It was only five years ago that we all came together in San Diego for the first time to discuss our successes, struggles, and opportunities as small wholesalers specializing in craft and specialty import beers. Well, those five years have flown by and we are back in San Diego this coming April 16th & 17th at the Town and Country Hotel. Complete Details
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. 
If you can judge a book by it’s cover, then you can also judge a brewpub by it’s website.
San Diego Brewing Company’s website (www.sandiegobrewing.com) is the epitome of small brewery websites. It’s beautiful, feature rich, full of quality content, updated frequently, and extremely informative. Hats off to the team that put it together. The site set our expectations for an inaugural visit to their establishment.
We were, unfortunately, over sold.
There’s no better way to celebrate a special occasion than visiting local breweries with a couple of close friends. A problem arises when you have to find someone to drive though. We solved our dilemma by hiring Brewery Tours of San Diego to shuttle us around the greater San Diego area this weekend.
Brewery Tours took their time in explaining all of our options and assisted in selecting an agenda that matched our group’s specific needs. Their staff is very informative and knowledgeable about San Diego’s beer community.
Is there anywhere better to live than San Diego? Our weather is perfect. We have miles of beautiful beaches. Low crime rate. Fantastic restaurants. And several world class breweries, bars and brewpubs.
As it has been for the last 7 years, RateBeer Best was again the largest beer competition in the world — over 1.4 million reviews of 76,000 beers from over 8000 brewers worldwide were tallied. A particular emphasis was placed on tastings from the last year’s performance. Additionally, brewpubs, bottle shops, restaurants and bars around the world were awarded prizes. Cheers to all the winners and to everyone who keeps the magical world of craft beer growing!
RateBeer.com
Here are the San Diego specific results for this year’s competition.
Ahh, the Aero Club. We’ve all seen it, and we’ve all thought the same thing passing it on the 5 North. “What the hell kind of dive is that?” That’s were you would be wrong. Matt and I were pleasantly surprised to see that The Aero Club has it’s act together.
The beer selection isn’t incredible by any means, but adequate for a weeknight bar run. The bartender was super cool, pretty well informed about beer and just a little smarmy(just the way we lik em’) They had a good selection of music playing, and the place never felt pretentious or “scenester”
Whatever could go wrong, went absolutely horribly wrong. The Linkery’s entryway is full of their positive reviews and various awards they have received. This review will not be among them.
Somehow I knew that this night wasn’t going to be entirely enjoyable. Before heading to G’s house I had to make a pit-stop at the local ATM. I pull up to the machine, slip my card in, and press the “English” button. Then I wait, nothing happens. Hit “Cancel” nothing. “Spanish”, nada. The machine was completely locked up, thank you Diebold (and these idiots run our election?)!! After waiting for the system to timeout, the machine finally ejects my card. Onward to dinner…
O’Briens Pub is our favorite place to grab some unique beers and excellent food. It’s not exactly a sports bar but they do show many soccer tournaments and Chargers games on their wide array of TVs. The large outdoor patio is the perfect spot to enjoy your food & beer while hanging out with your furry friends. Their massive bottle list and extensive tap selection boggles the mind.
Gretchen and I head here at least twice a month (sometimes more), our last visit was for the Chargers vs Packers game. The bar was about 60% full for the game with almost everyone cheering for the Chargers (minus Gretchen and some random old dude).
The WTF crew had an unexpected surprise last night. Hamiltons Tavern is one badass bar! With a beer selection that boggles the mind, it was hard to even choose what to try. I finally decided to have a bottle of Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout. I have to say it was delicious. I followed that up with a Lightning Thunderwizen. Matt had an Alesmith IPA, Racer 5 IIPA, Alesmith Speedway Stout respectively. Overall the atmosphere of Hamiltons was awesome, with just a *bit* of a hipster vibe that was easy to deal with.