My folks live in SD and I've been lucky enough to visit them and go to many of the breweries. Here's what I think (this got a little wordy, sorry about that)

Stone: 40 minutes from downtown SD. Huge restaurant, brewery and an amazing outdoor garden area with picnic tables, streams and trees. Should be amazing during Thanksgiving weather. Tours available but they fill up quick. Great gift shop with growler fills. Plus, great brews.
AleSmith: 20-30 mins from downtown. Located in a warehouse, the taproom is bare bones. $1 4-5 oz tastings of most if not all of their stuff. Speedway Stout is a must-try.
Ballast Point: 20-30 mins from downtown. 10 minutes from AleSmith. Small tasting room with pints of their stuff. Tours available. Sculpin is delicious.
Mission: Walking distance from downtown. Huge space that used to be an old building. They only have 5 beers out, and they're average. Not sure about tours
Coronado Brewing: A ferry ride over to Coronado from downtown SD. Restaurant/brewery. No tours that I know of available but decent food and a large selection of beers. Idiot IPA is an awesome DIPA.
Lost Abbey: 45 minutes from downtown. You need to like the styles Lost Abbey produces if you go here. $1 4-5 oz samples. Tours available and it's really interesting because they have all of their barrel aging on display, which is an incredible amount.
Pizza Port: Few locations within 20-30 mins of downtown SD. Great pizza, a really awesome and diverse list of beers. No brewery tours.
Alpine: About an hour out of the city. Small room where they sell tasters, but they prefer you go to the restaurant and order pints. World class beer and amazing fried pickles. You won't need a tour because the tasting room is inside the tiny brewery. When I went, the head brewer was having a beer and talking to us. Highly recommended.

If you just want to try a lot of local SD beer, I'd recommend two taprooms.
Toronado:Incredible list of beers. You'll definitely get stuff you never thought you'd get to try. Pliny typically on tap as well as 20+ more.
Hamilton's Tavern: Really cool bar. Knowledgeable staff and awesome loaded tots. Again, a wide variety of local SD stuff.

One last thing, if you want to buy beer, go to Best Damn Beer Shop which is walking distance from downtown. They have everything you could want from the west coast and stuff you didn't know you wanted. Ask for Sid, he'll give you great recommendations.

Here is a picture I took of the taps at Toronado. From what I can see there are beers from Russian River, Alpine, Port, Lost Abbey, Stone and others on tap. I'd highly suggest it.

Have never wanted a beer so bad at 10:30 in the middle of class.

So I lied and found a Founders Breakfast Stout in the fridge after I thought I had drank them all. I've started to blog about my ventures in brewing/drinking this month so if you feel so inclined you can check out my review/other stuff here: http://theaustinmunro.com/BeerBlog/.

You guys are great! Now I just gotta convince a relative to drive me around...

PSA for all beer lovers: MI winter fest tickets will be going on sale in about a month.

But deezy, who would want to go to Michigan in February??? The beer fest in Grand Rapids is awesome. Outside venue, lots of fire pits and over 80 different breweries. Plus grand rapids is home to Founders and Hopcat which is a top 10 beer bar in America IIRC. If you have the funds for a quick vacation and winter clothes, I'd really recommend checking it out

My Chocolate Stout and Karmeleit clone are on tap.

I'm enjoying the Karmeleit more than I thought I would, although we have a darker color to ours than true Karmeleit has.

The Chocolate Stout is really good, but we missed what I was going by a little bit. There's a smokiness in the back of the throat that I didn't want. Need to back off the grain bill a little bit, we used black patent and roasted barley, and some 350L Munich. Can probably reduce or take some of that out and still get the nice dark color I want?

Had a Pumking and St. Louis Gueze Fond Tradition last night. Pumking is hands down my favorite pumpkin beer of the season. The gueze was one of my first experiences with the style. It was good but there's something about wild/sour/farmhouse ales that I just don't get. They're good, but for some reason I can't get into them. This is probably good because I hear they're $$$$.

PtE, a lot of belgian sours can be found at better prices than domestic ones. You should be able to get a monk's cafe in 11.2oz bottles for decent money. You should also be able to get the regular rodenbach in 750 for under $10.

If you have any more of the gueze, I'd be more than willing to trade. I'm a big time sour freak

I picked up some Innis & Gunn Highland Cask. It's a beer aged in malt whiskey casks anyone ever had before?

I've heard nothing but really good things about I&G

It just showed up here in Nashville too, and its in clear bottles. I'm so sick of buying European imports that are old, or light-struck, or otherwise damaged that I'm not going to touch anything from overseas that's not in a dust free brown bottle.

There's too much good beer made here in the US to waste my money buying something from overseas packaged in clear glass.

Had a few Bells Octoberfest's tonight and they were way better than what I was expecting. Nothing out if this world but a solid beer for sure

I tried a couple of I & G's recently. Didn't take notes but I remember thinking something like meh. Haven't bought any since. Would agree w RDH's assessment.

The Innis & Gunn Highland Cask was a bit of a let down. I didn't get any skunkiness or sun struck tastes/aromas but it was a pretty boring beer overall. The whiskey didn't really come into play at all and that was what I was most excited about. The underlying beer was a bit underwhelming in depth and would probably make for a better session beer than anything.

On another note I decided that I am going to brew a different style of beer each month from the 2008 BJCP style guidelines. I am also going to try and get a friend to help brew which means we should be able to kill all 23 styles.

I'd like to brew certain styles for certain months, IE spice/herb/vegetable one for October drinking, or a porter style for November, saison for a summer month, etc...

If anyone has any cool ideas I'd like to hear them as I should probably start planning out the brew schedule now.

Also if anyone wants to do something similar and do some swaps throughout the year etc let me know.

I made a calendar a while back with brews matched to holidays, and then brew dates for those beers based on what they needed. So like a pre-prohibition American pilsner for July 4, need to brew it in May for it to be ready, an IPA for Diwali, that type of thing. Damned if I know what happened to it, though. But I think that's a cool way to go about planning brew days.

Still haven't brewed since May sometime, just too busy with life.

Yeah, incorporating specific holidays would be a great idea. If anyone else has some cool ideas for beers/holidays/months let me know!

Anyone ever work with Brown Malt? Anyone ever make their own from Pale Malt? I'm looking at a recipe that calls for 2.5lbs of it but my LHBS doesn't carry and I've read that you can make it yourself (http://homebrewingadventures.blogspo...rown-malt.html) so I guess I am going to give it a shot.

Sounds like a cool idea WU.

Id like to to say I was going to do that but Im all over the place with my brews that are planned, currently I have a Simcoe SMaSh and a RIS that I need to brew in the next 2 months then I would like to get into some wild brewing.

Actually, I racked a 6 gallon batch of an American Blonde I brewed that finished at 1.012. Since 6 gallons doesnt fit in a 5 gallon keg I figured here what the hell I might as well rack a gallon to a 1 gallon carboy and pitch some bugs. Im going to pitch the dregs from a few different beers, I started with an Orval bc thats what I had in my fridge then Im probably going to pitch the dregs from a Damnation I have laying around.

If someone makes this calendar, perhaps they can put it in Google so anyone who wants can get reminders, etc.

Wraths are you kegging? It'd be a nightmare to bottle that frequently.

I did my first all-grain a week ago and I didn't hit any of my numbers and only came up with 4 gallons of wort but it was a learning process. Going to try again in a week or two now that I know better

Yeah I'm kegging now finally. I usually end up bottling around 20 beers from the keg after kegging anyhow but it doesn't seem nearly as bad doing 2-3 at once instead of 50 at once. I'm also looking at getting a 160qt pot soon, and a 150 qt mash tun. Figure I can just use the pot as my hot water tank, transfer to mash tun, boil in pot. I'm not planning on doing 30 gallon batches or anything, but would be nice to have the equipment if I desire too. I'm hoping to get the pot for ~100$ from a guy on CL, it is aluminum but I don't mind that much.

My buddy just started renting out a garage that has some pre built walk in cabinets we are discussing turning it into a walk in cooler fermentation area. Lots of stuff on the horizon!

Just a warning, depending on the set-up of that mash tun, you may be giving up the option of doing normal 5g batches and possibly even light 10g batches. I've got a 100qt cooler mash tun and with normal gravity 5g batches I can't hold heat in it, too much dead space. I've been ok on 10g batches except for one light lager where it dropped a ton over 60m. Normally it holds within 2F over a 60m mash.

If you can apply heat to it, though, sounds awesome.

So this is me racking a new batch of Saison into a 1/2 bbl.



we got two cornies and seven 750ml's filled too. there was another cornie pulled off and fermented with Altbier yeast on brew day. I was told it's conditioning now.

The Saison came out mighty fine by my estimation. I used French Saison yeast from Cigar City, the same strain they use for their Table Saison and Guava Grove/Groove. I'm bringing that keg to a buddy's wedding (his fiancee told me his favorite beer these days is Foret) and I think it'll be very drinkable for everyone, but especially enjoyable for him.

All those kegs are conditioning naturally now, I did have the foresight to rack 1/2 a cornie last week and force-carbonate it over the weekend, which is what I'm drinking now.

I actually just bought an 80qt aluminum pot on ebay, I havent fitted it yet let alone used it but its of very good quality. Comes with a huge strainer to in case you want to BIAB.

$75 shipped, If this one works out Im going to buy 2 more for my single tier weldless me and a friend are building.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...#ht_500wt_1180

That makes sense. We still have a 6gal mash tun, a 12.5gal mash tun, and two 6 gal pots as well, so if it doesn't work out we can always switch back.

Sounds awesome, how did you obtain the yeast? I'm getting married in two weeks and my "premium" beer is Yuengling.

Good deal. I'm still debating if I want to make a single tier stand for a 2/3 tier.