USC vs. Cal drinkin....

A week ago USC played the hippies up in Bezerkeley and we cracked open some good beers. The first was Hangar 24 Pale Ale, from a local brewery who is making very good beer in Redlands. This beer has a big caramel flavor to it offset by mildly spicy hops. It has a nice little hop bite. Hangar 24 also makes a pretty tasty, albeit quite malty IPA and a nice light flavored beer called Orange Wheat that is similar to a witbier to me.






Next up was Sculpin IPA, which has overtaken Minneapolis Town Hall Masala Mama as the #1 IPA on BeerAdvocate. I've had both and there's no doubt people got this one right. Orange citrus and tropical flavor explosion and a nice bitterness to back it up. Oh, and dry. It has to be dry.


Lastly for our Friday night pregame drinking we opened an '08 Stone IRS. I love this beer with some age on it, and don't generally prefer it fresh. With 3 years this beer becomes amazingly smooth and chocolatey. With only a year age it's still a big improvement over fresh.



Onto Saturday, we started off with a growler of Hop 15 I got on my way home from moving that morning. This was our toasting beer with The Baltimore Beer Guy for the USC game. There was also an old Michelob Ultra sitting in the fridge, left over from a golf tournament in June, so Pat polished that off (he's been known to double fist Michelob Ultras). Hop 15 was tasty, but man is that a syrupy DIPA. On the other hand, what do you expect when it's 10% ABV?


Next up was a growler of Lost Abbey Red Barn. This was a fairly big crowd pleaser. One of my favorite beers of all time. Light, spicy, tropical, a little Belgiany.


As we got towards the end of the game we broke out some Stone/Maui/Ken Schmidt Kona Coffee Macadamia Coconut Porter. Pete had bought like 10 of them when he was at Stone and he said he didn't think it was that great so he brought over his last 3 bottles or so. I think everyone really liked it, but I forget at this point. All I know is I really like it. Love it actually. After some harrassement Pete admitted to thinking it was really good, but only after it warms up quite a bit. That's what a lot of people have been saying.

USC dispatched Kal 30-3.