Around The World

Lagunitas Brewing Tour & Tasting The day after getting back...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:35:28 -0800

Lagunitas Brewing Tour & Tasting

The day after getting back to Kentfield from Vancouver, I went on an amazing brewery tour/tasting. Lagunitas, one of my favorite breweries, is located fairly close to Kentfield, so on a whim I called them and discovered that they do a tour with a tasting at 3:00pm every weekday! I raced up highway 101 to Petaluma and just barely made it in time.

I would strongly recommend this free beerstravaganza for any beer lover in the Bay Area. The first 40 minutes of the hour-long tour are devoted to a beer tasting in the cool loft space overlooking their bottling line. The tasting space is plastered with decorated in a style that can only be appropriately referred to as “heady”, which shouldn’t be surprising since one of their flagship ales was formerly known as The Kronik (it is now labeled as “Censored” after the California ABC forced them to change the name). The tasting encompases five beers: four of their year-round beers including The Kronik and their current seasonal ale.

The seasonal for my tour is pictured above: Wilco Tango Foxtrot (or, as our tour guide called it, What The Fuck ale). The label describes it as “A Malty, Robust Jobless Recovery Ale”; it is dark and sweet (from all that malt) but with enough hoppy bitterness to keep it from becoming saccharine; it’s a good late-winter seasonal but wouldn’t hold its own on a permanent basis. The other three regulars, aside from The Kronik, are the Pils, the New Dogtown Pale and the IPA. The Pils is a Czech-style Pilsner, their only non-ale and my least favorite of the tasting. The Kronik is a rich amber ale, which I would call crisp and sharp without being all that hoppy. Very tasty, but it could be hoppier. The Pale Ale and IPA really turn up the hop-factor, but contrary to what a knowledgeable ale drinker might expect, the Pale is actually hoppier (has a higher IBU rating) than the IPA. According to the tour guide, this apparent discrepancy is a result of Lagunitas’ decision to change their Pale Ale recipe a few years back—hence the “New Dogtown” name—while keeping their original IPA recipe. Regardless, both are fabulous ales if you’re into hoppy beers; as a bit of a hop maniac myself, I guess I’d have to give the nod to the Pale. Sadly we didn’t get to taste Hop Stoopid, their 104 IBU beer, but I have had it before and it is absolutely KILLER.

While we were tasting our five beers, the awesome tour guide related some interesting and often hilarious Lagunitas anecdotes and trivia. For example, while they’re still named after Lagunitas, the Marin county town in which they were founded, the brewery is now located in Petaluma (in Sonoma county) because the Marin Sanitation Department gave him an ultimatum to pay or move after the dregs of his fermentation process began causing sewer problems. Also, recently they moved from their original Petaluma location to a bigger facility across the street and in order to complete the move they threw a gigantic party in the parking lot and then had all 1200 guests pitch in to carry equipment across the street, which is really representative of the freewheeling, community-oriented nature of Lagunitas Brewing. I’m sure I can’t do justice to the rest of the stories, but you can read a pretty decent if outdated article about Lagunitas here.

(Lagunitas Kegs Stacked In The Brewery)

After the tasting we got a quick walkthrough of their brewing facility, which was cool because they were actually working while we were there, but was disappointing because it was extremely brief and offered very little depth or detail on their process and equipment. I’m a nerd and a homebrewer, I need technical details! But all in all, it was a fantastic value for $0 as well as an inspiring vision of where an avid homebrewer can take their vision.

From the drive out to Whistler this morning. The entire...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:53:42 -0800

From the drive out to Whistler this morning. The entire Vancouver-Whistler drive is incredibly scenic and gorgeous if the weather is right, which it was today. The Sea To Sky highway runs from West Vancouver, where Ian’s house is, most of the way to Whistler. It juts over the water, rock faces reaching up to one aide, water stretching out to mountainous islands on the other, each vista seemingly more picturesque than the last.

The entire trip to Whistler takes about 70 minutes, which is almost regrettable on a beautiful day like today, but which would be an incredible benefit to living in Vancouver. It strikese as an incredibly urbane, sophisticated city (and not just by Canadian standards) but you can drive 30 minutes from downtown and be in untouched mountainous wilderness. Very agreeable. I still think I prefer the Bay Area, but this has moved way up my list in the 30ish hours since I arrived.

The skiing at Whistler was great—perhaps not worth the $120 that I spent on a lift ticket and equipment rental—but certainly some of the best terrain I’ve skied. We spent most of our afternoon on the back of Whistler Mountain at the Symphony Bowl. Conditions were perfect: warm, sunny, and several inches of fresh powder. There were large swaths of Symphony that were more or less untracked and it was far from crowded. It’s tough to imagine a better day of skiing.

Must. Get. To. Bed.

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:51:13 -0800

I need to be out the door by 7:30 tomorrow morning to catch a flight for Vancouver, so I really ought to be alseep already, yet I feel compelled to blast Deadmau5 on repeat and bang out another blog entry, so here we are.

I’m still on the first leg of my journey, barely a week in, and yet it already feels incredibly eventful. Highlights of the trip so far: near-death accident on I80 in Wyoming, the Truckee midnight blizzard mountain crossing of 2010, Stinson/Reyes, The Day of Nothing, reuniting with several Cornellians (Paul, Tom, Gabe), mac-and-cheese bake off, FREE ROCK BAND!, dinner with the Fosters.

I could write a paragraph or much more about each of those things, but since it’s late and I must sleep I’ll limit myself to this: WOW, HE’S ACTUALLY GAY (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

Sorry, I should back up and provide some context. An old friend of mine invited me into the city for a mac-and-cheese + jello shots dinner party the other night. The jello shots were ok, the mac was delicious, but discovering that one of my oldest childhood friends was absolutely, definitely into other dudes (or, as he referred to them, boys) was the real reason I’ll remember that night. I’m hesitant to even write about the episode here because although he’s clearly “out” in person, I don’t know how he’ll feel about me outing him to those of my readers who can read between the lines. Also, I worry about being seen as homophobic. But, it’s the most memorable part about the trip thus far, so I just had to mention it.

Perhaps I’ll write more about some of the other highlights later, but for now I need to get to sleep in order to make my flight to Vancouver tomorrow. I heard that they just had some sort of big sports event up there recently?!? Something about curling, or something. I’m just looking forward to checking out a part of Canada that I’ve never seen and doing some skiing at a mountain I’ve wanted to ski for many years. I’ve heard that Vancouver is the “Amsterdam of North America”; I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds fun. Hopefully it doesn’t mean that there are loads of fat, ugly hookers in the windows of downtown storefronts; that would be unfortunate.

Ghosts n Stuff - Deadmau5 I ab-so-frigin-lutely cannot get this...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:07:58 -0800

Ghosts n Stuff - Deadmau5

I ab-so-frigin-lutely cannot get this song—and several of its remixes—out of my head. I can’t believe that (a) I just heard about Deadmau5 now and (b) I heard about it from one of my sister’s facebook status updates. Sad. I used to be one of the cool kids who would have totally known about this shit months ago.

The same view, at night. The bright spot on the left is San...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:36:52 -0800

The same view, at night. The bright spot on the left is San Quentin Prison, home of California’s death row. The Richmond bridge is just beyond the prison.

How’s that for a view?!?

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:30:01 -0800

How’s that for a view?!?

The trip out to Stinson Beach & Point Reyes on Panoramic...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:17:16 -0800

The trip out to Stinson Beach & Point Reyes on Panoramic Highway. It’s an incredibly beautiful, fun drive.

The Point Reyes Lighthouse. It’s really old and has a...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 01:00:33 -0800

The Point Reyes Lighthouse. It’s really old and has a 6-ton fresnel lens.

Saw some interesting art at the apartment Tom is subletting....

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:33:40 -0800

Saw some interesting art at the apartment Tom is subletting. This awesome piece of pop art is a Barbara Streisand portrait contructed entirely of beans and noodles. Tom’s landlord is an actor who was in Ms. Doubtfire and The Worst Movie Ever Made (aka Star Wars Episode One); he is a very gay man and, shockingly, a huge Streisand fan. He also had an interesting image on the wall, which was clearly a severely pixilated image of two people having sex, but whether it was two men or a man and a woman was unclear. We spent a disturbingly long time staring at that ambiguously gay duo.

Went to a Mac & Cheese bake-off on Thursday. 5 kinds, all...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:56:14 -0800

Went to a Mac & Cheese bake-off on Thursday. 5 kinds, all delicious. The best was the 4th back: pancetta, truffle & Chantrelle mac.

On the first nice day after we got here, Colin and I went out to...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:42:08 -0800

On the first nice day after we got here, Colin and I went out to Point Reyes to do some hiking. It wasn’t my first time out there, but I’m always excited to go back. Point Reyes has some of the most incredible scenery and landscapes imaginable. This is the view of Point Reyes Beach—aka The Great Beach—from the path to the Lighthouse.

You can find this picture, and the rest from my trip as I post them, in my Around The World Flickr set. I will be posting highlights from the set here, but far from all of my pictures.

From The Mountaintop

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:59:00 -0800

It’s high time that I dusted off the old blogging shoes and got my travel blog up and running, since I’m already in California and technically my trip around the world—beginning and ending in Chicago—has already begun. However, I don’t actually head overseas until I depart SFO for CHC on March 13th. Until then, I will be bouncing around between the Bay Area, Vancouver and Tahoe.

So, for the moment I’m in Kentfield, CA, blogging from the mountaintop, making final preparations for the real adventure to begin and tidying up loose ends. And let me tell you: when you’re handing off day-to-day management of your company while making final preparations to hit 7+ countries in 4 months, there are tons of loose ends. Some of them are fun/interesting, e.g. rounding out my wardrobe and supplies at REI. Many others are not so much fun, e.g. getting my final crazy-expensive Japanese encephalitis immunization, paying bills, and ESPECIALLY preparing my 2009 personal and business income taxes.

I was hoping to go camping this weekend, up in Humboldt, but instead I’ll be staying in Marin to take care of business. Fortunately, this means I won’t be spending any money on gas for 12 hours of driving and a camping permit, which is great. I spent too much money while my buddy Colin was out here; I really need to tighten the old purse strings and keep myself on-budget so that I don’t run out of money somewhere in Africa. I expect the next few days to be filled with a lot of (a) not driving (b) hiking (c) doing taxes and (d) tuna melts.