NoCal Brew Tour: Day 2, Sierra Nevada

To be safe, responsible people, we decided to do tasters of all the beers instead of drinking ourselves silly trying pints of everything. This is what Sierra Nevada has to offer. (written by Tony)

• Crystal Wheat
  • A filtered wheat beer. Light wheat beer, not fruity at all.
  • Your standard American wheat.
  • As someone said, "It's something you'd want to shotgun."
  
  
• Ruthless Hef
  • Very clean and crisp. Much more so than a normal wheat beer.
  • Very fruity with a hint of clove
  
  
• Wheat Beer
  • More aroma than the crystal wheat, but similar flavor
  • A small amount of spice to the beer
  
  
• Summerfest
  • Mimi: "It smells like the monkey cage at the zoo"
  • Just a lager. Nothing all that exciting.
  • Easy to drink with flavor similar to the wheat
  
  
• Blonde Ale
  • Kenji did not like this beer.
  • Very little flavor. It has beer flavor and that's about it.
  • It's not bitter, though.
  
  
• Best Bitter Ale
  • Nice malt flavor, and hope flavor, but needs to be more bitter.
  
  
• Draught Style Pale Ale
  • A good, drinkable beer. Straight forward pale.
  • An excellent sideline beer.
  
  
• Pale Ale
  • You have all had this beer before. It's the Sierra Nevada beer with the green label.
  • Slightly more bitter than the draught style pale.
  
  
• Early Spring Beer (ESB)
  • "Tastes good for you"
  • It's like eating a salad
  • Much better than the best bitter ale, more hop flavor to it
  
  
• Southern Hemisphere
  • Wonderful Hop Aroma.
  • Citrus Hoppy
  • It feels like you drink it through the nose
  
  
• IPA
  • Doesn't taste like an IPA
  • Very sweet and not very bitter
  • Not as good as the Southern Hemisphere
  
  
• Torpedo
  • Well balanced is the best way to describe this beer
  • It is a very good beer to sit back, relax, and enjoy
  
  
• Brown Ale
  • A well balanced brown
  • Good and tasty, but a bit too watery
  
  
• Porter
  • Pretty thin
  • "It's not Black Butte Porter"
  • No foretaste, just a sort of burnt aftertaste
  
  
• Stout
  • Kind of more like a porter than a stout
  • Decent chocolate balance, but lacks the burnt, roasted aftertaste
  
  
• Bigfoot Barleywine
  • Good floral aroma
  • Fairly mellow barleywine, but nicely balanced
  • Mimi, "Whew!"

The overall winner of the tasting was by far the Torpedo. We ordered a pitcher of it since the only thing left for us to do was go to the campsite and drink more there.

NoCal Brew Tour: Day 2, Chico

We made it to Chico! The beer tasting would begin. Our first stop was the Butte Creek Brewery. Butte Creek is currently doing a Co-Op with Bison Brewery, so we essentially got a 2 for 1 deal. Unfortunately, they didn't have any tours or a tasting room. We went into the office hoping that we could buy some 22's. The woman working the office was very nice and although they didn't have anything to taste, she went back to the brewery and brought us a freshly bottled Bison Brewery Chocolate Stout. Our first beer of the trip!

Bison Chocolate Stout: A very rich, bittersweet chocolate flavor. Not very sweet and it could have been served cold, but good nonetheless.

We had a hard time picking out what exactly we wanted, so we purchased 4 cases of 22's.

• Bison Farmhouse Saison
  
• Mateveza
  
• Butte Creek Hang Ten IPA
  
• Butte Creek Fresh Hop Ale

After the quick stop at Butte Creek, we headed over to Sierra Nevada. They have an awesome brewery. It is a model of energy efficiency. From a chemical engineering standpoint, the place is awesome. Props to them. Couple of cool facts about the brewery: they use whole leaf hops in all of their beers, bottle condition all of their beers, and they generate about 60% of their electricity from fuel cells and like 20% from PV solar cells. Here's a few pictures we took from inside the brewery.

Kenji, Tony, and Dave just outside the gift shop.

Kenji making a lewd gesture

Here we are eating our dunch out on their patio.

Now then, on to the beers.

NoCal Brew Tour: Day 2, Medford to Chico

Day 2 began nice and early (for us). We left Medford around 9. I've never driven on I-5 south of Ashland, so it was new road for me. Interesting fact: the pass over the border is the highest point on I-5. For those of you who haven't been on that stretch of road, it's gorgeous. Here's some pictures Mimi took from the car.

Yes, that's my tongue sticking out. It's bigger than Mt. Shasta!

Mt. Shasta through the clouds

Here's a cool cinder cone mountain further south.

Since we didn't have any breakfast, we stopped in the town of Mt. Shasta around 11:30 at a local natural food store recommended to us by a friend of Kenji's. It was delicious. If you're in the area, stop by. It's called Berryvale Grocery.

From there, it was only 2 more hours to Chico. We were pleasantly surprised at the much shorter drive time than we anticipated.

NoCal Brew Tour: Day 1

First thing's first: we set out on a journey through Northern California to visit 15 breweries in a week. Our ultimate destination happened to be the Boonville Beerfest on May 10th. You can read about it here

We had been preparing this trip for a long time, so we had a couple of Bible pages to help us plan our way. Here is the Google Earth map of our plan, and here is our nifty spreadsheet itinerary.

Now, on to the trip. The four of us (Tony, Mimi, Kenji, and Dave) piled our gear into and on top of my car and finally left Kenji's house around 8 PM. We had originally planned to leave around 6:30, but I'm always late and refused to pack ahead of time. The drive to Medford, OR was mostly uneventful. It was pretty late by the time we arrived, and I had started to see things towards the end. We checked into our Motel, unpacked the car, and promptly fell asleep.