ship to India, and to keep them preserved during the long voyage, they loaded the beer up with a ridiculous amount of hop flowers, the ingredient that adds the bitter flavor as well as beer's only natural preservative. IPA's tend to be more hoppy and bitter than other beers, as well as having an elevated ABV. Also, they're pretty trendy right now.

So it's pretty cool for the Bruery to refuse to brew them. What they do brew, though, is almost as acquired a taste as beer itself is to a kid. I bought a large bottle of their fall seasonal brew, Autumn Maple, a play on traditional pumpkin beers. They use yams. Lots of yams.

After the tasting room of The Bruery, we headed south from Placentia to Orange, just a few minutes, right past Chapman University to get to The Bruery Provisions store in Old Orange. From the entrance, looking across the street (we stood in line on Monday for a special release) yields this next picture (we ended up grabbing a bite to eat at Smoqued):

Old Orange is quaint and cute.

As much as I love beer, my body has a hard time recovering from days like we were having. While we're camping is one thing. While on a lazy vacation is one thing. (Sigh) Just getting old, I guess. That's not so bad, really.

Thanks Ryan for exposing us to the riches right down our proverbial street!