Yay Beer! (Part 2)

Last Saturday (the 22nd) the weather was cruddy and rainy, so we needed an inside activity. Our best idea was to drive over the hill to Sonoma Valley and visit the brewpubs there. We invited our friend Victoria to come along with us. Our first stop was Dempsey's in Petaluma. We chose to start there because they had the best-looking lunch menu. We had a very nice lunch there and shared their beer sampler between the three of us. There were five beers on their sampler and they all were nice. Our favorite was their stout.

Next, we drove the 18 miles to Santa Rosa and visited the 3rd Street Aleworks. They had quite a selection in their sampler.

There were 13 beers (as you can see) ranging from a Kolsch to an Oatmeal Stout. Abby and Victoria's favorite was a cherry ale called "Bada Bing Cherry Ale" which was certainly not made with bing cherries. It tasted like it was made with sour cherries and in spite of my general dislike of fruit beer, it was actually quite good. My favorites were their English Bitter and the IPA on cask. All the beers were solid and several were terrific. Here are some photos of us with the beer.















After the 13 samples plus the five from Dempsey's, we needed a break. We went to Target and spent about an hour taking care of our general merchandise needs. After a little walking around time, we decided we were ready to visit Santa Rosa's second brewpub, the Russian River Brewing Company. Russian River had a great presentation for their sampler.

You can't really see it in the photo, but the glasses slip out the edge of the tray. Since the 12 beers here were numbers 19 through 30, we had a pizza to help us maintain some level of decorum. Russian River is well known for its Belgian-style beer. I thought the Belgians were fantastic. They had great names, too. The golden strong ale is called Damnation, the biere de garde style is called Perditition, and one of the brettanomyces-soured ales is called Sanctification. They also had four or five blisteringly hoppy IPAs including an imperial IPA called Pliny the Elder. The beers were all pretty tasty. Abby and Victoria didn't care much for the IPAs or the sour Belgian ales. My favorites were the Damnation and the Perdition, but I loved all of the Belgians because they were so unique.

We had originally planned to continue North to Healdsburg and hit the Bear Republic Brewing Company, but our safe return home would have been at risk, so we called it a day and headed back to Saint Helena. We had a great time and personally, I can't think of a better way to spend a rainy day.

P.S. I racked my beer from last Friday into a secondary fermenter and I'll probably get it bottled next weekend.