Blue Dot IPA

Hair of the Dog Blue Dot IPA at Lucky Baldwin's this morning- getting some age on it but it's still amazingly tasty. Wish I ever had the opportunity to get it fresh on draft. And ManU 2-1 Arsenal! Woo!

Beachwood Sour Fest 2

10oz of new belgium love barrel #13 and a 5.5oz of Russian River Consecration batch 2
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Beachwood BBQ Sour Fest

The sour fest has kicked off as of yesterday morning and I stopped by for an hour to check it out on my way home from Long Beach. Lots of familiar things on after having attended the Stone Sour Fest a month ago. Anyone remember Chili Wonka? That was one of the most talked about beers at Stone and deservedly so.

I started off with a 5.5 oz glass of Allagash Confluence. It is their blonde ale made with a couple strains of brett. It has quite few similarities to Russian River Sanctification, especially with the way Sanctification has been going lately (less tart). Confluence has an extra dimension though since they also use their regular house Belgian yeast to ferment some of it. It's super light, earthy, slightly lemony, mildly tart and super easy to drink. It has shown up around my house in bottle form for $20, might be worth a bottle or two for a special occasion.

The next glass I got was of the Cantillon Bruocsella Grand Cru '07. My intention was to smack the shit out of my palate with some ultimate Cantillon-brand sourness. This Lambic did not produce the mouth puckering sourness I was inaccurately expecting. It's spontaneously fermented and aged in oak barrels for 3 years. It is also a still beer- no carbonation. It pours a murky deep gold and was moderately tart with some malty sweetness behind it. Other than that it was unremarkable to me, although I could have come up with more to say about it over a full glass perhaps.

The last glass was the always fantastic Bruery Berliner Weisse. It's hard for me to see this beer on tap anywhere and not order it, so I did. As I've said a million times before, I could drink this allllllll day. And good news for non-So Cal area residents, it's being bottled now so it'll be easier to get.

Tonight they feature New Belgium sours, and Thursday they'll feature Lost Abbey sours. I won't be able to make either but you definitely should.

Long Beach Area Brewery Hop

Finally made an effort to experience some of the beer destinations around Long Beach with a friend who lives down here. I'm in the area fairly often and have slacked at trying out these places.

The first stop was Red Car Brewery in Torrance. They only had 4 beers on tap and I went with their IPA which was listed as 9% ABV and 65 IBU. It was drinkable but not particularly aggressive. As for their buffalo wings, I'm a fan of pepper but wow, these things set my face on fire.

The second stop was San Pedro Brewing Company. I tried their Pale Ale (picture 1). It was nothing special, only slightly hoppy but not with any major faults. This place appears to be a bRuin bar so I probably won't be back :-P

Third stop was Rock Bottom in Long Beach. They had a good number of beers on draft. I went with the Coffee Stout (picture 2) which was on cask and it was delicious. My friend ordered their IPA which had a very nice smell, similar to Blind Pig, but lacked that full and aggressive flavor.

The last stop was Belmont Brewing in Long Beach. Cool place with good beers on their guest list (picture 3). I tried the Belmont Hop Head Red (picture 4) which was tasty, and as expected fairly hoppy.

All in all, this circuit of beer stops around Long Beach isn't really anything to go out of your way for but there are formidable options if you happen to be in the area, like on a Monday when Beachwood is closed.
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Beachwood BBQ Sour Fest

Starting Tuesday is Beachwood BBQ's Sour Beer Festival. The festival will run all day all week and feature special breweries on the first few nights (The Bruery, New Belgium, Lost Abbey). Beachwood is the highly acclaimed beer bar in Seal Beach also well received for their top notch food. There will no doubt be some amazing sour beers on tap (think Stone sour fest encore) and I'll try to brave the ridiculous crowds that will pack this tiny joint and surely send a few claustrophobics running for open air.

The beers to be tapped as posted on BeerAdvocate:
Abbey St. Bon Chein 07
Allagash Confluence
Avery Brabant
Avery Voltron
Avery Vogelbekdieren
Ballast Point Sour Wench
Bear Republic Cuvee de Buba
Boon Oude Lambic
Bootleggers Kentucky Wild
Bruery Berliner Weisse
Bruery Cuvee June
Bruery Sour in the Rye
Bruery White Zin
Cantillon Bruocsella 1900 Grand Cru 07
Cantillon Lou Pepe Frambiose 05
Craftsman Summers End Sour
Deschutes Green Monster
Deschutes Little Budha
Duchesse de Bourgogne Cellared 1 year
Echte Kreickenbier Cellared 3 years+
Green Flash Grand Mantis
Ichtemans Grand Cru
Jolly Pumpkin La Roja Reserva
Lost Abbey TBD
Lost Abbey Cuvee de Tomee
Lost Abbey Duck Duck Gooze
Lost Abbey Phunky Duck
Lost Abbey Isabelle Proximus
Lost Abbey Red Poppy
Moonlight Sourpuss Black cellared 1.5years
Moonlight 25 to Life
New Belgium La Folie
New Belgium La Terior
New Belgium Lechee Tart
New Belgium Love #30
New Belgium Transatlantic Kreik
Ommegang Rouge Batch 07
Ommegang Rouge Batch 08
Rodenbach Grand Cru
Russian River Consecration batch 1
Russian River Consecration batch 2
Russian River Temptation
ST. Louis Gueuze Fond Tradition
Telegraph Reserve Wheat
Valley Brewing TBD
Valley Brewing TBD
Valley Brewing TBD
Valley Brewing TBD

Russian River Temptation on draft

If you are in the Orange County area and crave the tart bliss that is Russian River Temptation, their sour blonde ale aged in French oak chardonnay barrels, better get on over to Hollingshead's Deli and get it while it lasts. It's not often that Russian River's sours show up on draft in Orange County, and last time Hollingshead's had on Consecration it went in a day or so. By the time you read this Temptation might be gone too.

Miscellaneous Night

Watching Step Brothers with a couple brews. That Choklat is now 2 years old or so and still drinking very well. Tastes like a blend of malt balls and chocolate milk. It's definitely one of Southern Tier's better brews as far as their extreme series goes (which I think they call Blackwater series).

Lost Wages

I don't really wanna go back to Las Vegas for a long time, but at least here are a couple of the beer pics I took.


Waiting for Grimaldi's Pizza to open at around 10:30. Alpine O'Brien's IPA so generously given to me by The J's. We pulled around to the back of the strip strip mall and polished this growler off before heading in for our pizza.


Bottle of Fat Tire at Grimaldi's. I never bothered with this beer much before, but I really enjoy it at places where it's one of the better beers in stock.


$2.50 Dos Equis for Happy Hour. Couldn't complain at this point... it's Vegas.

Tenaya Creek Brown Ale

At Alligator Bar in The Orleans. Not bad, only cost me $20 since I lost it all on video blackjack.
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Stone / Cambridge / BrewDog Juxtaposition Pilsner

After a couple months of beer and beer writing apathy, I feel like I'm back into the swing of things. So today I decided to go out and find a new beer. I headed only a couple miles down the road to Pacific Wine Merchants (so I could do some cigar shopping at the same time- going to explore the Arturo Fuente line a bit more soon) without knowing what I would really find. They only have about 3 fridge doors worth of beer, but generally it's very good beer (Pliny, Pig, West Coast IPA, everything Stone, Oskar Blues stuff... you get the drift). To my surprise there were Blind Pig bottles in there that were only 3 weeks old! I haven't seen bottles that fresh at the best beer stores in So Cal for a long time.

So aside from stocking up on the Pig, which I would take any day over Pliny, I also noticed the recently released Stone/Cambridge/BrewDog collaboration Juxtaposition Black Pilsner. For the last year or so I've thought the whole trend of "blackening" traditionally light beers was kinda gimmicky and lame. I didn't like the Stone 11th Anniversary black IPA so much and I think that's where it started. If I see one of the many Black IPA's on tap these days I never order it. But I figured I'd give this one a whirl, since The J's seemed excited about it. So it's a 10% ABV black pilsner. It pours with an obviously thin body... ok that's good, because if it didn't it'd basically be a porter disguised with lager yeast. The smell is quite interesting at first, and maybe that's because I served this puppy COLD- the way it should be (probably around 40F). At first I get really nothing other than some lager yeast byproduct stuff in the aroma, but after a bit it starts mirroring the flavor a little more with a mild roastiness. In the taste there's no question this contains a good amount of roasted malt (as opposed to that darkened malt that imparts no roastiness, I think one of the Carafa's). Anyway, it's basically an imperial chocolate porter with a thinner body and a less fruity yeast. The 10% ABV is easily detected on the back end of the palate and has a belly warming effect. This aspect wears on me a bit as the beer warms up towards the end of the glass. The body was not overdone here which is nice. It's still within the "thin" spectrum of mouthfeel, just slightly below medium. I enjoyed this beer for the most part but as I got to the final 1/3'rd I began to get tired of it. An interesting brew, but give me a well crafted regular pilsner like Sly Fox Pikeland or Moonlight Reality Czeck and I'll be much happier.

Cool Beer Label

Nothing new for Lost Abbey to pump out some awesome artwork for their beer labels, but I especially like the new Duck-Duck-Gooze lable.

Brewing Like A Monk

I started to read "Brew Like A Monk" by Stan Hieronymus a while back and there were a couple paragraphs in the foreward by Tim Webb that really grabbed my attention:

"Unfortunately, in the permanent, and I for one think misguided, quest to keep down production costs, the recent falls in the quality of the fermented beers are now revealing the effects of flawed recipes rather more than was previously the case. At Rochefort the taste impact of the beers has diminished a little, through reduction in lagering time and, I suspect, by rather too enthusiastic filtration. In Chimay and Westmalle beers one finds the acrid backtastes of fast fermentation, set against a backdrop of svelte character. Orval remains a classic brew but is less extreme in its statements and is the smaller for that."

"In a head-to-head tasting of Belgian-style abbey beers made by American microbrewers, in Arlington, Virginia, in early 2005, I was shocked to find that the American imitations were knocking the socks off certain freshly imported "real" Trappist ales." I should not have been. After all, the Belgians have been imitating them for years, and some the pretenders, such as St. Bernardus, Kapittel, Witkap, Dupont, and St. Feuillien, are way better than most of the originals."

"So if you want to brew like a monk, what should you do? Not imitate current practice, that is for sure. Perhaps the best advice would be to brew with good intentions."