Beer Night at the Cal Academy

SF Beer Week 2012 came to a close yesterday, and I was so wrapped up with work and family stuff that I managed to avoid it almost entirely. The one event I made it to was the Beer Night at the California Academy of Sciences, on Thursday, Feb. 16th. Frankly, that event was a bit of a bust.

Basically, Beer Night at the Academy consisted of expensive beer sampling in the African Hall. They set up twelve tables--one for each of the 12 breweries participating--along the length of the hall. Each brewery had two beers on hand, and you could buy it by the sample (probably 2 oz) or the glass (12 oz). A ticket cost $2, a sample cost a ticket, and a glass cost 4 tickets. In other words, they were charging $8 for a 12 oz beer poured out of a bottle (and at most of the tables I saw, they didn't even give you the whole bottle's worth--they'd pour heavy so the beer foamed up, and when the foam hit the top of the glass, they stopped. Whatever was left in that bottle got used for samplers, or combined with other bottle-remnants to fill up another 12 oz glass). Add that $8 a beer price tag to the $12 entry fee you had to pay to get in (which, fortunately, I didn't have to pay, because I got free tickets from a friend), and you're talking about a relatively pricey event with relatively common beers (common enough, at least, to be packaged in six packs--with the exception of the brews brought by Berryessa Brewing, which came in kegs, and which ran out before I even got there).

To make matters worse, I had to work late that night, so I didn't get to the place until 8:30 pm. By that point, three of the breweries had already run out of stock entirely, and a few of the other breweries only had one beer left. Plus the lines were pretty ridiculous--often a fifteen minute wait for a single sample glass of beer.

Of the beers I managed to get a taste of, only one stood out, but it was good enough to lend some light to an otherwise disappointing evening (disappointing in regard to beers, at least--I did have a fine time hanging out with friends). Moylan's Dragoon Dry Irish Stout was wonderful--rich and roasty, with a hint of lactic tang in the style of the original Guinness Export (which is one of my favorite beers ever). They also brought bottles of their Kilt Lifter Scottish Style Ale, which made for a good pair of beers to showcase the diversity of their lineup--though the Kilt Lifter didn't match my particular beer preferences.

Field Trip: Lagunitas Brewery

My girlfriend and I stopped by Lagunitas Brewery on a Sunday night a few weeks back, went on the tour, and tried every beer on draft. Things were fuzzy enough after getting through the sampler, and now the passage of time has made them even fuzzier, but here are a few things that stood out:

1) The sampler is awesome! $20 for a four ounce taster of every beer on tap--a total of 16 beer samples.

2) The sampler is terrifying! Almost every beer is above 8% abv, and since they're in those little glasses you end up drinking 'em pretty fast--don't want them to warm up or go flat, you know.

3) Lagunitas likes hops. Half of the beers on tap were IPA styles, and a lot of the rest were hop forward.

4) Money is raining down on the brewery. They've got expansions galore going on, including the recent completion of what the tour guide claimed to be the largest capacity brewhouse on the West Coast (though it didn't look obviously bigger than Sierra Nevada to me), plus a new amphitheater. And they've got a customer following that's lapping the beer up--brewing is going on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

5) Culture-branding is serious business. A lot of effort, from the decor of the 'beer sanctuary' to the tone of the tour guide's spiel to the flavor of the website, is focused on giving you the impression that Lagunitas is a laid-back bunch of weed-smoking dudes that like to drink beer and thumb their noses at authority. Probably more of the tour talk focused on their contentious, thumbing-noses history with the ATF than it did with the beer itself. 'Course, this rebelliousness didn't stop them from clamping down and kicking out a bus-tour group that got belligerently drunk and obnoxious.

6) The design of the brewery is pretty weird. There are pipes running all over the place, moving things here and there. The lines that run from the grain storage to the mash tuns are very long, and include brushes that crack the husks a little more at each bend. There are also pipes stretching all the way across the parking lot to more fermentation tanks in a separate building. Doesn't seem super efficient in its design.

7) It's all about their eponymous IPA. You've probably tried Lagunitas' flagship beer--it's excellent and it's everywhere. The bulk of the money raining down on the place is probably coming from sales of this particular brew. They're brewing it like gangbusters.

8) Despite their obsession with hops, they're not whole-hop purists. I didn't see a single whole hop on the premises, and when I asked the tour guide about it, he said they use pellets and whole hops both.

And, if you're interested in my favorite and least favorite beers tasted, here you go:

Favorite: A seasonal release called Holiday Leftover Sucks, or something like that. Malty and fairly sweet, but still with a very aromatic hop aura.

Least Favorite: Probably the only beer I really didn't like was their Cappuccino Stout. The flavor is overwhelmed by the coffee aspect, and the coffee flavor they've captured is reminiscent of the swill that sits on the hotplate at 7-11 until it condenses and burns into a horribly bitter nightmare.