Just need the Marley, imo
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A musty, attic-y delight. Yeah, it tastes like an attic smells. This is a feature.
Bissell Brothers never, ever disappoint.
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Bissel is so good it’s stupid. Love that place.
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Hot take: Alvarado Street Brewing > Trillium
All of Alvarado Street’s beers I’ve tried have been pretty elite. Trillium may be the OG when it comes to NEIPAs, but there are so many other great options in that style nowadays.
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Interesting, can you get Alvarado at retail outside of their brewery? Which beers from Trillium have you had? Any other elite SW US breweries you can recommend?
I’m moving from Boston to LA area and am in search of good West coast breweries to rely on. Will miss my access to Trillium, Treehouse, and Bissell (among many others).
I’ve only tried a couple of beers from Trillium (can’t remember their names), so my comment was likely recency bias. I’d love to try Tree house sometime as well.
I had Alvarado Street beers while visiting the Bay area before, and it was always a standout for me. Only yesterday I saw that my local bottle shop in Denver had some Alvarado, so I grabbed a couple while I rushed for the trilliums this afternoon. BTW, the Trilliums were gone within 4 hours of the shop posting in their IG that they had some.
As for other breweries in Socal, I only have limited knowledge. Modern times is a classic, pizza port is pretty solid, and I really enjoyed a black plague brewing (lol that name) hazy IPA when I was visiting the area a month ago.
There are some pretty good breweries in Colorado and New Mexico as well, but I don’t know how much they distribute to California. Just to name a few from Colorado: knotted root, outer range, verboten, new image. In New Mexico: La Cumbre, ex Novo, gravity bound, bow and arrow.
You wrestling fans will know this one. I brought some El Segundo Broken Skull American Lager to a dude party not that long ago:
While the IPA seems to be available, the lager turned out to be pretty difficult to get here at a reasonable price. Had to do about a dozen checkout cart runouts to get it down to non-crazy. These are pint cans at 4.8% ABV.
Stock photos only b/c I didn’t think to take pictures. I don’t have a refined palette for beer description so I’ll just give my basic impression. I was expecting an easy-drinking, maybe even chuggable beer. Instead, it was more complex than that: hoppier and more citric acidity than a mass-produced American lager. Still had some of that watery hollowness I associate with American lagers which is one of the reasons why I don’t drink them. Stone Cold was double shotgunning these at Wrestlemania, but imo it’s not that kind of beer and will probably disappoint IPA haters expecting a Budweiser. My rec would be try the IPA version if you get this beer since the reviews on it seem to be decent.
I had the goses are red which i enjoyed.
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I’m going for a long run tomorrow morning, which would normally mean that I don’t drink anything the night before. But, on this very-much-not-filled-with-drama day, I decided to open one anyway.
It is an absolute banger. It’s a little lighter than the IPAs that I normally prefer, but the taste is perfect - Revolution IPAs are already great and the blood orange flavor really shines. It’s a 16 oz can that I’ve gone through way too quickly, and I’m probably going to open a second one.
Outlook for tomorrow morning is dismal.
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I’m surprised a couple of beers the night before would make that much difference. How much are we talking here? I don’t suppose you can quantify it some way. Maybe after your run you can tell how much better it would have gone without the beer.
I’m sure it would make some difference, but I’m surprised that it would be as big as you make it sound.
How much what - running? 2 hours/roughly 14 miles. 32 ounces of ~7% beer isn’t trivial, especially because I haven’t been drinking much the last several months. Probably the biggest issue is that it’s going to completely fuck up my sleep (which I can see via my overnight heart rate on my Garmin watch).
But maybe it’s just a big exaggeration on my part. I’ll know better in about 14 hours.
I meant how much difference in performance.
I wasn’t thinking about it wrecking your sleep at all. That would explain it. Although, if anything I’d have expected it to maybe improve your sleep.
That makes sense. I guess I didn’t realize that is what spidercrab may have been referring to. It sounded to me like the problem actually falling ‘physically’ asleep.
Just left Jester King. They had a ton of really interesting farmhouse ales that I loved. Perfect style after a day on the lake. The size of the property is insane as well.
If you like Zins you are in luck. You can still get into world class examples in the $30 to $40 a bottle range.
I would start with Bedrock, Ridge and Turley and look for vineyard designated bottles then go from there based on Cellar Tracker reviews on the specific vintage that you can find locally. I’m not a huge fan, but I can ask a friend (who also happens to be a somm, but way more importantly he’s been crazy for Zins for 2 decades) for more examples. I like to drink mine with 6-8 years on them in general. You should be able to find examples from the producers listed above. But there are likely many more my friend would recommend and ultimately it will come down to what style you like.
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Jeez I just took a poke around some of the retailer sites and have to adjust my world class price range to more like $35 to $60 now. Damned inflation.
Ridge yes. I wouldn’t consider that specific bottling to be world class, but I bet it’s a good bottle for the price. Depending on the vintage you probably want to decant for a couple of hours. The two big Ridge bottlings that I’ve had from different vintages that have a wide distribution are Lytton Springs and Geyersville. (I might have spelling wrong.) Ridge typically has a lot of tannins and needs some years or decanting to tame it a bit.