Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Traveling Around California's Bay Area and Beyond

Do you know the way to San Jose? or Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Rafael, Santa Clara, Santa Rosa? After our trip last week through the Bay Area region, we now know much better ourselves. Especially Santa Rosa, where we found a mighty good time at Russian River Brewing. Over the coming weeks, I'll have more to say about the many different stops we made, the beers that were drunk, and the people we met. It was truly a brew-tastic way to make a business trip more rewarding into a longer personal vacation. (Oh yeah, and the business stuff got done very well too, thank you :) This was my first time exploring the beer scene outside of the city of San Francisco in this much detail. Basically, I'll just say that the city's got a great thing going on, but the region is ten times more rewarded. We tasted beers that exemplified what west coast hoppy beers are all about (Hopsickle, Racer5, Red Rocket, Pliny the Elder, Pale Ales, DIPAs, TIPAs). And, then we discovered that these guys know what to do with malted barley and wheat too (Quadrupels, Barleywines, Stouts, Porters). And, the people; we certainly met some great people along the way too. I am looking forward to sharing this all as I get my notes together. Then there was the Lagunitas Skunk Beer Train event. Oh boy, wait 'til you hear about the fun and frivolity aboard the train through the great redwoods (no, the beer wasn't skunked ;-) What fun... In the meantime, here's a quick map of our traversals across the region. There may be better mapping tools out there for this type of thing, but I use this pedometer website for my running routes, so that's what you're getting today :) http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=430168 Along this route we hit up the following breweries: Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing (Santa Cruz); Half Moon Bay (Princeton-by-the-Sea); Pyramid Alehouse (Walnut Creek); Moylan's (Novato); Marin Brewing Co. (San Rafael); Iron Springs (Fairfax); Russian River Brewing Co. (Santa Rosa); North Coast Brewing Co. (Fort Bragg, CA); Anderson Valley Brewing Co. (Boonville)

2 comments:

Adam said...

Ok...that must have taken a long time to map out! Holy smokes!

Bryan Kolesar said...

Oops, I thought the mileage seemed a bit light. We also took a wine/spa trip up into Napa and Calistoga with Patty's sister.