What’s a vacation without a little beer? The Thirsty Hopster takes on Santa Fe

A week ago today, I departed San Francisco on a much needed vacation.  Unlike most of my other recent trips, this one was not supposed to revolve around beer.  Now that my various beer enterprises (this blog, the tastings I host, the beer business ideas I bat around, etc.) consume on the order of 20 hours per week of my free time, I had been starting to feel the need for a vacation from beer, rather than a vacation with beer. 

The plan was simple:

• 4 days in Santa Fe, a city not renowned for its beer, with my sister and a group of 11 co-workers and friends
• 2 days driving Route 1 up the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco with a college friend

And we did stick to the plan, more or less, but somehow along the way beer weaseled its way onto the itinerary.  All I can say is

• (A) What? You expect me to drive by a brewery without stopping to poke around? Really! I can’t help it if they just appear along the side of the road.
• (B) I’m so glad I caved because the sudsy parts of the trip were a reminder that when you love what you do, you don’t really need a vacation from it.

Friday, May 23 – Monday, May 26: Santa Fe

Photos to be added tomorrow

The day began early, at 4:15am.  Living in San Francisco, where a cab to SFO costs $45+ and a cab to OAK $55+, and the public transportation requires multiple transfers on vehicles overflowing to the point of active passenger management, I miss the option of an $18 cab ride back home or the $1.25 T ride complete with an almost-guaranteed seat in Boston. 

After taking the J line to the BART to the AirBART shuttle to the Oakland airport, I arrived just in time to hear my flight had been delayed an hour, giving me ample time to gulp down a vat of iced coffee, which I would come to regret while occupying my window seat for the next two hours. 

When I first arrived in Albuquerque it was overcast but warm, but by the time the Sandia shuttle had driven me an hour northeast and 1,700 feet up in elevation, it was pouring hard enough that I was wishing the shuttle were an ark, or at least that I had any one of the following: an umbrella, a jacket, closed-toed shoes, a sister who understood the phrase “unlock the car before I come out from under the awning so I don’t get too wet”.

I’ll spare you the full details of every meal, every conversation, etc., but beer highlight of Friday was our trip to Kokoman Fine Wines & Liquors. 

This place is an oasis in what is quite literally a desert, both beer-wise and otherwise.  They have a large warehouse-like space with one moderately long aisle devoted to beer, half refrigerated, half shelved.  Their selection was about 2/3 domestic, with an emphasis on New Mexico and Colorado beers, a fair showing of California and Pacific Northwest brews, and a smaller but still surprising number of beers from elsewhere stateside.  While the selection beats anywhere else I’ve been in the Santa Fe area, I have one gripe: many of the bottles on the shelves were coated in a none-too-thin layer of dust.  Fresh beer, this was not.  However, as we went to check out, we discovered that inexpensive beer, it was.  At least, it was to us San Franciscans, who need reminders every once in a while that paying $10.99 for a six-pack of microbrew is not inevitable.

We were stocking up with a diverse group of non-devotees in mind, and an eye on the specials, but I think we still assembled a pretty decent stock:

• Jolly Pumpkin Tasting Group:
  • Calabaza Blanca Witbier
  • Bam Biere Saison
  • La Roja Wild Ale
• Full Sail Brewmaster’s Reserve Tasting Group:
  • Vesuvius Belgian-style Strong Pale Ale
  • Nugget Red Ale – it took me a while to find this online, I realize now this is because it was a spring seasonal beer from 2007!  Seriously, someone needs to get inventory management under control at Kokoman.
  • Top Sail Bourbon Barrel Imperial Porter
• General drinking beers:
  • Fort Collins Retro Red Ale
  • Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale
  • Bridgeport IPA

My favorites of the bunch were the Jolly Pumpkin Bam Biere and La Roja, and the Full Sail Imperial Porter.  Between them, you’ve got something for drinking at just about every occasion. 

The Bam Biere packed a surprising punch of funkiness for something looked so unassuming in its 12 oz. bottles without any labels screaming “special!”  The La Roja appeals to my recent obsession with sour beers.  I like that the earthiness (which you also can find in the Bam or other pale farmhouse ales) is combined with fruity and sour flavors.  While the Bam is dry and spicy, the La Roja is tart and spicy, without being too sweet. 

The bourbon barrel-aged imperial porter knocked the other two Full Sails out of the park.  I regret that we drank all three out of short plastic cups, because I think the Belgian-style and the red ale suffered for it.  However, I am also sure that part of the problem was oxidation, given that I now know the red was over a year old.  I love the richness of this barrel porter.  You can taste the vanilla oak flavors from the barrels, the whiskey flavors from the Kentucky bourbon that had been in the barrels previously, mild roast flavors from the malt, and a noticeable alcohol presence. 

Though I thought we’d be set for the weekend, by the end of Friday night most of the beer was gone, and I was glad I had hidden a few for Saturday consumption.  We went back to the store on Saturday, but this time only to Albertsons, and only to pick up a few mix packs and get on our way.  We picked up a couple New Belgium Mixed 12-Packs with 1554 (Belgian-style dark ale), Mothership Wit, Fat Tire (American amber ale), and Mighty Arrow (American pale ale).  I stuck to the 1554, which has been a personal comfort-beer of mine for a while now, and which I credit for getting me through the LSATs.  I used to go sit in Rose Pistola on Columbus Ave on a weekday, order a pizza and a bottle of 1554, and run through my practice tests.  Nerdy as it is, I miss those days — they were some of my quietly happiest days from last year. 

We also spent Saturday visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, where we were asked to stand at least a foot from the artwork.  They had a joint Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams exhibit showing, and we had beer staring up close at an Adams photo in which a rock seemed to be floating in a black void surrounded by snow.  After being warned by the security guard (we weren’t being rambunctious, or threatening to touch it, just curious), he followed us around the rest of the museum.  I’ve loved almost everything Ansel Adams did for a while now.  He can take such mundane natural scenes, and some that are spectacular no matter what, and make them seem otherworldly just by cranking up the white/black contrast or focusing on the nearly parallel lines in a stand of trees, or bringing out a precise clarity of texture in the foreground presented against a smooth and texture-less background.  However, I think I’m just starting to appreciate Georgia O’Keefe, mostly the abstracts, though I still hate those ubiquitous sunflowers.  This may just be because they trigger memories of a horror movie I saw as a kid, in which people get lost in a sunflower field full of stalks taller than their heads, and then attacked by aliens.  I think.  The details are sketchy but the aversion to sunflowers remains. 

Then in the afternoon, we set out on an impromptu brewery tour that ended up encompassing Blue Corn Café and Santa Fe Brewing Company. 

At Blue Corn Cafe, we had lunch and ordered sampler platters of their beer, so many platters (between the 13 of us) that they ran out of sample glasses and started pouring us half-tumblers – bad idea.  Though the tray started with a series of benign light beers (a honey wheat, a blonde, a hefeweizen), they started cranking up the body and hops in the medium-range beers (a pale ale, an IPA, an amber, a red), and then finished off with a couple light bodied but dark beers (a brown, a stout).  It was a very complete platter. 

My favorites were the red and the stout, followed by the IPA.  The red had a good hops-malt balance.  It wasn’t something incredibly unique, but it was a very enjoyable beer to drink alongside my stuffed sopapilla.  The stout, as mentioned above, was relatively light bodied, perhaps the opposite of an imperial, but the flavors that were there were pleasantly roasty, without an overly acidic or bitter aftertaste.  The IPA was very citric, especially in the nose, which made it easier to get the non-hops fans to try.  I think they went easy on the bittering hops and high on the aromatics.  Again, nothing incredibly unique, but easy to drink and enjoy. 

Once we had finished the trays, with much trading across platters (I gave away our blonde and honey wheat in exchange for a red and a stout), it was off to SFBC.  But first, we walked by a store in the mall with a sign that said “cleavage jewelry & clothing,” with the “cleavage” covered up by a somewhat transparent piece of tape with “vintage” written on it.  Was that a typo?  And why did they not send the sign back to the printers?  “Cleavage” for “vintage” is a pretty obvious swap. 

Of course, the first half hour of the SFBC trip was a comedy of errors.  No one had looked up the address, but we all knew we had seen it from the highway on the way in from the airport.  Emily had to pee.  Badly.  And we had eight people stuffed with very little elbow room into the SUV.  We navigated back onto I-25, with Melissa at the wheel and about four backseat drivers shouting over her shoulder.  Then one of the multiple BlackBerry owners in the car got service and the BlackBerry informed us that we ought to be heading east from Santa Fe (not true).  Then someone else got service, found the SFBC webpage and informed us that it was now quarter to four, but the brewery closes at two on Saturdays (also not true).  We were about to throw in the towel and pull over at the nearest fast food franchise to give Emily some relief, when all at once we saw the brewery on out left, like a beacon on a hill.  Getting to the brewery required off-roading up a hill through the back entrance (or rather, it wouldn’t have required this if we hadn’t missed our original turn), but we made it.

When we arrived at Santa Fe Brewing Company, we worried that we were crashing a private party, since we still thought the brewery wasn’t officially open past 2pm.  Not that this stopped us, it just meant that I hung at the back of the group while telling everyone else, “Of course this isn’t a private party!” so that if it was, they’d be the ones to take the brunt of the weird looks. 

Things got off to a rocky start when I saw a beer listed on their board as “Viszolay Belgian” and asked the bartender, “What kind of Belgian is it?”  His response was, “It’s brewed with Belgian yeast.”  Yeah, dude, no shit.  I continued to probe, “Oh, ok.  But what style is it? You know, dubbel, tripel…?”  His response, “No, it’s a Belgian.”  Ok, whatever.  This was the point where I gave up and said, “I’ll have the Chicken Killer Barleywine.”  I wish he had been able to articulate what the Belgian was like,  because when I look at their website now, it sounds delicious:

Viszolay is a distinctly continental ale with a hint of the southwest. Belgian malt, Bavarian and Czech hops, and a secret blend of German and Belgian yeast strains provide this beer, inspired by the Trappist’s Dubbel style ale, with a strong traditional base, while a hint of New Mexico wildflower honey infuses it with that ethereal quality that we New Mexicans simply call, “enchanting”. Like the Trappist ales from which it sprung, Viszolay is light and refreshing. The hop’s subtle notes are overpowered by complex fruity flavors derived from the Belgian yeast, leaving Viszolay a very drinkable (yet rather potent) addition to the Santa Fe Brewing Company’s family of beers.

We took our drinks up to the balcony for what unfolded as a nearly perfect late afternoon.  The sun was shining, it was about 80 F degree out, we had some cold pints in our hand that had cost only $2.50 because it was happy hour… and a massive rugby team was sprawled over the grounds below us.  These guys were hilarious, and at one point started playing full cup boat races, after which they were more hilarious.  There was also the point at which Melissa pointed over the rail and said, “Look, Jess.”  Me: “The dog?  It’s really adorable.” Melissa: “No wonder you’re single — I clearly meant the hot guy.”  Me: “Eh.  But I do really love that dog.” 

Though I drank a pint of each of the barleywine and the IPA, I have no lingering thoughts on either.  I’d drink them again, but didn’t come away vowing to import SFBC to California.

Sunday rolled around and with it came the Tent Rocks hike.  We schlepped out there, mildly hung-over at 9:00am, only to spend an extra 45 minutes in the car because we took the wrong exit.  I have a remarkable ability to sleep through any car ride (and a dangerous capacity to slip into this state even when I’m the driver), so I dozed most of the way.  The hike winds through narrow chasms in the rock, carved by now non-existent rivers up to a 360 degree vista at the top.  We all enjoyed the hike, which was only very mildly strenuous, but I felt bad for sweating at all when we passed an 8-month pregnant woman with three little boys under 5 years old making her way down from the top.  The other moment for concern was the boulder incident.  At one point Kevin thought it would a great idea to climb a boulder for a photo op, a move that followed Matt’s equally fantastic (but, luckily, scrapped) idea to crawl into small den in the rock that looked like it might house a pack of sleeping coyotes.  As Kevin scrambled to his boulder of choice, he dislodged a rock larger than my head which started rolling down hill with ever-increasing momentum.  Though it might have taken out downhill hikers, if there had been any near us, there was no danger of it taking out one of us, something everyone in our group realized, except me.  In my panic, I tried to run away and picked the one direction in which I was absolutely blocked, running myself straight into a rock wall, bashing my shins, and breaking a large branch with my head.  Clearly, if we still lived in a “survival of the fittest” type environment, I’d have been weeded out long ago. 

Monday mostly just involved cleaning up the remarkable quantity of trash accumulated of the last few days, and bidding good-bye to sub-sets of the group as they headed off to the airport. 

I originally intended to include a description of the road trip up the coast in this posting, but it is so long already, that I think I need to work on my materials for tonight’s saison tasting and hold off on the second half of this story until tomorrow. 

So, until then,

Cheers!

The Thirsty Hopster to return this afternoon

I want to say thank you to everyone for being patient with me this last week.  I generally try to write a new post every week day, but I’ve been on vacation for the last six days, and today is my first day back. 

While I didn’t have a lot of time to write while on vacation, I did have a lot of time to visit breweries and taste new beers.  An account of my 4-day trip to Santa Fe and my 2-day trip driving up the California coast will be coming soon. 

Thanks!

Introducing The Little Hopster & the GWB Quest

There are a lot of people out there whose dedication to good beer amazes, impresses, or absolutely boggles me.  Then there’s my sister who not only does all of the above, but delights me by tackling the beer world exactly way I wish I had thought to do. 

Let me tell you a little bit about the Jones women before we get started here, because there’s a baseline level of understanding that some of you have and the rest of you need before you’re going to get where this post is coming from. 

Things we are:

• Opinonated
• Hyper-organized
• Stubborn
• Excited about things that come in sets / doing things in an exhaustive way
• Liable to put our feet in our mouths
• Likely to have beer plans already made for every weekend from now to 2010

Things we are not:

• Demure
• Particularly feminine, graceful, or elegant
• Quitters

What does this mean in general? 

• It means that whatever one of us is excited about, the other is likely to jump onboard relatively quickly and become at least as excited about, in a friendly but semi-competitive manner, whether this is beer, or Seattle, camping & outdoorsy pursuits, history of the American colonies and frontier, or the Iditarod (ok, I haven’t jumped on this boat yet, but I’m on board with Alaska, which is halfway there). 
• It means that we egg each other on to find the next big thing first and to share it with each other before anyone else. 
• It means that we obsessively plan how to take things to the next level, because let’s face it, neither one of us has met a alphabetized, color-coded plan we didn’t like. 
• Finally, it means that we often have moments where we blurt out the same thing at the same time and get progressively louder as we each try to convince the other one we’re right, often not realizing for several minutes that we’re saying the same thing.  (We also just had one of these moments right now.  We’re on vacation with friends, drinking lots of beer.  We’ve each decided that the Jolly Pumpkin Bam Biere is the best of the bunch, and that we want to taste it alongside the other Jolly Pumpkins we bought, the La Roja and Calabaza Blanca.  After seeing friends pull beer after beer from the fridge, with little distinction made between the beer we picked out and the Keystone Light, she turned to me and said “I’m hiding one of the Bam Bieres.”  I looked back at her and said, “That’s what I just did.”)

And what does this mean for beer? 

For me, it means that when we went on our microbrewery tour last year, I felt the need to make a 40 page PowerPoint presentation outlining the trip, including directions, lodging, sites to visit, and info about the microbreweries we’d visit. 

For my sister, affectionately known here as The Little Hopster, it means that she is on a quest to visit every brewery in the state of Washington, and that her system of recording her progress towards this goal is as elaborate as any statistician could hope for.  Not only has she set this goal for herself, and made the database to track it, but she’s already about 1/3 of the way there after only 3 months. 

The Great Washington Beer Quest (GWBQ from here on out) began this March when Melissa suggested she wanted to “go where the sunshine was,” prompting Allie to dupe Melissa into driving her out to Kennewick to taste beer, even though Melissa doesn’t even like (most) beer.  They went to seven microbreweries and brewpubs that day. 

Their favorite experience was Roslyn Brewing Company, in Roslyn, Washington, also known as the set of Northern Exposure.  Now, Northern Exposure played a large role in our childhood.   I realize I am betraying here, once again, how young we are compared to most beer fans.  Ah well, it can’t be helped.  In any case, Northern Exposure was my mom’s favorite show, not least of all we suspect due to a latent crush on Rob Morrow, a.k.a. Dr. Joel Fleischman.  Apparently, not quite as many beer fans know this piece of Roslyniana as Marilee of RBC would hope, and thus she was ecstatic when Allie & Melissa asked about the town’s relation to the show.  She whipped out a picture of herself as an extra and entertained the two of them for the better part of the afternoon with stories of the Roslyn heyday.   

However, Allie reminds me that the real origin of this quest is day she began to love craft beer.  It was part of a weekend trip I took Vermont to visit her at Middlebury College during her junior year.  I brought a couple sixers of Brooklyn Brown and Allagash White with me, and in the course of a weekend converted her over from Twisted Tea and Midori sours (I know, I know – that stuff is seriously toxic, I feel like I’ve saved her from early onset diabetes and poisoning by Blue Lake 40 and Yellow #5). 

The Joneses fall hard and fast when we find something new, and the next day Allie was out at the grocery store stocking up what came to be known as the ‘beer fridge’ – the rest of the semester it contained nothing else.  Emily, one of her best friends from college jumps in at this moment to volunteer, “You couldn’t go to the grocery store without buying beer.”  Melissa adds, “You still can’t!”  To which Allie responds, “No that’s not true! I even went into Bottleworks one time and didn’t buy anything!” Melissa: “yeah, one time…”

So back to the GWBQ: She spent the equivalent of two full work days combing Brew News, Beer Advocate, and “some random website I can’t remember” to put together an up-to-date list of all breweries in Washington.  By her count, there are 73 Washington breweries, and this includes recent additions to the roster, such as Laughing Buddha.  She notes that while there are other lists out there, none are as up to date as her own. 

For each one, she collected:

• Brewery name
• Type (brewpubs, microbreweries w/ tasting rooms, microbreweries w/o tasting rooms)
• City
• Region within Washington
• State (you can tell she’s already thinking about future expansion into Oregon and the rest of the US)
• Web-site
• Address
• Phone number
• Whether the brewery is a Washington Beer Lovers (WABL) member
• How many beers they have (e.g. 5 year round + seasonals)
• Their BeerAdvocate BeerFly rating
• The hours they are open to the public
• And whether or not she has visited yet

So far, she’s been to 23 of the 73 breweries, including 17 brewpubs and 6 microbreweries with tasting rooms.  She also created a Google Map of all of these breweries, which she updates as they open or close.  Here are a few stats on what’s out there in Washington and where she’s been, and then I’ll post the full list of breweries below. 

By Region:

Overall:         That Allie has visited:

Seattle/King County:            22                11 (50%)

North WA:                             15                 1 (7%)

South WA:                             11                 0 (0%)

Southeast WA:                      10                  7 (70%)

Northeast WA:                        8                  0 (0%)

Western WA:                           6                  4 (67%)

Uncategorized:                       1                  0 (0%)    

Total                            73             23 (32%)

 

By Type:

Overall:         That Allie has visited:

Brewpub:                               49                17 (35%)

Micro w/ tasting room:         13                  6 (46%)

Micro w/o tasting room:       11                  0 (0%)       

Total                             73            23 (32%)

 

By WABL Membership:

 

Overall:         That Allie has visited:

Member:                           46                19 (41%)

Non-Member:                   27                 4 (15%)      

Total                         73            23 (32%)

 

Complete List of Washington breweries:

Locations visited thus far by The Little Hopster in bold

Name, Type (BP = brewpub, TR = micro w/tasting room, MB = micro w/o), City

• Alpine                                          MB      Oroville
• Anacortes                                    BP      Anacortes
• Atomic Ale Brewpub                BP      Richland
• Baron                                           TR      Seattle
• Big Time                                       BP      Seattle (U. Dist.)
• Birdsview Brewing                         BP      Concrete
• Boundary Bay                                BP      Bellingham
• Cashmere                                     MB      Cashmere
• Chuckanut Brewery                      BP      Bellingham
• Coeur D’Alene                              BP      Spokane
• Diamond Knot                              BP      Mukilteo
• Dick’s & NW Sausage                   BP      Centralia
• Elk Head                                      TR      Buckley
• Ellersick Brewing                          TR      Lynnwood
• Elliot Bay                                    BP      Seattle (W.Seattle)
• Elysian                                        BP      Seattle (Cap. Hill)
• Engine House #9                          BP      Tacoma
• Fish                                              BP      Olympia
• Flyers                                            BP      Oak Harbor
• Georgetown                                  MB      Seattle
• Grey Parrot                                    BP      Long Beach
• Hale’s Ales                                  BP      Seattle (Fremont)
• Harmon                                         BP      Tacoma
• Hazel Dell                                      BP      Vancouver
• Hood Canal                                TR      Kingston
• Ice Harbor                                   BP      Kennewick
• Iron Horse                                     TR      Ellensberg
• La Conner                                      BP      La Conner
• Laht Neppur                                TR      Waitsburg
• Laughing Buddha Brewing Co.        TR      Seattle
• Lazy Boy                                        MB      Everett
• Lost Falls                                       TR      Colville
• Mac and Jack’s                               MB      Redmond
• Maritime Pacific                         BP      Seattle (Ballard)
• McMenamins                               BP      Seattle (QA/Fremont)
• Methow Valley                               BP      Twisp
• Mill Creek                                      BP      Walla Walla
• Naked City                                    MB      Seattle
• North Fork                                    BP      Deming
• Northern Ales                               MB      Northport
• Northern Lights                            BP      Spokane
• Peak’s Pub                                    BP      Port Angeles
• Pike                                             BP      Seattle (Downtown)
• Port Townsend                          TR      Port Townsend
• Powerhouse                                 BP      Puyallup
• Pyramid                                      BP      Seattle (Downtown)
• Ram                                             BP      Seattle (U. Dist.)
• Rattlesnake Mtn./Kimo’s        BP      Richland
• Redhook                                      BP      Woodinville
• Rock Bottom                             BP      Seattle
• Rocky Coulee                              MB      Odessa
• Rogue/Issaquah                       BP      Issaquah
• Roslyn                                       TR      Roslyn
• Salmon Creek                              BP      Vancouver
• San Juan Brewing Co.                   BP      Friday Harbor, San Juan Isl.
• Schooner Exact                           MB      Seattle
• Scuttlebutt                                  BP      Everett
• Silver City                                 BP      Silverdale
• Skagit River                              BP      Mt. Vernon
• Skookum                                    TR      Arlington
• Skye Book and Brew                    BP      Dayton
• Snipes Mtn.                              BP      Sunnyside
• Snoqualmie Falls                     TR      Snoqualmie
• Speedway Brewing Co.                BP      Lacey
• Steffan’s Aldergrove Brewery       MB      Tulalip
• Stix Brewing                                BP      Seattle
• Swinging Arm Rest.                     BP      Black Diamond
• Twin Rivers                                 BP      Monroe
• Two Beers Brewing Co.                MB      Seattle
• Walking Man                               BP      Stevenson
• Water Street                             BP      Port Townsend
• Whitstran                                 TR      Prosser
• Winthrop                                    BP      Winthrop

‘New’ Magnolia brewpub update

Last night I ventured out to the new Magnolia for their ‘Grand Opening’ to check out the new menu and renovated restaurant space.  Unfortunately, the restaurant was still closed, as you can see by the paper lining the windows in the photo to the left.  A note posted on the door promised that they would be opening tonight at 5:00pm, but given the looks of the inside of the place, I doubt that. 

The external structure is still the same, and they’ve left up their original sign on the outside, but I have to wonder how long it will stay there given their re-branding efforts.  All the other colorful hippy-esque touches on the inside are gone, and the front door already bears their new black and gold logo. If you look at the picture below (sorry about the poor quality, snapped through a window at night sans flash), you can see that they’ve painted over the mural with metallic gold paint.   They have also added black leather booth upholstery and a bar along the wall to the left of the door.  So much of the restaurant looked unfinished last night, with few tables along the right windows (maybe no tables are going back in there?  It would certainly relieve the crush of people waiting around the door, except the crowd would be even bigger, for lack of tables). 

I won’t be there again tonight to try once more, because I am seeing off my friend Nick, who’s headed to Helsinki.  However, last night’s ongoing construction weren’t the only factors getting in the way of my beer drinking.  No, sadly, there was one more big disappointment last night: Amber Is The Night is flat!  I guess the yeast up and died at some point without notifying me, but this means I now have 50 bottles of uncarbonated, homebrewed alt beer on my hands.  Let me know if you need any marinade or have other ideas for what to do with 5 gallons of beer without any bubbles. 

Luckily, and I’m so happy I can end on a positive note here, both of last night’s major disappointments were offset by the fact that I made some incredible new friends.  Before heading over to Magnolia, I met Steve and Gail from Beer by BART.  They had found my blog on either Peter’s BetterBeerBlog or Jay’s Brookston Beer Bulletin, I forget which.   In any case, we met at Toronado for a pint, en route to my place to try the underachieving alt, en route to Magnolia to confront the construction.  I loved hearing about the beer tasting class they had taken in Los Altos (I may have to look into this…) and Gail’s recent BJCP exam.  My favorite part of our conversation about the exam was hearing that people form very serious study groups outside their preparation classes.  First of all, how awesome would that be to have a beer study group where ’doing your homework’ literally means ‘drinking beer’?  Also, I like the way that would help you meet and get to know other beer drinkers. 

In the end, we ate at All You Knead, a diner a few doors down from Magnolia, where the breakfast-served-all-day further soothed my disappointment over the way the beer evening had gone so far.  We found out that we all really like Anchor Porter, so we each ordered one and Gail & Steve told me about their unsuccessful attempt to find the Anchor Porter on tap anywhere around here.  In the end, not too bad for a Wednesday. 

Brand new Magnolia gastropub opening tonight

As you all may or may not know, Magnolia is definitely one of my five favorite restaurants in the city, and quite possibly my absolute favorite if I were forced to make a choice.  

They have been closed for renovation for the last nine days to make some major changes not just to the space itself, but also to the menu and the ‘concept’ of the restaurant.  They re-open tonight and I encourage anyone who can make it to attend.  I also encourage everyone to check out owner Dave McLean’s very thoughtful and engaging blog about the remodel.  Here are a few highlights:

The new menu: They are embracing the slow food movements principles of local, fresh ingredients (even more than before) as well as the British concept of the gastropub (pub food, but done really well, with care for the final quality of the dish).  Neither of these seem like such as stretch from what they were doing before, I’d say both were ideas were manifest in their previous menu, so it will be interesting to see how they will be taking this further.  

The new concept:  Certainly the slow food and gastropub concepts will be part of the new Magnolia experience, but it also seems like there is an additional element that for lack of a better word I’ll call ‘elegance’.  The old Magnolia featured Grateful Dead-inspired murals and bright colors in the restaurant and online.  The new Magnolia I haven’t seen yet, but the website is all black and silver and chic.  I do hope this means it will be less of a crush of people inside and that they’ll develop a better system for taking names on the waitlist (as opposed to the current practice of threading through the whole restaurant dodging other waitlistees with drinks in their hands and waiters with trays of food to make it to the far corner to hang out by the kitchen entrance for 10 minutes trying to find someone to take your name).  On the other hand, I hope it doesn’t go too far upscale – we already have The Alembic for that.  

The new space: Both the restaurant space and the restrooms are being remodeled.  There are only a few details I know for sure as of now and these include:

 

 

• The mural is coming down (sad!) and there will be new paint in the restaurant
• The booths now have wainscoting
• There is new tile in the bathrooms
• Perhaps most excitingly: a new tap wall!

Hopefully, I will get a chance to check it out tonight.  My original plan was to get there as early as possible (5:30-ish?), but of course fate has decided that today will be the busiest day yet on my current case at work.  So, my new plan is just to try to make it at all, most likely on the later end of the night.  Email me if you’d like to meet up at Magnolia!