★ Travel: Miscellaneous Photos from my Trip to Nor-Cal
*warning, crummy iPhone photos ahead*
I was in Northern California for a week and the company gave me a rental car so I got to hit a few places. You can see all of them via my place ratings on RateBeer. I snapped some photos throughout the week and wanted to share them as well as some thoughts on various breweries. This is not as polished as most of the blog posts here..most posts here are thrown together without really a thought on formatting…and this just a random post of iPhone shots. Meh.
Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing – Solid IPA, taster was cheap and the place was very ‘hip’ you could walk around the brewery while they were brewing batches which was strange. Their hefeweizen was pretty impressive for wheat beers.This was taken at 99 Bottles of Beer in Santa Cruz. Lately, I’ve been trying to track down as many Mikkeller Spontan-beers as possible because quite a few are on the RateBeer top 50 Lambic – Fruit category. These are not lambic but as a completionist, I’m trying what I can. This was actually pretty good. Pricey for a 375MLBruery 6 Geese-a-Laying on tap at Burger in Santa Cruz. I also had Humulus Lager at Mikkeller Bar SF. It’s cool seeing Bruery beers on tap.The Turkey Panini at Rare Barrel in Oakland was actually not bad. The pesto was pretty weak.A single barrel dark sour beer with Sightglass coffee added smelled amazing, tasted pretty bad. Rare Brrel does have a nice setup with their tasting room basically in the beer warehouse.Another shot @ Rare Barrel.Cellar Maker in SoMA SF is a new brewery. Their 10% stout and coffee stouts were both awesome. the pales fell short. The place is very small and was packed with people. Obviously, they’re selling a ton of beer which is great!I was at Blackwell’s spirits dropping some things off and I noticed Virtue Cider is in Cali now. Awesome for them!Surfrider Cafe in Santa Cruz is owned by Boulder Creek so they had a lot of those beers on tap. Most were just okay.Sampler at Surfrider Cafe – Tickers gotta tick!Taplist at Discretion Brewing in Santa CruzTheir Abbey triple at Discretion was pretty awesome. Overall, they have a lot of solid beers , most above average in taste.Seabright Brewing / pub was overall a let down. Pricey, I went there for the ticks, left disappointed.Burger in Santa Cruz had a very diverse menu. 40+ beers on tap and they had Four Roses bourbon on tap…yes, draft bourbon. Seriously.
Santa Cruz was a lot of fun. I hit places in SF, Santa Rosa, Oakland and the bay area peninsula that week and ended up getting 129 beer ratings so far in January. My record is 149 in August but that’s beer festival month so that sort of makes sense. Travel is great and I look forward to sharing more bay area adventures this year.
