While we make up our list for what to do at the unbelievable embarrassment of riches that is SF Beer Week, including two events we’re helping with, beer judging and tasting 101 classes on the 7th and a gathering of women in beer on the 13th at the new Beer Revolution in Oakland, one thing we’re doing is getting ready to capture a little corner of this chapter of our local beer history in pix and little videos.

Please join us in this community collaboration by putting your photos into the SF BEER WEEK pool at Flickr. Flickr has a lot of features, but you will only need to use a few of them. (Make a simple free account, join the pool there, then upload or email pix to your Flickrstream, and “send” your best beerweek photos into the group pool for community appreciation.)

You’ll see some great community shots from various people from last year, further back in that pool too.

What about moving pix? Steve has been doing some little preview and promo videos, such as this one:

and some of them can be seen on the SF Beer Week gallery now. Check them out.

We’ll see you at Beer Week.  Don’t forget your camera.

Explore Beer By BART; see our list of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

Rosamunde, just prior to opening steps away from 24th St BART

We just updated the main Beer By BART listings index with two more beer destinations! Rosamunde, the little sausage shop famously paired with Toronado in the lower Haight,  just opened a second location, at 24th and Mission, SF.  Yes, they have the sausages, and an array of popular craft beers to go with them.  It rivals Jupiter in Berkeley as perhaps the second closest beer destination to a BART station. All the details and logistics are on our new Beer By BART Rosamunde page, and frankly, this one’s stupid-easy to walk to from BART.  Get on over there when you get a chance.

We also added a page for Bobby G’s, a place in downtown Berkeley we’ve liked for a while.  Bobby G’s is offering a very good list of taps and will be hosting local brewing legend Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing for an SF Beer Week event.  In combination with Triple Rock and Jupiter, that makes three places to find something delicious in the center of Berkeley.

Check out the new listings… and most important, the places! Let us know if we should add anything to the listings: Rosamunde and Bobby G’s

More beer venues are popping up all over.  What a great time we live in.

Explore Beer By BART; see our list of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

The beer holiday season is upon us!

There was a time when beer festivals were a fixture of the summer months, and a locus of mass-quantities guzzling.  Gatherings that come off like that do still exist, but in recent years several cool divergent trends have emerged:  Stronger, more esoteric, more adventurous and odder craft beers on the one hand, and culinary acceptance with a move to gastropubs and elite beer/food pairings on the other.  Not only does SF Beer Week, the glorious second week of February, offer multiple opportunities to begin or to continue enjoying these trends, but there are several excellent opportunities coming up before that time, while we count the hours.

First, on the indoor and sophisticated end of the spectrum, our favorite local beer educator and Certified Cicerone, Nicole Erny, has announced a guided Belgian beer dinner at the Lafayette Park Hotel on January 29th.  From their announcement:

The Duck Club Restaurant at the Lafayette Park Hotel & Spa invites you to celebrate some of the finest beers of Belgium at a special beer dinner on Friday, January 29th, 2010.  (For reservations call 925-283-7108).

The evening will be hosted by Nicole Erny from the Trappist Belgian & Specialty Beer Bar in Oakland, CA. Nicole is a certified “Cicerone” of beers, similar to a sommelier for wine, with expertise in selecting, acquiring and serving today’s wide range of beers, and she will guide us through this menu and the world of Belgian beers. Executive Chef Chuck Courtney has created a unique menu to pair with an exceptional selection of Belgian beers to demonstrate why this small country has its tremendous beer tradition.

But is it BARTable? Almost… if you arrived in time for a 1.4 mile walk from Lafayette Station, and then returned to the station via taxi, you could probably make this transit option work. We’ll reluctantly sit this one out (as non-meat-eaters) but heartily recommend this Friday evening to the Belgian beer experienced and curious alike. Nicole has a way with describing key flavor characteristics in ways that make beer tasting twice as fun, and she knows the stories behind these legendary old world beers, too.

Next on the list is a new winter festival, the BN Winter Brews Festival, just in case you think SF Beer Week is not soon enough. (BN? Ever seen those stunning hop grenade tee shirts? Those guys.) The intrepid gang of homebrewing podcasters from The Brewing Network is producing an exciting event on the Saturday of the same weekend, January 30, at Linden Street Brewery in Oakland. They promise “winter warmers and unique innovations …and barrels from breweries such as Russian River, Firestone Walker, the 21st Amendment, Speakeasy, Linden St., Moonlight Brewing, Magnolia, and many more.”

This festival includes food and music, from 1pm to 8pm at Linden St. Brewery, 95 Linden Street in Oakland. Sounds wonderful! We like the walk from West Oakland BART to Linden Street by day, but in the evening, calling a cab to get back to BART is recommended. There is a rumor that there will be a shuttle bus operating at least for part of the festival. The area is somewhat desolate at night, though by day the industrial cityscape around Linden Street Brewery is pretty cool. Priced at a modest $25 considering the special beers promised, this should be a worthwhile afternoon.

Linden Street Brewery has been open for less than a year, and has already produced some delicious beers featured at terrific East Bay restaurants and pubs. Linden Street beers explore the West Coast brewing tradition of “common lager” revived by Anchor Steam beer, with hoppy and roasty twists. Founding brewmaster Adam Lamoreaux has hosted homebrewers during the national conference last summer, a cicerone exam study class taught by Nicole Erny, and other special events benefiting the community. So it all ties together, with a big beer holiday bow.

Explore Beer By BART; see our list of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

The number of great beer events in the Bay Area really seems to be growing. This November weekend there are festivals on Saturday and on Sunday.

Turns out that this Saturday is the 4th annual incarnation of the incredible Barrel Aged Beer festival at The Bistro, a short walk from Hayward BART. Can this Saturday, the 14th, already be the Bistro’s 6th Annual Barrel Aged Beer festival? For some reason on a past year’s writeup we had reported that this amazing local event started in 2006… Misinformation corrected. Yes, it begin in 2006. Yes, we were there! (Just a four-year-old! So very young.) Anyway, now we can’t miss it, and the Bistro Barrel-Aged fest goes on our calendar as soon as the date is set each year.

We both love trying one-off local sour brews, then tasting rich smooth beers that have picked up the flavor from whiskey or brandy barrels, and circling around to beers that have been conditioning in a brand new wooden barrel, picking up the vanilla notes from the oak the way a wine does. The variety of flavors is the best part of it. We just looked at our friend Peter’s Better Beer Blog, and he says he expects it to cost $35 (cash) per person for a limited number of tastes. The Bistro’s own page says to expect about 70 beers. Wow. Why drive? Transit info is on our Beer By BART profile of the Bistro.

On Sunday, BevMo! is putting on a Holiday Beerfest at Fort Mason in the immense Herbst Pavilion. BevMo! is chain of liquor stores with big wine and beer selections. Good move for them. Friends have bought the holiday beers they sell and redistributed them around to the group of pals in mixed sixpacks, and so a winter warmer festival seems like a great project for BevMo! to take on. Sadly it is not near BART, though you can patch a no-driving trip together with MUNI lines or cabs, using the essential local tool 511.org, and Fort Mason is right on the Bay.

They are charging $35 in advance, $45 at the door (cash only, while tickets last.) A portion of the proceeds will go to the non-profit Culinary Arts Foundation. This is their first year, and we wish them luck.

In addition, there are other beer events. Friday night tastings at The Jug Shop, on the Van Ness Muni bus corridor, the BRU-SFO American Belgian beer experiment at 21A and at Magnolia, and probably a lot more we don’t know about. More holiday events are coming to our favorite places in the weeks ahead. We’ll be pacing ourselves!

What a great time this is for beer. Enjoy, and be careful out there!

Explore Beer By BART; see our list of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

This month’s version of The Session – a beer blogging tradition of note – is dedicated to the idea of “framing” an experience by expectation and context. The experience is beer, of course.

One of the pleasures of trying exciting new beers in the company of a close companion is sharing sips in bars, restaurants and festivals. Who can resist nearly twice as many interesting beers to try and to talk about? Now and then we find that there is only one beer on the list that we both crave, but usually we make the most of one of the classic “beer geek couple” benefits by discussing our choices, sharing and comparing.

What a way to learn about flavors, preferences, differences in perception… and the importance of flight-sequence! The first beer frames the second. After this, therefore somehow influenced by this. That seems to be how tastebuds like to work, not quite like the famous logical fallacy, but strangely similar, letting sequence change perception on a sensory level. This is framing like that experienced by contrast in tempo or other characteristic in music or perhaps as in a novel, with foreshadowing to color the unfolding action.

The first thing beer tasters are likely to discover is that a favorite beer can taste bland if preceded by a similar but sweeter, more bitter, more roasty, more yeast-flavored or higher alcohol beer. That’s easy to notice when the flavor of the known beer is strongly committed to memory, and the contents of your glass are no secret. It’s harder in a blind tasting situation, or where the known beer is not a recent favorite. When you get to a second beer in a tasting flight that’s one you have never had before, there is no way to know exactly how the prior beer is changing your perception of the current one.

The usual suggestions for coping with this are:

1. Milder, lighter (in flavor but not always in color) beers should be tasted first.
2. Before you go to the next beer, have a few sips of good water.
3. Before you go to the next beer, have a bite or more of bland food like bread. Salty breads, crackers, chips or pretzels are not quite as good because they change your perception of sweetness, but they may be better than nothing for resetting your palate.
4. Before you go to the next beer, use a trick from experienced Beer Judges and smell your own clean shirt sleeve, resetting your ability to get the aroma of the next beer. This can look a little odd, but it works like a charm. Best if you use unscented laundry detergent, of course.
5. Just take a few minutes to rest your senses before tasting a different beer. Easier when you are not sharing sips, perhaps.

A few more strategies that we have come across accidentally may be interesting to play with.

If you share beers, try to have more than one sip before swapping back. Sometimes “just a taste” gives a bad impression, but swapping back after several sips can make your original glass seem like the odd one. That’s not ideal either, but at least it’s instructive.

After a while you’ll start to get an instinct for what beers not to order together. Recently Steve and I went into Toronado and saw Bony Fingers and Publication on the list, and wanted those two. I had a little trepidation looking at the two beers, since I was not sure which one should go first. Both are complex and unusual treats.

Bony Fingers from Moonlight Brewing, one of the very special small breweries in our area, is a Halloween seasonal that has some of the delicious dark French-roast coffee-like malt character of Moonlight’s Death and Taxes, their popular innovative robust dark lager, with added spooky hop complexity. Publication, from Russian River Brewing Company, is a delicate Brettanomyces-fermented beer, dry but with creamy impressions of malt sweetness, not sour or funky, but with layers of earthy aged leather character from that unusual yeast, with a hop presence, but nothing like that of Bony Fingers. Flavors from a whole other universe! Which one to taste first? Turns out it didn’t matter! For us, those two seemed to each set up the other one by a fortuitous contrast that worked better than a clean slate. Like picture frames for sensory painting.

Last winter after trying some barleywines, (the big boozy malty sweet granddaddy of beers from the British and American brewing tradition), we ordered two sour beers at a bar in the LA area, and the milder one was blown away by the more intensely sour beer. We knew the milder sour beer we had ordered — La Folie — was one we’d liked before, so we sat waiting to get the busy bartender’s attention for some water. No luck, but there was the rest of that sweet, malty barleywine still sitting in the glass from our prior sampling. Sure enough, that barleywine reset our tastebuds so we could experience the milder of the sour beers and enjoy it. Again, beers were preparing our palates for other beers though contrast. Sometimes an unusual sequence is not odd, but inspiring.

One of our favorite local festivals offers great chances for fortuitous contrasts. The Bistro, easy walking from the Hayward BART station, has slated their much-anticipated Barrel Aged Festival for November 14, 2009. They promise 70 beers, some of which you will never see anywhere else, along with live music and BBQ from 11am to 7pm. For us, this annual festival is one of the joys of living in the Bay Area. Savoring so many contrasts of beer in bourbon barrels, in wine barrels with tart sourness, in clean vanilla flavored oak barrels and more is a rare treat.

That moment of discovering contrasting beers that pair to frame one another perfectly is even more fun than beer and cheese pairing.

Explore Beer By BART; see our list of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

With the opening of Pi Bar on Valencia, just added to the Beer By BART transit listings, and the recently added Shotwell’s (on Shotwell of course),  it’s becoming obvious that craft beer enjoyment is now one of the many reasons to visit the Mission District. The Mission, like many other neighborhoods, is ever changing. You can still find corner stores with multiple Central American lagers. There are still great taquerias and little local restaurants of all descriptions with wonderful food, although you won’t usually find a good craft beer to enjoy with your meals in them. One reason to visit the Mission is to experience this multicultural variety. The Mission has had its time as an Italian neighborhood, an Irish area, a largely Mexican and then a mixed Latin American district. The “knowledge worker” influx over the last two decades has laid the groundwork for a growing number of places near the 16th and 24th Street BART Stations where you can get good beer. After all, who ever met a geeky young engineer or interface designer who didn’t appreciate the best the beer world has to offer?

A few months ago we added Shotwell’s to our list of BARTable destinations, and we’ve enjoyed returning there. Amidst their impressive tap and bottle lists, we’ve regularly found Anchor Porter on tap. This clean robust porter is a classic San Francisco beer we both love on draft and don’t see too often outside the bottle, except on the Anchor Brewery tour.

Recently, Pi Bar opened on Valencia Street near 25th, bringing great beer to the Cesar Chavez Street corridor. (It’s an easy walk from the 24th Street BART Station). We just got around to adding the listing, but we have already put some photos up at the open Flickr group for the Northern California beer community, including these on this page, and we have already been back there several times. This sample list on their Draught Board shows why:

• Pi opens with an elegant list on draft

Beers will rotate, but no doubt you’ll find something delicious to drink here.

Welcome, Pi bar… and Shotwell’s.

Caldera, a craft brewery in Ashland, Oregon, about five and a half hours north of San Francisco on I-5, recently launched their own downtown taproom on the site of the original Rogue brewhouse on the charming Lithia Creek.

For twelve years Caldera was a production operation only, so finding a place to taste their full line of beers was usually impossible. During a weekend of Shakespeare festival-going and mountain camping, we happened upon the new taproom and pub.

Caldera’s friendly founder, Jim Mills, told us “In a way this tap house venture is coming full circle, returning to the little place where I originally made pizza and bartended for Rogue 18 years ago.” Jim has remodeled his taproom, but up on the wall in a hallway you can still see an indicator marking the high water level from the 1997 flood that helped convince Rogue to move out of town.

Caldera is noted for being the first west coast brewery to return fine craft ales to the freshness-preserving can, discontinuing use of the potentially light and air leaking bottle, and making a lot of river-rafters very happy indeed. They started by canning a crisp Pale Ale, added a big, deliciously hoppy IPA in 2007 and have just put a third, their Ashland Amber Ale, into cans. Caldera’s production is growing, and Jim says they are expanding their staff at the brewery as well as in the taproom. In the new pub you are likely to find the 20 taps pouring their flagship ales along with an assortment of seasonals and lagers, plus a few classic imports and regional guest beers.

If you are planning a little trip to Ashland Oregon, we recommend checking out the Caldera Tap Room plus some of these nearby attractions: Mt. Shasta Brewing in Weed, California, Standing Stone brewpub in downtown Ashland, Southern Oregon Brewing just north of Ashland in Medford and, of course, Ashland’s famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. (There’s often a lot of good art and music around town in addition to the fest.) When you are leaving Ashland, the best place we’ve found to pick up some nice bottles of Oregon beer to bring home with you is at Market of Choice. Ashland’s really not all that far north from the Bay Area, when you are in the mood for some neighboring beers in their own habitat.

One thing you probably don’t need to bring home to the Bay Area is Rogue beers, formerly of Ashland and now brewed in more northerly Oregon. As you probably know, there is already a Rogue San Francisco taphouse and pub featuring their extensive lineup of beer and spirits. Unlike the road trip above, that one can be walked from BART for a simple SF destination.

(Post by Steve and Gail, photos by Gail)

Explore Beer By BART; see our list of the San Francisco Bay Area’s best beer places with detailed transit info, so you can get out there to enjoy without driving.

Beer dinners, beer sommeliers, cicerones, beer pairings… intelligent concern with good food and beer — both the quality and quantity and attention to pairing flavors — is booming. It sure looks like a trend from where we sit. We’ll be going to a Bruce Paton Beer Chef dinner featuring beers including rarities from Valley Brewing (Stockton) and Schooner’s Grille and Brewery (Antioch) this Friday July 10, partly because we’ve been paying more attention to food and beer lately, and partly because of our appreciation for Steve Altimari and Craig Cauwels,  two exceptional brewing talents we last caught up with during their landmark cheese and beer event during SF Beer Week in February.

Cicerone Beer Sommelier Class

Though we are not particularly “foodies,” we have been paying a lot of attention to beer-food pairings lately.   First there was the Cicerone class with Nicole Erny from The Trappist. She’s one of our favorite beer tasting leaders, so when she asked us who might be interested in such a class, we jumped at the chance. Her class covered all of the areas of beer styles, tasting and serving covered by Ray Daniels’ Cicerone program, the serious beer sommelier exam.  The course just ended with a beer and food pairing exercise in the form of a delicious dinner, each course thoughtfully paired with a complementary beer by a class member. One of the surprise delights was the Urban People’ Common Lager from Linden Street paired with a mixed-fruit tart, with the fresh peaches and berries pulling out sweet golden malt flavors and tangy, minty hops from this new local beer.  It was quite an eye-opener, among a whole sequence of delicious pairings which delighted us in different ways.

Millennium Vegetarian Beer Dinner

A couple of weeks ago we went to a terrific beer dinner at Millennium, one of SF’s favorite vegetarian restaurants and certainly the one with the best every day beer list, and enjoyed a sumptuous beer pairing evening where the complexity and variety flowed together from one combination to the next.

Here’s a description from a second-hand announcement adapted from the original: “Don’t miss out on Millennium’s 2nd Annual California Beer Dinner! Local brew gals Nicole Enry from The Trappist, Christmas Collins from Russian River Brewing & “Thirsty Hopster” Jessica Jones from Firestone-Walker will be coming back for the second year to entertain and educate attendees. The ladies will showcase some of the area’s finest brews, complimented by Chef Eric Tucker’s unparalleled lust for the union of food & beer.”

Christmas, Nicole and Jessica are friends of ours, and three of the most enjoyable beer tasting leaders we know, so we had to be there.  Happily the meal was incredible, the stories about the beers amazing, and Chef Eric Tucker was charming in his description of how the flavors were matched.  For example, the new batch of Russian River Sanctification met up with roasted wild morel mushroom stuffed with white bean sage puree, and a shaved fennel, ripe nectarines, wild arugala and walnut oil salad, calling out the nectarine notes in the complex beer. The guests included Millennium fans who go to many of their special events, beer community people there to see friends and enjoy pairings, and vegetarians interested in craft beers. Interestingly, there was a sizable minority who raised their hands when Christmas asked if there was anyone who’d never tasted a sour beer before. Or is it more noteworthy that the majority had had sour beers? (Russian River beers are sure a fun choice to start the exploration.) It appeared to be a success all around, and we were happy to be there to see friends and meet new fans of some of our favorite beers, as well as to savor the work of a beer-loving chef.

Rate Beer Summer Gathering 2009– Dinner and Tour This Weekend!!

The wonderfully crowd-sourced beer-evaluation ad trading website “RateBeer” is sponsoring their Summer Gathering this weekend and luckily enough for us it is in the Bay Area.

We are attending some of the events and are happily passing the invitation along. You can still sign up (as of Thursday) for tomorrow’s dinner on the Rate Beer site, and you don’t have to be a beer rater there to join in. “The Beer Chef” — Bruce Paton — will be working with some highly appreciated and rated rare beers, making Friday a don’t-miss event.  There is limited room to sign up for several of the events of the Rate Beer Summer Gathering, July 11 in San Francisco, including a particularly inexpensive bus tour of favorite Sonoma county destinations. It’s one of those extended virtual beer community holidays that offers a chance to meet people who know and care about fine beer, as they learn about the Bay Area beer community. And about our great food town, too.

(The photo is the dessert course at another epic Beer Chef pairing dinner at Cathedral Hill Hotel. Yum!)

P.S. We didn’t list Drakes (The Saturday night Grand Tasting’s location) as a BARTable destination — it’s more than a mile from the San Leandro Station — but here’s how you’d walk (by daylight please) Get info at 510-562-0866. Sometimes there are Friday afternoon open house hours, currently on hiatus.

This time around The Session was all about charting uncharted territory.

We gave a very general call, asking for either travel stories, practical tips, or dream beer vacations… plus a beer description if it fits in anyplace, and we got a lot of delicious variety. Beer reviews were sprinkled thoughout. Quite a few bloggers did a little of each option, but here’s a rough attempt at classifying the tasty posts that emerged:

Tales of beer expeditions. What really happened on the road:

Rob writes about a Montana brewery visit – but his post is more on the craft of blogging and on reviewing a place based on only one visit, a pretty important insight.

Ray talks about going to the source for the brewpub-only offerings from Dogfish Head in Delaware.

Beer Odyssey Brian gives an example from Sun Valley, Idaho, of when travel plans go awry

The gun-totin’ New Mexico history is the star in this brew pub visit story by Derrick.

Beer Sagas gives general travel tips, specifics on Prague as a destination, and a lovely bit of international beer vocabulary – a Czech tradition, the dzban. Something like the American “growler” for take-home beer.

Touring the Texas Hill Country with its German beer heritage gives plenty for Don the Beer Brotha to work with.

Jay Brooks gives a quick overview of a life with a lot of beer travel, and singles out one special destination, in Scotland.

Peter of Better Beer Blog recaps a trip to San Diego, California he and Sam took last year.

Hey, wait a minute: We wrote about San Diego travels too, along with fleeting remembrances of the beers of the English countryside and Bavaria years before.

Ted remembers his hurricane evacuation beercation that ends with sumptuous notes on a bottle of Lost Abbey’s Judgement Day. Yes, San Diego again.

The Beer Nut posted, appropriately, from a pub in a foreign country, with tales of a mouthwatering tale of a trip to Copenhagen complete with notes on “Brewers United Belgian Stout” a Mikkeller-Xbeeriment collaboration.

Tips on how (and a little bit of where and why) to go:

Stan Hieronymus, founder of The Session (Beer Blogging Fridays), lists five specific great beer destinations you may not have thought about, and also encourages you to travel happily by seeking out national parks and always braking for good pie.

Jimmy of Hop Wild lays out some solid tips on preparation and beer hunting strategy.

Mario tells about a trip to Mt. Shasta and the seeking out of a small town brewpub as an act of familiarity and comfort.

Andreea gives practical, useful tips on making your beer trip to Belgium glorious.

Alan gives tips on the practicalities and challenges, including getting your beers over the US/Canada border.

Jon from the Brew Site suggests San Diego (imagine that!) and Portland as destinations and lists breweries to support his claim

Matt, the GISBrewmaster, adds some tips and endorses Portland as a worthy destination.

Stephen includes travel tips, a description of entering an establishment in Belgium, and then throws in an evocative beer enjoyed in a Toronto pub.

Knut Albert gives useful tips for European beer holidays from a Norwegian point of view.

Dreaming of the perfect beercation:

Steph Weber was the only blogger to write in this mode, with a carefully planned trip to North Carolina with both beer and childhood-memory destinations, and she closes with a beach sunset photo, the classic vacation keepsake.

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This was a lot of fun. The most mentioned destinations are San Diego, Belgium and Portland. The most mentioned tip was to do your homework – get going on that research ahead of time. (Of course, some advocated the pleasures of serendipity or leaving time to take suggestions on the fly from locals.)

The Session is a “blog carnival” group writing event originated by Stan Hieronymus. For an index of the Sessions see Jay Brooks’ handy guide. You can contact him to volunteer to anchor a future month. On twitter look for posts marked with the #thesession hashtag.

Next up will be “Beer Desserts” for the first Friday of August, hosted by David Jensen at Beer47.com . Sweet!

One of the great attributes of craft beer is that it continues to be primarily a local phenomenon. Travel for beer – or even just travel with hunting beer as a major component – is a pastime that won’t quit.

Our earlier travel adventures that were not primarily for beer, but with good beer quite available and appreciated, included England and Bavaria, both in the 1980s. We didn’t know enough about what we were enjoying to make any notes or seek out anything that didn’t just fall in our laps, but we knew enough to try a variety of offerings and pay attention. It was all part of our gradual beer education, in the context of some walking-centric vacations.

Fragments we remember: While walking on the Coast-to-Coast trail through Northern England, coming off a ridge in the Lake District into some tiny village to the cozy B&B we had booked by phone the day before, we got out of our muddy boots and went over to the town’s only pub for the evening meal and a pint of the invariably delicious local bitter. What the hell was it? Who knows. All we knew was that after the next day’s walk that brew was no longer available and we had another offering in another village. All part of the sense of place.

Another year, we enjoyed a similar experience traveling from Frankfurt to Munich. Each night we’d have beers with our meals wherever we were staying, only to learn that the same beers were not available again the next evening in a new town. We quickly learned to revel in the expectation of sampling new and interesting beer each evening, served by publicans who were proud to offer them as their own.

It was on this trip to Germany that we enjoyed our first Monastic beer. Our research told us that a short train ride from Munich would leave us with a nice afternoon’s walk from the the train station to Andechs Monastery and Brewery. After a longer-than-anticipated, hot afternoon walk on country roads we arrived at the Holy Mountain less than one hour before last call. On a summer afternoon, the beer was a minor miracle, to be remembered vividly for years. In fact, Steve would not wait years. He arranged for his train connections 2 weeks later from Prague to leave him with a 4 hour layover in Munich which he eagerly used to re-ascend Andechs Mountain and enjoy a more leisurely drinking session. He met a German high school teacher there who was grading papers whilst enjoying some “holy lagers.” The teacher treated Steve to several rounds and bought him a six-pack to take as a house gift for the next stop on his journey.

Almost nine years ago we became acutely aware of the West Coast American IPA revolution, thanks to festivals hosted by The Bistro, one of the East Bay establishments that inspired the creation of our Beer By BART transit guide. The Bistro does an IPA festival in August and Double IPA in February. That year the two of us scouted hoppy beers and compared them intently, trying to cover the major Northern California producers we knew, and some unknowns, too. We took a regional approach, confident that the beers from our area are excellent. They are.

Then the report came back from the judges. The three competition winners that year were all from San Diego county. Huh, what? We scrambled to taste the offerings from some brewery called Pizza Port. The San Diego style was a citrus slap in the face — and an elixir of pleasure. Who knew back then? We were fast learners, and immediately started planning a long weekend on the southern border.

Magic Hour Frolic: San Diego in January

When the time came we checked into a hotel on Pacific Beach — unintentionally, though fortuitously setting up only a few blocks from a little tavern called the Liars Club. The Liars Club was THE local pub for San Diego craft beer. We made many a return visit in subsequent years. They moved from PB to Alpine in 2008 and unfortunately closed earlier this year. We still miss it.

We reveled in the joy of discovering Alesmith, Ballast Point and the Pizza Ports one at a time, getting leads from people in each brewery or bar about where to go next. Our first time was like no other expedition.

San Diego County is difficult to tour because the good beer places are spread out, and a designated driver (or a group that can hire a driver and split costs) may be the only good solution. In recent years the two of us have stayed in a different hotel each night to be walking distance from the final round at that night’s brewpub or beer bar. Winter is our favorite time for this excursion, when slightly warmer temperatures than San Francisco means more to us. Jeans and a hoodie on the beach, a January treat.

Brewery tour, at Stone, San Diego county.

We also brought back great treasures. San Diego beers were a rarity in the Bay Area so we always had unique offerings to bring to dinners and sessions with friends. It was easier to do this, pre-9/11, since carry-on luggage could include bottles of liquid. Now, even though many of those fine breweries distribute at least some of their beers around the state, the trip is still worth it. There are always special releases to try and fellow beer fanatics to meet. The hop shortage helped encourage breweries like Stone, Green Flash and Lost Abbey to experiment with sour beers just as we were learning to love them courtesy of Russian River, Marin, Drakes, Valley, Moonlight, Schooners and such in our region. A little bit of this new microbial magic makes it to the best bottle shops north of their county, but often a special batch is only poured locally, or at a festival. Something hoppy, puckering or richly malty will warrant wrapping and packing. Bubble wrap never sleeps.

Remote outpost on the San Diego county beer trail

Gail & Steve