Just Another Bunch of Beers from Just Another Trip to San Diego

When we travel, Beard always makes sure to leave a ton of extra space in his suitcase to bring home beer. This most recent trip to San Diego, both Beard and Broad made sure to have adequate room to store booze for two reasons 1) to share with friends and pet sitters and 2) we wanted to have a San Diego beer tasting.

BevMo!
When we’re in San Diego we typically head to two places for bring-home beers: 1) BevMo! and 2) Bottlecraft. BevMo! is a booze super store. It’s like a playground for adults who drink. According to their website their philosphy is: “shopping for beverages should be as much fun as drinking them!” They got that right. When we’re in there we willingly spend an ungodly amount of time perusing through the beer and liquor aisles. For this trip, our BevMo! adventure included purchasing giant bottles of champs for our hot tub boat party, a bottle of whiskey for one of Beard’s friends and of course a wide variety of beer we can’t find back home.

Bottlecraft Beer Store and Tasting Room
We bought the majority of our beers this trip at our favorite beer store, Bottlecraft Beer Shop. The have four locations (three in SD and one in Virginia Beach). We’ve been to all three SD locations. You can drink in the shop or take it to go. You can also bring in your own food as well.  This time, we went to the location in North Park.  From their website, “In 2014, Bottlecraft partnered with Venissimo Cheese to carve out a portion of the shop dedicated to beer’s best friend, cheese! The section offers hundreds of cheeses as well as charcuterie, paninis, chocolates and other artisan goodies.”  You can NEVER go wrong with beer and cheese. We spent about 45 minutes in Bottlecraft browsing beers and sipping on brews. The staff is very friendly and helpful (all locations). You can find something for everyone. Broad even bought a fancy canned rosé.

The Beers
Comet Rider: Bottlecraft x Modern Times Collaboration.
This was hands down the best beer we brought home and maybe one of the best beers we’ve had.  From the Bottlecraft website: “This is a crazy beer. Like, crazy good, but also like, crazy crazy. Here’s the deal: Comet Rider started off with a careful kettle souring, a lactobacillus fermentation technique that gives the beer tartness in a jiffy. Then we fermented it entirely with a blend of two different Brettanomyces strains, Brett Drei and Brett C. Most people associate Brett with funk, but a 100% ferment results in a mostly clean beer with intense notes of pineapple and orange sherbet. Then, we dry-hopped it with Citra and Mosaic hops, lending it an aroma of mango and honeydew melon.” It’s sour, fruity and very easy to drink.  Crazy indeed. Crazy amazing.

Beatitude Prickly Pear: Council Brewing Co.
Council released the Beatitude series of Tart Saisons which allowed them to explore and experiment with fun flavors.  Prickly pear is the fruit from a cactus. It is bright pink and so tasty. With this beer they “used real prickly pear fruit (no extracts) and achieved a delicious, bright pink colored beer . This beer has huge cactus fruit characteristics with some background notes of pear and lemon. When you tastes this beer, you’ll also get some watermelon jolly rancher flavor, which is surprising because we didn’t use any artificial flavorings.” This was delicious, fruity but could have been more tart.

Opal: Firestone Walker Brewing Co.
Firestone made this beer as an interpretation from 18th century saisons brewed in farmhouses in southern Belgium. They describe the beer as “into this mix comes a dimension of dry-­‐hopped brightness, layering in notes of fragrant citrus and tropical fruit. The result is a rootsy, rustic saison that brings down the farmhouse, merging Belgian tradition with West Coast style.”  This was tasty and probably a beer we would drink more but we had this after about 5 other beers so it didn’t seem that special or memorable to us.

Modern Times: Fruitlands Passion Fruit and Guava Gose
Modern Times has become one of our favorite San Diego breweries over the last few years.  They’ve grown incredibly fast and continue to produce interesting and well made brews.  This is one is a rotating Gose, a sour and salty wheat beer.  “Fruitlands is tart, fruity, and delicious, with the sour, salty base beer bringing the funky refreshment, while the heavy dose of real fruit turns the whole thing into a tasty flavor bomb.” The one we purchased was flavored with passion fruit and guava.  You can taste a perfect balance of both fruits, and it almost has a slight fruity bitterness to it as well.  The 17 IBUs is actually kind of high for a gose, but it works really well here. Like all of their beers, this is amazing.

Off Color: Hyper Predator
Off Color probably has our favorite marketing of any brewery.  Every bottle is illustrated in quirky, odd drawings by Nikki, an in house employee: “Her work tends to focus on a macabre sense of humanity and tenderness depicted through vicious animal themes juxtaposing the softness of embroidery.”  As for the beer, this is a farmhouse ale with cold-pressed coffee. We weren’t sure what to expect with this, but it was really nice.  Great coffee aroma. Threw us off with the light color (just looked like a regular saison), but the aroma and taste let us know the coffee was there and added an interesting layer to the beer.

Allagash: Little Brett
This is one of a handful of amazing US breweries that doesn’t distribute to Ohio, and it’s a damned shame.  Every beer they make is good.  They specialize in a lot of Belgians and barrel-aged beers that are quite expensive, but they also make quite a few 4- and 6-packs that we’ve seen in New York and California.  We hadn’t seen this one before so we snagged a single 12 oz bottle to bring back.  It’s an ale fermented with Brett and dry hopped with Mosaic.  Super earthy and funky and barnyardy and those adjectives-y. Another great example of how it’s possible to pack a bunch of flavor into a beer under 5%.