Friday Beer Post: 2015 Gameday Pub-o-the-week - Oregon State Edition

Each week throughout the football season I'm going to suggest a good beer for the ubiquitous pre-game tailgate. Let's be honest, with tailgates it's not always top quality that you're looking for. To steal a phrase from the heinous beer terrorists at Budweiser, you want "drinkability." (or what a real beer connoisseur calls "a session beer") So, be warned, these may not be "the best" beers around. But, in the words of Dave Chappelle as Samuel L. Jackson "IT'LL GET YOU DRUNK!"

I'm going off script, so please bear with me.  With the move to the Pac-12, Las Vegas has become a town of increasing importance to BuffNation.  Between the annual Pac-12 Basketball Tournament, the forthcoming Las Vegas Classic, the occasional showcase game at the MGM Grand Garden arena, and the possibility of the football team being just average enough to make the Las Vegas Bowl, chances are you loyal Buff fans will be making a trip to LV to watch Colorado sports sometime in the future.  Should you do, and a craving for good beer strikes, might I suggest a trip off-Strip for your suds?  My favorite beer joint in town, the incredible Aces & Ales, is this week's gameday pub of the week.

The best beer bar in Vegas.  I'm not kidding.

I was introduced to Aces & Ales by renowned beer connoisseur @RicoBlank four years ago.  We've since made a pilgrimage to the hole-in-the-wall every year during the Pac-12 Tournament, and I've yet to regret it. It's a jaunt (we prefer the Nellis location, about 20 minutes from the MGM Grand, and decidedly off-Strip), but makes for a nice escape from the hustle and bustle of Las Vegas proper.  Between the excellent craft beer selection, outstanding food menu, and perfect dive bar ambiance, it ticks off every single one of my requirements for 'good bar' status, and has yet to disappoint.

They've always got a great tap list going, usually with stuff you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else, and have an extensive bottle selection of some of the rarest finds in all of craftdom.  As if that wasn't enough, their food menu is a treat, with the Arrogant Bastard steak wrap (steak marinated in AB... hell yeah!) and the deep fried Oreos my personal favorites.  Throw that in with a dark, local-focused atmosphere, and it's just a little slice of heaven in the middle of Sin City.

I'm deadly serious, you have to try this place out.  Walk away from the craps table.  Leave the neon lights behind.  You won't find a place more honest and real in all of town.  A perfect place to pregame for the whatever event you're in Las Vegas to see.


Happy Friday!  Go Buffs, beat the Beavers!

Friday Beer Post: The remote awesomeness of Alpine Beer Company

If you were a brewer (if only!), and you had to imbibe something other than your own product, where would you turn?  Apparently, the answer for many of crew over at Stone involves a tiny brewery called the Alpine Beer Company.  When visiting my friend at Stone last month, he near demanded a visit to the joint, which included a trek to the far eastern edges of the San Diego area.  I was not to be disappointed.

Situated in tiny Alpine, CA, the nearly decade-old brewery has quickly gained a reputation for great brews and food.  It's somewhat awkwardly located in a tiny strip mall; the modesty of the brewery and tap room quickly giving way to the quality of its offerings.  They seem to be fellow worshipers of the all-mighty hop, as they offer 5 different varieties of "west-coast IPA," with the best being their Pure Hoppiness Double IPA.  A fantastically large amount of hops go into making this brew something to remember.  The blast of hops is certainly impressive, and welcome, but it doesn't necessarily overwhelm the beer experience.

PH is a fantastic brew for a hop-head like myself.  Picture ripped off from here.

The biggest surprise of the tap room, however, is the quality of their food offerings.  Some damn tasty BBQ litters the menu, and gives you more then enough reason to want for return visits.  The BBQ topped nachos were a hit, as well as the brisket plate.  Combined with the beer it made for a blissfully contented ride back into SD.

This gives you a good idea of the size of the bar.  Picture ripped off from here.

You have to drive a ways to get there, and it's in a very quiet, unassuming locale, but it's worth the trek out there if you're in the SD area.

 Happy Friday!

Friday Beer Post: Trip to Stone Brewing

OK, so I'm an idiot.  I took all these awesome pictures of the brewery on my phone, but forgot which SD card they're stored on.  When I find them, I'll update the post.

I take it for granted that I'll never get to walk into the Buffs or Sox clubhouse on a gameday.  Not only would I never be granted access, but I'm not even sure I'd want to go in there if offered the opportunity; I feel it would be an intrusion.  I'm decidedly an outsider, and feel it should stay that way.  I humbly submit that, in the words of Wayne and Garth, I'm not worthy.

This is not the case with beer.

I have no problem stepping into the places where my favorite brews are created.   When offered an opportunity to get an intimate look at a brewery, I have yet to say 'no.'  I still maintain a naive, fanboy-ish view of the great brewers of the day, yet I have no qualms about busting into their space, grabbing some samples, and wandering around like some master of the domain.

This all leads me to my trip to Stone.  They are, without a doubt, my favorite brewery on the planet.  Everything they produce, even the Cali-Belgique IPA (which is apparently un-popular with the people who actually work there), is a hit with me.  The mere mention of Arrogant Bastard makes me weak in the knees.  Walking into there is, to me, the rough equivalent of strolling into the underbelly of Dal Ward on a Saturday in the Fall.  Yet there I was two weeks ago, running around the joint like a kid in a candy store.

As in all things, it's good to know somebody.  One of my best friends talked his way into a job at the estimable Escondido, CA brewery, and on my recent trip to California he was more than happy to give me the full tour (thanks again, dude!).

Stone has a very impressive set up.  Their current location is located on an old stone quarry (get it?), and combines their large and impressive brew space with a contemporary restaurant and immaculate beer garden.  Large and well stocked, the brewing floor provides an awe-inspiring back-drop for diners while still pumping out over 100,000 barrels of beer each year.  I tried the menu at the restaurant later in the week, and found it full of interestingly tasty items.  For the record, my favorite item was the fresh beer pretzels, which were essentially pretzel doughnuts.

Before the tour started, it was off to a secret fridge to grab a special 'walking around beer' that isn't even available in their tap-bar yet.  Later this year Stone will be releasing an "odd-year" version of their Imperial Russian Stout.  It's spiked with Belgian yeast and anise.  The anise flavor was more subtle than I expected, but the rest of the beer was totally in your face.  It'll definitely fall in line with the rest of the Stone canon when it hits the market.  It certainly set me in the proper mood for strolling through a brewery.

The tour hit all the usual spots.  The coolest stops included the laser engraved mash tuns, the large hop storage area (pelletized hops; Odell's still has the market cornered on whole-leaf hops), the large filtration cenerfuge, and, of course, bottling.  An additional interesting stop on the tour was the test area, where small batches of trial beers are made.  Employees can even utilize the set-up to make uber-home brew; for example, my buddy had one currently in the dry-hop stage.

The high-point of the tour, however, was the stop at the barrel-aged area and its giant fermenters.  There I was able to experience the pure joy that is truely-fresh beer.  Your average brewery, constrained by distribution laws and logistics, usually can't get you beer much younger than a week or two even if you take a trip to their tap room.  The best way to get around this is to grab some before it gets bottled.  This particular tasting was of Arrogant Bastard (which just happens to be my all-time favorite beer). It may sound like a cliche, but I could almost hear the angelic choirs light up when the taste hit my tongue.  The natural carbonation alone made this a unique experience (beers in fermenters, of course, have yet to be hit with bottling CO2), but the flavor profile was on a whole different level.  It was slightly sweeter than typical AB, and the floral hop flavors were more intense.  A fantastic way to cap of an unforgettable experience.

Stone not only lived up to my expectations, it surpassed them in every way.  They have an excellent set up, with just enough room for experimentation.  Big thumbs up to the team over there!  If you get a chance, please stop by.  And try the pretzels.

Happy Friday!

Friday Beer Post: Coors Brewery Tour

It's a right of passage for any Colorado beer geek to walk the haunted halls of the Coors Brewery in Golden.  Yes, Coors may clog the aisles and airwaves with over-indulgent advertising for less than inspiring product, but they are a Colorado institution.  It's a simple fact that any serious discussion of beer in Colorado must include the Golden behemoth.  Sure I've been there a few times before, but when presented with an opportunity last weekend to get a VIP level tour of the joint, I couldn't say no.  It's still beer, afterall.

The thing that differentiates Coors from the smaller breweries I visited a few weeks ago is pure scale.  Just approaching the brewery gives you a sense of awe.  At first sight it's slightly frightening as the series of ugly gray buildings harken back to bygone years of industrial "splendor," when aesthetics were hardly ever considered during construction.  It's huge and expansive from every perspective, and easily dominates the skyline of the tiny city of Golden.

That's what's called sticking out like a sore thumb.

Once inside, just past the opportunistic photo booth, you can immediately get down to brass tacks with a "short tour" or take the normal tour. One of the ugly secrets of the current brewery tour at Coors is that it's a pathetic down-scaling of what was once an excellent tour. The old "normal" tour of the facility (a expansive, personally-led excursion through the entire brewing process) has been reduced to a pathetic self-guided sham.  Instead of knowledgeable tour guides, the every day visitor now gets a pre-recorded radio thingy, and a shortened route.  The Wonka-esque trip through nearly every level of the main complex, replete with looks at every level of the brewing process, is gone, and the whole thing seems to be designed to get you out of there as soon as possible.  Luckily, I know people.

Having a friend who works at the brewery, and who used to be a tour guide, allowed me to see what used to be the full tour.  We kept going in and out of the "regular" tour areas, routinely jumping through doors that now say "Employees Only."  Hey, it's fun to poke around a brewery, and I want to see as much of it as I can.  Maybe some people just want to get to the tasting room, but I wouldn't drive down to Golden just for the beer.

One of the many areas that we normally wouldn't have access to was the areas associated with the creation of malt.

One of the key parts that got cut away when they changed the tour program was a full view of the malting process.  The ability to germinate and roast their own grains is one of the things that sets the big-3 apart from smaller breweries.  It's an impressive and interesting process that speaks to the scale of the business, and one they should show off.  When you take that aspect of it away, it's just like every other brewery in the world, just with more mash-tuns and an internal plastics plant.

I want to see the roasting rooms, I really do.

At the end of the tour came the ubiquitous stop at the tasting room.  Along with the standard tastings of Blue Moon and Colorado Native (still not sure what I feel about Native) they have an interesting brew called Batch-19.  It's based on a pre-Prohibition recipe unearthed after a flood of the records room, and the only place it's served in Colorado is the tasting room at the brewery.  Not as simplistic as, say, Coors Original, Batch-19 definitely has a taste of old-world German to it.  It's very grainy with a little kick of hops.  It was certainly the most adventurous thing I tried while I was there, and can pass for good. 

If you can find Batch-19, give it a taste.

I'm glad I went, simply from the perspective that every trip to Coors allows me to contemplate the place of macro-brews in a beer culture that is constantly moving towards craft brewing.  However, this visit revolved around the ability to re-connect with a good friend, and to try a beer outside of my comfort zone. That's worth a trip down Hwy 93 in a way that "ice-cold" samples of Coors Light can never be.

Happy Friday!

Friday Beer Post: Monday Beer Tours

"Wow, it's like I died and went to heaven, then God realized it wasn't my time yet, so He sent me back to a brewery." - Peter Griffin


I can't stand Family Guy, but they can get to the heart of the matter every now and then.  Much like random baseball fields in Iowa, breweries are little slices of heaven on earth   Since visiting Heaven, and all of it earthly slices, is much better than working, I took Monday off to tour some of Colorado's numerous breweries.


I came up with a grand unified theory of brewery tours.  It is impossible to do more than 3 in a day.  Simply, the force of time, distance, and drunkeness will keep you from getting too many in.  Don't get me wrong; visiting 3 breweries instead of working on a Monday is fucking awesome, but in a perfect world, I would've slipped about 5 in.  Damn physical laws of time and space.


Odell's

I started my tour by trekking up to Fort Collins.  Two of the more iconic breweries this state has to offer are located up in Ft Fun in the form of New Belgium and Odell's.  I can't stand New Belgium, and they aren't even open on Monday's, so Odell's was my starting place.  In retrospect, I don't think I could've done any better.  As a hop freak, a hop-obsessed brewery like Odell's is right up my alley, and the tour was small, which allowed for an easy conversation style with the tour guide.  He took us around the usual route, passing the cool hop back and the bottling line before entering their hop storage.  Inside, the group was allowed to dive into a basket of whole hop leafs.  I was damn near giddy at the mere sight of it all.

That's a lot of hops.

Hop-fondling behind us, I stopped at the taproom for another pint of their new double IPA Myrcenary.  Very recently released, Myrcenary is something I've only been able to enjoy twice previously.  Those tastings had left me pleased but not blown away; the beer was very hoppy, but it seemed to be missing something.  The pint I had at the tap room, however, changed the way I look at the brew.  Much more floral and citrus-y, the whole character of the hops came through in a way that they hadn't in my previous tastings.  If you can find your way to Ft Collins, it's worth the stop at Odell's just to try Myrcenary fresh.  For me it was a wholly different experience.

Myrcenary: gotta try it at the brewery.

FCB
 
Literally down the block from Odell's lies relative newcomer Fort Collins Brewery.  I haven't been too exposed to this brewery, but the constraints of time and space, combined with the fact that I drove all the way up to FoCo, compelled me to stop by.  This was a more traditional taphouse experience.  The small scope of the brewery (under 20 employees) meant that tours were infrequently available, so dueling taster trays combined with a discussion with the bartender were the course of my time spent there.

By far the best brew I tasted there was their Maibock.  Smooth, well crafted, and lightly hopped, the sweet maltiness of the Maibock was a pleasure to enjoy.  The Maibock is indicative of the general Germanic oeuvre of FCB's offerings.  Plenty of lagers dot their menu, which is slightly out of place in the American craft brewing community that is so dominated by ales.  It was an interesting change of pace, and if I see that Maibock on shelves, I wouldn't hesitate to grab it.


Avery

Heading back down US 287, I passed up the opportunity to stop by Longmont's Left Hand (I'll swing back around sometime later, I swear) to close my tour at Boulder's own Avery.  By far my favorite Colorado brewery (although my trip to Odell's ticked them up a couple of notches), Avery is haphazardly strewn about an industrial park in East Boulder.  It's damn hard to find if you haven't been there before, but its worth the effort.  As the day was inching closer to 5, the tap room was semi-full, and our tour was filled with people. 

The Avery taproom is a great place to try some wild stuff; and I mean fucking wild.  I tried two beers there that stretched the boundaries of my palate.  The first, Fumator, is a smoked ale aged in Stranahan's whiskey barrels.  It would go great with any number of smoked sausages and cheeses, and generally reminded me of smoked cheddar mixed with whiskey; really freaky, but, in its own way, very tasty.  The other eye-opening flavor came from the Hand of Budda.  It's a spiced Belgian ale, spiked with an interesting spice called Budda's Hand.  I've never, in my entire life, tasted anything like this.  I'm not sure I liked it (I'll have to try some more) but it certainly was unique.

Fumator was a smoky treat

The highlight of any trip to Avery is the barrel room where they keep all of their barrel-aged brews.  Barrels are reused until they no longer have any quality flavor to impart, and the brewery does weekly taping of some wildly anticipated stuff.  While there I listened to arguments over what type of barrels impart the best flavors, and which year of "the Beast" was best.  A really awesome place to end my day.

Happy Friday!