Sonoma Beer Mini-tour

As I said in my previous post, the other two places I wanted to go to were the Lagunitas Brewery and the Russian River Brewpub.  The first place we got to visit was the Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, California.

Lagunitas

Lagunitas has tastings and tours every weekday at 3PM.  Their bar where the tastings are held is in a loft above the bottling floor.  There are some unique items in the loft.

It's a Barbie chandelier.  No idea why it's there.  Here's their fridge:

On the upper left corner there is a ticket someone brought in where they got ticketed for drinking Lagunitas while riding their motorcycle.

The beer tastings are great, you get to try half a dozen of their best beers.  My current favorite is their new Pale Ale.

Ok, on to the tour.  They have recently replaced and enlarged the brewery, which is probably why we can get almost all of their beers in Chicago now.  Honestly, these picture weren't that interesting, so here are a few other things they had there.

I want to know where in Chicago these kegs are going.

I hadn't heard of beer being aged in wine casks before I saw these:

I'd love to try that beer.

I was hoping to get this as a souvenir, but they wouldn't sell it to me.

Russian River Brewpub

We hit the Russian River Brewpub on Sunday night.  The brewpub is located in downtown Santa Rosa.  We got there a little after 8PM, and to our amazement, the place was totally packed.  There was a great band playing, and we were really lucky to get a table in the back.

The band was great, they played swing music, the blues and some straight rockers too.  Lots of people were dancing as well.

But I was here for their beers.  The guys at beerschool.com repeatedly have said how good Russian River beer was.  Here's the sampler I got.

And yeah, I was on Twitter when she was taking the picture. 

Here's the list of 'regular' (not Belgian) beers they had on tap that night.

I had all of these in my sampler.  Only $0.50 per sample, I thought it was a great deal.  I ended up getting a pint of the Blind Pig IPA, I really liked it a lot.  Although all of the beers were good.

Here are the Belgians:

I'll try these the next time I'm out there!

One last picture, here's the back room where they age their casks:

One last thing, here's a little video of the outside of the Lagunitas Brewery, showing their people hard at work.

Outside Lagunitas Brewery from Matt Volk on Vimeo.

Comments

[donkeypuncher]

How much Pliny did you bring back for me? :)