San Diego Beer Blog

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Europe with a large group (the most cost effective way to take big trips). After spending 5 days with crappy Bulgarian beer, we were off to Vienna Austria. Vienna was 4 days of the metric system, a weak dollar, smoking indoors, street performers, museums, public transportation and most important, bier. RateBeer has put together a solid list of beer bars in Vienna, this was a life saver for us! Without it we would have never hit all the establishments we did.

Vienna’s large network of buses, street cars and subway trains make the entire city easily accessible. I paid €18.50 for a Vienna Card that allows unlimited access to the entire system for 72 hours. As an added bonus, the Vienna Card also gives a discount at most major attractions. I must have saved at least €10 by just presenting the card at various locations, well worth the investment.

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While I was buying beers for the Pale Ale Challenge, I came across the Sea Monster Stout from Ballast Point. I’ve had this beer several times at O’Brien’s and Home Brew Mart, but never seen it bottled. I had to give this bomber a spin.

From the deep dark depths of our Brewmaster’s imagination comes this rich and monstrous oatmeal stout. Our Sea Monster embodies all that the true dark beer aficionado will appreciate: roasted coffee notes, with hints of bittersweet chocolate and currant flavors all brought together by a perfect hop balance.

Don’t fear the Monster!

Our Robust Series gives all beer lovers an opportunity to try our most rare beers, previously available only on draft at select tap houses. Enjoy!

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The first in a series of posts dedicated to comparing San Diego beers within a specific style. Pale Ale being one of the most popular styles, it was an obvious choice for the first challenge. I wanted to keep things simple, so I drove down to BevMo and grabbed five different beers. These five were all easily accessible at the time, we’ll run the Pale Ale tastings again with some of the breweries that I’ve left out at a later date.

Here’s the basic idea of how we’re going to run the single blind (the drinkers don’t know what they’re rating) tastings. Each beer will be assigned a number, we’ll pull numbers at random to select the order of the tastings. From there, each participant will be given ~4 ounces to review. Their thoughts and rankings on each beer will be reported below. Like I said earlier, simple.

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