We had a really nice trip to Sacramento. After we tried to check into the hotel, we headed over to Rubicon Brewing Company for lunch and ales. I was worried about parking, but we were able to park on the street about a half-block away. The place was pretty busy, with no tables available outside, and only a few inside. 
I started off with a Hop Sauce, an imperial IPA. It comes in a 10 oz goblet, and they’ll only serve you two. They claim that it has ten different hops in it and is a smooth, easy drinking IIPA. It was very good. After one Hop Sauce, I had one of the their stellar IPAs – their flagship ale, with my Cajun cheeseburger. Finally, I had a cask stout, that was also very good. This was my first trip to Rubicon, and I was very impressed. 
The bar is pretty nice and the service was OK (but they were busy). Stephen and I will be going back to Rubicon in August when we go see Dave Matthews at Raley Field.
We went back to the hotel, checked in and than headed over to Old Sacramento, to have a beer on the Delta King. The Delta King is a permanently moored river paddle wheel boat that has been converted into a floating hotel and restaurant/bar. Brenda and I stayed overnight on the Delta King about four years ago. It was very nice and the restaurant was wonderful. Their bar had nothing on draft, so I had a Newcastle brown ale and we watched the boats go by on the Sacramento River (man – there are really a lot of stupid twenty-somethings with boats…)
Next it was back to River City Brewing for an ale on the patio. 
They were out of their Kolsch, so Brenda had a wit and I had a Woodenhead. I tasted their cask ale again, but found it to be watery and flavorless. We watched the world go by at the head of the mall and I made dinner reservations for 7:45. We went back to the hotel and chilled until dinner time.
We shared a Brewmaster’s pizza and a Caesar salad for dinner. The food was very good – so good to forgot to take a picture:) We had originally planned on seeing a move, but decided to head back to the hotel after dinner, since there were no movies playing that we really wanted to see.
We slept in the next morning, and headed over to Johnny Rockets for lunch, before heading out of town. All in all, it was a very relaxing trip.
Brenda’s Jaguar needed a trip to Livermore for servicing (and we have to go back once the parts they had to order arrive…), so I stopped by The Good Brewer for a visit.
Julie, one of my blog readers, let me know that they had leaf Saaz hops in stock, and I like to have some of them on hand for a couple of my different brews. I was really surprised at the excellent selection of both leaf and pellet hops they have on hand – a real change from several of the other homebrew shops I’ve visited lately. Daniel, The Good Brewer’s proprietor, told me he expects to have a good selection on hand through the rest of this season, as well as for next years crop. If you need particular hops for that special brew, check The Good Brewer out! They also have a good selection many different specialty grains, and just about anything else you’d need to throw together a batch of homebrew.
I got to visit with Daniel for about twenty minutes and really enoyed how he could multi-task. We chatted about homebrewing and running a homebrew shop, and he never missed a beat keeping his happy seven month old daughter smiling the whole time:) I left a couple of my hoppy IPA homebrews for Daniel and a German Hefeweizen for Julie.
…both figuratively and literally! It’s a wonderful escape from the summer heat of the San Joaquin Valley in Monterey. The temps have been in the upper 60′s and low 70′s – with beautiful weather. Brenda is here for a conference in Salinas and we are staying at our favorite Monterey accommodations, the Merritt House Inn. The Merritt House is an old historic adobe that has been converted to a hotel – but probably more of a bed and breakfast. It is surrounded by beautiful gardens that always have many flowers in bloom. We’ve been coming here for years and we always enjoy our stay. It is walking distance to the wharf and just a block or so away from a trolly that will take you down to Cannery Row – and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for free!
Since Brenda was off learning new ways to teach writing to middle school students, DawBoy and I took the trolly down to the aquarium and spent four hours looking at the exhibits and taking in the presentations in the theaters. DawBoy took a bunch of pictures of fish and had a great time.
After Brenda was finished for the day, we headed down to Britannia Arms for a couple pints and dinner. I had a couple nitro Murphy’s Stout and a local Dragon Slayer IPA. All good stuff. The ales are always properly poured at Britannia Arms. Either a Guinness or a Murphy’s on nitro takes time to pour, so I always order my next stout when my current one is about half empty.
The food at Britannia Arms is also excellent. I’ve tried a range of their offerings over the years and have always been pleased. This time, Brenda and DawBoy shared a Fish ‘n Chips meal and I had beer battered prawns.
Several years ago, Brenda and I celebrated our 25th anniversary with a trip to Belize. Our friend Eric had seen a magazine article where Francis Ford Coppola’s resort, The Turtle Inn, had been mentioned. He knew we were looking for an exotic local for our anniversary trip and suggested that we check it out. We did and decided to book the ocean front Honeymoon Cottage. It was a great trip! The resort was top notch, with an excellent restaurant, attentive staff and of course several bars:) Our favorite was Laughing Fish Bar (see the pic above), a crescent shaped ocean-side bar. We spent much of our time in Belize sitting at the Laughing Fish Bar, talking to other Turtle Inn guests and visiting with our favorite bartender, Arnold. When we first arrived at the Turtle Inn (after an interesting flight in a 10 seat plane:), we were met at the front door with two glasses of Turtle Juice. Over the course of the next five days, we drank many Turtle Juices and asked Arnold for the drink’s recipe. It is simple, yet potent:)
Turtle Juice
- 1 shot Amaretto
- 1 shot Stolichnaya Vodka
- 1 shot of coconut rum
- 1 shot of 1Barrel Rum
- 3 shots of cranberry juice
- 3 shots of pineapple juice
Put all ingredients in a cocktail shaker, shake like hell, and pour over crushed ice in a pint glass. Drink!
We bought two bottles of 1Barrel Rum at the duty free store at Philip S.W. Goldson International Airport in Belize City, for $10 US apiece, and brought them home so we could make Turtle Juice. We rationed the bottles and still have about a quarter bottle left three years later. I recently went looking for more 1Barrel Rum on the Internet. I discovered that a wine shop in San Francisco, K&L Wines, carries 1Barrel Rum. Better yet, it was only $13.99!
I ordered four bottles and two days later, FedEx showed up with my package. It had a label that said it required an adult signature, so I knew what was in the box. Inside were four wonderful bottles of liquid amber! Now that I know I can get more 1Barrel Rum, I’ll be more willing to try it in other traditional rum-based drinks.
You can view a photo gallery of our trip to Belize here.
Yesterday, we dropped off Brenda’s car in Livermore, grabbed a rental (a Pontiac G5 – ugg!) and headed off to Concord. After a quick stop at MoreBeer to get a variety of stuff – most notably four vials of White Labs Pacific Ale yeast (thankfully White Labs has decided to make this yeast available year-round. It used to be one of their seasonal Platinum strains), we headed off to the EJ Phair Alehouse. I was disappointed that the didn’t have Drake’s IPA on tap, but they did have Stone IPA, so I had that with their Spicy Steak Wrap. Good stuff:)
We killed some time shopping and then picked up the Jag. Traffic was light (spring break?) and we got to Redwood City with plenty of time for dinner. We had Mexican food for dinner, at a place called Margaritas, about a block from the Fox Theater. As we were finishing dinner, Paul Thorn and the band walked by the restaurant, presumably heading out for dinner before the show. I waited in line at the box office to pick up our tickets, while Brenda got in the main line to enter the Little Fox.
There was open seating, so we were hoping to get good seats. There were only a dozen or so people in line in front of us, so we weren’t too worried:) Unfortunately, there were having sound board problems, so we had to wait an additional half hour, out in the cold, before we were let into the theater. At 7:30 p.m., they let us in and we grabbed two seats, literally in front of the center-left side of the stage. We were so close I rested my feet on the stage for most of the show! I grabbed a couple of beers for us (I had a Sierra Nevada Pale). We kicked back waited for the show to start. It was a older crowd, and many of the folks had Paul Thorn stories to tell. Paul and the band came out exactly at 8:00 (I love people that are on time:) and he immediately apologized for wearing an ugly shirt.
He said he’d gone out for a run that afternoon, come back to the Little Fox, and was bummed that there was no shower – so he’d taken what he called a “whore bath,” where you clean yourself with paper towels and water. Then he discovered that the venue didn’t have an iron to press his shirt for the show, so he had to wear a shirt that he could pull directly out of his suitcase, and didn’t need ironing. It was an interesting shirt…
He played almost all of the new CD, but the cuts sounded polished, like they’d been playing them for years. Paul sang an acoustic set in the middle of the show, to spell the band, and he played one of my favorite unrecorded tunes, “Might as Well Stay Married.” One of the lines goes “I couldn’t get laid when I was single, if you threw me in a women’s prison, so I might as well stay married.”
All in all, the band played for two solid hours, without a break, and it was the best show I’ve seen Paul put on. After the show, Paul met with crowd to sign CDs and take pictures. He is a gracious guy and took the time to chat individually with everyone who wanted to meet him.
Me and Paul. Aren’t you glad I Photoshopped out the bloody eye? 
Brenda and Paul
My autographed CD
We were on the road by 10:15 p.m. and home a little after midnight:)
Jeez – just a little more than 48 hours later, the Belgian Strong Golden is all but done! The airlock is only bubbling about once every 30 seconds and there’s a huge yeast cake on the bottom of the carboy. Tomorrow morning I’ll give the carboy a swirl (yea, I’m a swirler:) to re-suspend the yeast and hope to get a couple more points off the final gravity. I’ll not rush this ale out of glass, so it’ll sit on the yeast for at least ten days, if not longer.
On a completely different note, when I woke up Saturday morning, eager to brew the Belgian Strong, I noticed that one of my eyes was red – like a small blood vessel had burst, but it didn’t look too bad. My eyes are often pretty funky looking and red after taking a shower, so I didn’t think a whole lot about it. But within an hour or so it kinda blossomed (if you look carefully at Saturday’s pictures you can see it:) and over the next day it started looking pretty bad. Brenda suggested that if it didn’t get better I ought to call the optometrist’s office and see what they had to say. By Sunday, it looked bad and I had pretty well decided to call the eye Doc on Monday morning.
I called this morning and they reassured me that the burst blood vessel wasn’t dangerous, or even that urgent, but I could come in if I was worried. A strange coincidence, I’d planned on getting an appointment for a regular check-up this week since I’m on spring break. Of course, they had no last minute appointments available, but put me on the “call list.” Well, I got a call about 3:00 p.m. today saying that they had a cancellation for 4:00 p.m., so I jumped at the opportunity:)
The doctor looked at it, laughed (he’s an old family friend:), and said I had a good one indeed!
It may take as long as a month for all the blood to drain out and make the eye look normal again. Great…
Tomorrow is a full day. We drop Brenda’s Jag off in Livermore to get worked on, I have a leather jacket to return to Wilsons in Pleasanton, then it’s off to EJ Phair (they currently have Drakes IPA and Schooners IPA as guest handles – yum!) in Concord – and a quick trip to MoreBeer. Once we pick up Brenda’s car, we’re heading down to Redwood City and the Paul Thorn show. Life is good!
