Beer Tasting in San Dizzle

I have been completely out of the loop due to travel and a new job, so I am SUPER backed up with posting material. About two weeks ago I went beer tasting in San Diego to Stone Brewery, The Lost Abbey, and The Breuery in the OC- I have been very into craft beers lately.


(Stone)

Actually, Ryan Sweeney from Verdugo in Silver Lake gave me a great list of breweries to check out (and I happen to be going to BoHo tonight where Ryan created the beer list), but I didn't get to nearly as many as I would have liked. Our first stop on the beer tour was the behemoth, Stone.


(Bottle line at Stone)

Popular for Arrogant Bastard, these beers- I think they had about 16 available- were quite hoppy. We also took a tour of the brewery and it was HUGE.



Actually, it was the first real brewery tour I have taken, and it much resembled a winery. Cool fact about Stone, it's totally huge and almost entirely run on solar power, score! Our next stop was The Lost Abbey down the road, and TLA occupied the old Stone brewery space.


(The Lost Abbey)

The Lost Abbey was wayyy smaller and seemed to focus more on barrel fermenting. Unfortch, when we got there, there were only a small selection (like 3) of beers to try, and I didn't really dig any.



On our way back up to LA we stopped at The Breuery which I absolutely loved. I am a HUGE fan of Flemish reds and sour beers, and I tried some fantastic sours there.


(The Breuery- Sour Beer List)

The breuery is definitely a more renegade brewery and they experiment a lot with brett (brettanomyces) - a hard to control beer yeast that many breweries fear because it's hard to control and spread via air and contaminate other non-brett beers.



Also, the day we chose to stop by happened to be their 1 year anniversary party, so the brewery was completely packed.



The downside: (and I was very upset about this) they didn't have any sour beers bottled- so I had to sip- then leave with no doggie bag. GR.