Today our home brew club went on a Sacramento pub crawl. It was more of a brewery tour crawl, but nobody says it that way. We met at a preschool in Chico this morning at 8:30 am, boarded a charter tour bus and headed down to Sacramento for 5 scheduled brewery tours. As soon as we boarded the bus club members starting pulling our their stashes of beer and pouring everyone samples. That's when I figured out why we were supposed to bring our plastic party cups from breakfast with us on the bus.
There were probably 4-5 pours already downed before we got to our first brewery, Rubicon Brewing Company in downtown Sacramento.
Chris took the brewery tour, but I stayed behind and babysat the beer and made some new friends with the ladies in our club. I didn't try any beers there, though in retrospect I wish I'd had the apple cider since our visit to Two Rivers Cider was canceled. Our second brewery visit was to Lockdown Brewing Co. in Rancho Cordova (still Sac).
It was hard to find because it was literally a tiny cubby in some storage looking building in an industrial park.
The club paid for the beers at Lockdown so Chris tried the sampler. I stuck to the non-alcoholic root beer, it was delicious! On the way to the next brewery, Hoppy Brewery, we had a raffle for lots of prizes and goodies on the bus and Chris' number was called. He chose the Hop Variety Handbook much to the envy of fellow onlookers.
Our stop at Hoppy was also our lunch break so we were able to stuff our faces with some much needed pub grub after the brewery tour.
Chris had what he called 'the best Reuben sandwich' he's ever had for lunch there. I had a turkey and gouda sandwich was was edible, but certainly nothing special. In fact I skipped the second half for some more of Chris' fries. Back on the bus we finally got to sample some alcohol the event organizer, Joanie, had brought called Green Moon that was an anise-flavored vodka that tasted like absinthe. Since Chris hates licorice flavor, I called dibs on his sample shot;
Yikes! That's harsh! No bueno. After lunch we stopped at Brew It Up in downtown Sac for a super quick in-n-out tour since the place was reserved for a wedding reception 20 minutes after we showed up.
Our last stop wasn't in Sacramento, but rather at Feather Falls in Oroville on our way back home. We'd already been there once and loved it, but this time we got the behind the scenes tour by the actual brewmaster.
Since we were there during the 7:00 pm hour we decided to grab some dinner as soon as the tour was over. Seafood tacos of course, our favorite from our last visit. We were loaded back on the bus and headed back for Chico by 7:45 pm. It was a long day, but utterly fun. The brew club members were a hoot and it was great having somebody else do all the driving! There's already talks of doing another brewery trip next year, maybe to the Santa Rosa/Petaluma area. We'd definitely be first in line to sign up!
Personal pizzas to order. Chicken pesto for me and bbq chicken and bacon for the boy. It'll be back to Chris slowly dying on the couch of starvation while I make a racket in the kitchen.
I scraped the crumbs out of the mixing pot and they were delicious. I can't wait until they set up so I can shovel mass quantities into my mouth.
