Best Brew Pubs

The Quest for the Holy Grain - Best Brew Pubs

California

Chico

	Sierra Nevada Taproom, Restaurant, & Brewery 1075 East 20th Street Chico , CA 95928 1 (530) 345-2739 Imagine crossing a vast brown desert that stretches for miles and miles and finally arriving in the town of Chico . Ahead of you, rising from the desert floor, is the Emerald City of OZ. Sierra Nevada is not your run of the mill brewery, restaurant and taphouse. It is, by all standards, posh. Tours of the brewery are available, take one. This is about the taproom and the beer. As you enter the taproom two huge copper kettles in a glass enclosed showroom with control panels reminiscent of Three Mile Island capture your eye. A long wooden and mirrored bar created the rightmost boundary of the taproom. High above in an upper corner is a full-sized statue of Bigfoot, the spiritual godfather for this part of California . The bar is lined by about 15 stools. Two large cabinets flank the arched center mirror of the bar back. The one on the right is topped by stained glass art. The cabinet on the left is more eclectically filled beneath its own stained glass. A large board detailing current beer offerings is found to the right of the bar. Stools and tables abound, and a row of booths abut the outside beer garden. The taproom could accommodate a couple hundred people and did at times with the noises level rising and falling with the numbers that included a mostly younger crowd. There is a skylight above the high tables and beautiful copper HVAC along the ceiling. It stops well short of luxurious but it is swank. We sat at a table for two and were immediately impressed by the fact that the Sierra Nevada taproom offered excellent personal service. A busboy dropped a glass and three more people suddenly appeared to make sure the glass was cleaned up. In this increasingly self-service world the quality of service at Sierra Nevada was luxurious. There were eight permanent taps, twelve rotating seasonals, and three beyond-beer choices. Kudos to SN on the range of beer styles available at the taproom. They had two Pils, a bock, two stouts, a wheat, and a bunch of IPAs? At Sierra Nevada ? Chance in a million. We engaged two flights each, four four- ounce pours from the permanent and rotating taps. It was Lagerworks Pils, Resist Anti Imperial IPA (proceeds to Ukraine ), Pale Bock and Hoptimum for my first flight followed by It Can't Always Be Night, Crystal Wheat, Knightro, and Widen the Aperture Lager . Of course one cannot leave Sierra Nevada without trying the original. Pints range from $6 to $8. Chico gets hot, but this day was pleasant and the blue skies and shade added to the pleasure of the experience. We drank more than we ate but a pound of wings was nicely done followed by a couple of overpriced but tasty salads. It was West Coast chill and I miss the aggression of the East. No one gave anyone dirty looks, everyone was polite, and our server was genuinely pleased to learn we travelled by UBER. It made you want to stand up and bump into someone. Sierra Nevada will not blow your mind but it will make a very pleasant memory from one of the homes of an original craft beer brewery.

	Moylan's Brewing Company 15 Rowland Way Novato, CA 94945 (415) 898-4677 It was a California soundstage. The hotel was at the end of a dead-end road, nothing but water-starved brush for landscape near a building suitable for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel. Moylan's is a quarter-mile away but the freeway and its crossing point make it a two-mile walk. Joan may be the only Uber driver in Novato, her van is filthy and she is crazy. The scene shifts to a California oasis, an intersection with trendy strip malls and shopping centers on every corner. Moylan's occupies one of them. Minutes from the dead-end road it is as incongruous as the interior of Moylan's is tacky Scottish. It has the inside wooden architecture (exposed heavy-timbered trusses) that is reminiscent of Deschute's in Portland but with that sunny California outlook on life that is ultimately so artificial. The walls are covered with a patina of Scotland and tavernalia. A long bar lined with bar seating across the aisle from the barstools stretched to the right. Up a few steps is a dining area. The place is moderately full and preternaturally quiet. I do not like it. Not because of how it looks but because it exists in an artificial environment in what ought to be farmland or desert. I should like it, though. It has heavy wooden furniture, moderately attractive chandelier lighting in the dining room, tiffany lights in the bar. Let's go to the flag and pennant festooned wooden bar. Behind it are the brewery works, visible only from the end of the bar at which we sit.. The other end leads to the open kitchen where the bar food is prepared. The plentiful taps are clustered at both ends of the bar. Right in front of me a Barrel-O-Meter tells us 2757 barrels have been served to date with 248 pints per barrel. There are thirteen Moylan beers on tap this day, all listed on the mandatory chalkboard. I am a little disappointed by the number, given their array of beers, but I was not disappointed by any of the beers. I began with a Hopsickle Triple IPA and it was so good I was not going to deviate from it, but what a shame that would have been. A Hop Craic XXXX IPA was next, it was killer, followed by a very nice New Zealand IPA. I finished off with a Whiskey Barrel Aged Double Kiltlifter that weighed in at 12% and that is when I really knew I hate this place. Moylan has great beer. But it also has everything that is wrong with beer drinking in America today...it is family friendly. Imagine sitting in a beautiful long bar with a nice tall 12% beer in front of you and a twelve-year old appears on the stool next to you with hamburger stuck in his braces on a Saturday night. Brewing beer is not a family-friendly activity, to try to make it so violates half the laws of nature. Altered states are the goal of drinking. Drinking beer in a bar is not a bring-the-kids opportunity. If I want to say I'd give a month's pay to f*** her I do not want to have to worry about a ten-year old girl giving me a #MeToo look. “Didn't you say your father used to take you to his bar for a coke with a cherry in it and a box of pretzels?” my bar mate asks. “That was different.” “How?” “Shut up, you're not helping.” If I were beer Czar and you brewed beer, no one under 21 would be allowed near the premises. Family-friendly my ass.

Lagunitas Brewing Company 1280 North McDowell Blvd. Petaluma, Calif. 94954 707.778.8776 Lagunitas Brewing Company. Lag-Unitas. A Baltimore connection if there ever was one. And the 2016 Preakness shows Exaggerator as the winner on a big screen in the corner. I sip a Sumpin' Sumpin' and my companion has a Dogtown Pale. Every seat is taken, the din of happy quaffers is deafening. “Why do we keep coming to such popular places?” he asks. Beer has changed. My dad drank at a stag bar. Google it if you do not know the term. Lagunitas in Petaluma, home of Charles “Peanuts” Schultze and the world's arm wrestling championship, is part farm (grain silos loom in the background), part performance venue with two stages one with a grassy amphitheater, part playground, part beer garden, part tavern, part souvenir store. Families on the grassy parts, music on the stage, beer flowing, food passing through the crowds and this is just a regular Saturday. When we entered there were 200-300 people milling about or anchored to scarce seats inside and out. We definitely raised the average age of the crowd. Halfway through our first beer two bar seats opened up. We sat, backs to the bar, watching the Preakness and when we turned around we had a bucket of peanuts and pretzels. It was California, the women had bare backs and legs; it made it difficult to watch horses in mud. There were 19 beers on tap....some were going to go undrunk. By the way, we had a hotel in walking distance, a walk that was shorter going to Lagunitas than coming back because it was a straight line going to the Lagunitas but not on the way back. Lucky 13 is an imperial red ale and a great beer; it followed a Lil' Sumpin, Equinox, Imperial Stout, Z in Ztout , Hop Stoopid... and by then I was. The beers were fresh and every bit as good as you would expect from Lagunitas. Each was served in a jar. Tavern food-- nachos, wings, sandwiches—were available. This was a destination stop. We had affable beertenders but it was too busy to strike up a conversation with anyone and so loud you had to lean in on your own conversation which competed with live music and crowd noise. Counting us, I saw four senior citizens on our visit. One, Neil, approached us and said he has enjoyed seeing us here every Saturday over the years. So I will spend tomorrow looking for our doppelgangers. This ain't no stag bar, dammit.

	Russian River Brewing Company 725 4th St. Santa Rosa, CA 95404 (707) 545-2337 You can't get Russian River beer back home. When I go to California I find it rarely. It is 2,817 miles from my house to the Russian River Brewery and it is a trip I knew I was someday going to make. A car, two planes a rental car and hotel check-in later I was walking East on 4th street toward its 700 block, on a picture-perfect California day. Up ahead, on the sidewalk, was a mass of people standing in a loosely organized queue. There went my first fantasy of a nice little table by a window in a cozy little pub where people loved to talk beer. I do not wait in lines as a rule. There is nowhere I want to go so badly. There were two lines, one for eating and drinking and one for carryout. I travelled 2,817 miles. I waited. Thirty minutes later we were in the door. First order of business, request a table...45 minute wait. Now head to the bar. The building is not as big as many brewpubs. The pub was split in two by a wooden divider. On one side was a bar that stayed two and three deep my entire visit. A few tables abutted the divider on the bar side. On the other side were a variety of tables for parties of two, four, six or more. Large beer signs, few in number. An unremarkable place. Above the bar is a chalkboard list of the available beers. It is a thing of beauty...colored chalks, OG, ABV visible from anywhere in the main room. Amazingly on this very crowded Saturday every beer on the left board is a $4.75 16 oz. pour and every beer on the right board is a $4 12 oz. pour. There are 21 Russian River beers on tap and several more available in bottles. There is nary a Pliny the Younger. My plan was to get a flite of beers, figure what I like and go after it. But there is nowhere to sit and to set a flite so I go after a pint. After standing through my first pint, Pliny the Elder, we found a couple of stools at a super crowded, noisy bar. Damnation was my second choice, followed by Perdition and then when my Bierre de Sonoma arrived a table was ready, just about 45 minutes in. By now I am experiencing the Russian River effect, but I am sitting and I finally have a place to set a flite, so I order one. It comes with 3 oz. glasses of all 21 beers on the board. It is a thing of beauty and wonder. I begin with Erudition which gets high marks, then Perdition, which I had earlier and liked. By the time I got to my ninth sample, OVL, I realize I will never finish this flite. I fall three short, all sours; I dare not test my stomach and I am now under water. The crowd is young and it is large. No one seems too earnest. The wait staff are working their butts off but no one is talking about the beer. Neither does anyone seem very knowledgable about it; they are just selling it. I expected a consecrated place with erudite staff but damnation if it wasn't just a bunch of young'uns. The one salvation was the beer itself. Food runs to pizza. The appetizers are basically slices of pizza cut into small bite- size pieces. The menu has a few salads and sandwiches, but pizza rules. My itch for Russian River has been scratched. If I could do it over I'd go on a slow day, if they have them. I'd share a flite and choose a few pints but my opinion of Russian River would not change. Been there. Done that.

The Lost Abbey
155 Mata Way, Suite 104
San Marcos, California 92069
800-918-6816
www.lostabbey.com

We're-Not-Worthy Beer Tour stop #2. If Stone isn't enough then travel the 3.2 miles to brewer Tomme Arthur's beer playground at The Lost Abbey, located in a light industrial complex.
We were there on a Saturday afternoon when it was standing room only, albeit any room to sit or stand was scarce.
Still, the beers, which include brews from both Port Brewing and Lost Abbey, are worth a stand on one leg if necessary.
Lost Abbey beers are all high-end and Belgian-inspired. Some are within a traditional beer style, others defy both tradition and style.
During our visit the nine Lost Abbey taps ranged from a 4.8% Witch's Wit to an 11% Serpent's Stout, with most closer to the stout in abv. You may not be standing at all after two pints in this place. Wooden barrels are everywhere, including being used as bar stools.
While there's no food, Lost Abbey offers some of the best craft beers we've ever tasted.
You want to go to there.

Green Flash Brewing Company
1430 Vantage Court, Suite 104
Vista, California 92081-8545
760-597-9012
http://www.greenflashbrew.com/

Yes, it is another high-end San Diego brewery and another brewery in a light industrial development. So what's not to like? No pub here, just a tasting room open on Friday evenings and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. $6 bought us a taste of nine beers, eight of which were 6%+ and some available only at the brewery. Full pints are also available, as are growlers and bottles for take home. You won't be disappointed.

	Breakwater Brewing Company 101 N Coast Hwy Oceanside, CA 92054 (760) 433-6064 While the greater Los Angeles area was quite late in getting on the microbrew bandwagon, that was not the case for San Diego, located only 100 miles to the south, where microbrewing has been the rage for a couple of decades now. Oceanside is a very popular vacation beach town located precisely midway between the two, but for beer lovers it is a close-in suburb of San Diego. Breakwater Brewing Company is a brewpub located in busiest part of the downtown area, two or three blocks from the beach. There are lots of TVs broadcasting sporting events. Food fare includes burgers, sandwiches and pizza, but the star of course is the beer, brewed on premises and not distributed elsewhere. The working part of the brewery is hidden in the back kitchen, but the important part – the taps – are right where they need to be in the bar. The night we visited they were pouring 30+ beers, including all of their own and quite a few really interesting guest beers. Their beers ran the gamut from great to sublime – really, we could not find anything mediocre, and we sampled quite a few. We had already eaten, so did not get a chance to order food, although most of the patrons seemed to be enjoying pizza. This is a definite must-visit brewpub, strategically located to furnish refreshment to road-weary So Cal travelers as well as beach revelers.

Beach Chalet Brewery
1000 Great Hwy
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 386-8439

Location, location, location.
The Beach Chalet Brewery serves their beer with one of the finest views of any brew pub in the country.
If you believe your beer tastes better whilst beholding a fantastic vista, the Beach Chalet might serve you the tastiest beer you've ever had.
Take a stroll through Golden Gate Park, and don't stop ‘til you reach the beach. There you'll find the Beach Chalet on the second floor of the Golden Gate Visitor Center.
Huge windows span the entire front wall, providing a magnificent view of the beach and Pacific Ocean. When we visited, there were seven beers on tap.
I enjoyed the Imperial Stout from the Dark Side Series – seasonal dark beers inspired by Star Wars. Most impressive.
The food and service is also great. Make this place an excuse to visit Golden Gate Park.
If you can, catch the sunset over the Pacific.

21st Amendment Brewery
563 2nd St
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415) 369-0900

You probably know 21st Amendment from the cartoony drawings of Washington, Lincoln, Paul Revere, and of course, Ham, the space chimp, on their cans.
21 st Amendment makes the environmentally friendly choice of canning rather than bottling their beer.
If you're not a fan of the can, all the well-known brews such as Back in Black and Live Free or Die IPA are available on tap.
You'll find a few delicious seasonals on the beer menu as well. I particularly enjoyed the Oak Smoked Porter.

With a rotation of about 10 beers on tap and a variety of good food, 21st Amendment brewery is a must-visit if you're in the SOMA area. It is a great place to pregame or watch the Giants game, located only two blocks from the park.
You're sure to find some spirited Giants fans at the bar.

Karl Strauss Brewing Company
901A South Coast Drive
Costa Mesa, California 92626
714-546-2739
wwwkarlstrauss.com

Southern California is home to six Karl Strauss brewery-restaurants. We visited the Costa Mesa location next to the sprawling South Coast plaza and there were plenty of thirsty beautiful-people shoppers on hand. Based on a number of visits over the years, Karl Strauss beers have always been first class, ranging from Endless Summer Light (when's the last time you saw an American craft-brewed 3.4% beer?) to a seasonal saison (7%) and trippel (9%). Food is on the better side of typical brewpub fare and stretches from mac and cheese to filet mignon. A large parking structure is a short walk away. For a mall brewery, this Karl Strauss is worth going out of your way to visit.

Stone Brewing Company
1999 Citracado Parkway
Escondido, California 92029
760-471-4999
www.stonebrew.com

The We're-Not-Worthy Beer Tour stop #1. We recently visited Stone for the fourth time, and this time we included a brewery tour before lunch. Tours are free but you need to sign in early as they fill up quickly; you'll get to see an operation that looks more like one of the big guys than a craft brewery. Besides, the tour finishes with a sampler of five Stone beers. Great start. Stone is one of the few brewery-restaurants that has paid attention to food and how it pairs with its beers, so anticipate a damn good meal. And it looks and acts like a restaurant, with park-like outside dining and a soaring inside dining area. Imagine a California biergarten...this is it. But then, seriously, there's Stone beer. When we visited there were nine Stone beers on tap and three more in the bottle, including Cali-Belgique IPA (6.9%, $5), Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale (8.7%, $4), and the 2007 and 2008 Old Guardian Barley Wines (each 11.26% and $12). But if Stone beer alone were not enough, there were also 23 taps and 69 bottles from places like Alesmith, Green Flash, Russian River, Moylan's, Brew Dog and others. All well-crafted and mostly big beers, and with great food and service to accompany them. This must be on your brewery bucket list.

Sudwerk Restaurant & Brewery
2001 2nd St
Davis, CA 95618-5474
(530) 758-8700

In Davis, Questors must go to Sudwerk Restaurant & Brewery. Period. German beer made in America. Why didn't someone back East think of that? Smooth and consistently flavorful beers is what you will find at this award-winning Rheinheitsgebot Brauerei.

Brewed on premises, these are splendid brews. The hefeweizen is one of the best outside der Vaterland. This is not Southern California, but it is California, and the clientele is so good looking on some nights, that many Questors risk being asked to leave for excessive blandness. No way these women drink beer and look like this...no way.