Escondido with Ryan and Jules

It really started in San Marcos, at Churchill's Pub and Grille, for a sour-beer festival, where sweet lambics and other wild-yeast fermented beers are celebrated. I'm a beer man, certainly, and I appreciate and respect the lambics and other anciently-brewed beers. Appreciate and respect.

Those words don't denote, necessarily, giggly sweaty fun downing large glasses of fermented grains. These beers aren't for downing, as it were. They're like wines, almost, with a thicker fizz than champagne. They're only like wines in flavor, the texture and carbonation and look are definitely beer. They serve the sour beers, at a fest like this, in small, four-ounce glasses, best used for tasting.

I understand espresso offers more complex and a well rounded example of "coffee-flavor". But, when I want some bean-drink, I'd rather have a 12 to 20 ounces of hot beverage. I appreciate--and maybe even revere--lambic. But in the hot shade of inland SoCal in the early afternoon, please give me a large glass of regular beer. The larger the better.

But that's me. Here's Corrie and Jules, under the tent at Churchill's:

Apparently only Corrie and I and Tony call Julie "Jules". She mentioned it once, when we were visiting them in SLO, and that she thought it was funny, or at least not annoying in some way to her. Which I would hope not. In any case, after the sour-beer get-together, we headed off to the tasting room for Lost Abbey Brewery, or BrewCo, or what have you.

They have large amounts of barrels aging all around, and the next picture shows how they label them and keep track of the additives, the following with 80 lbs of peaches added on Norm's birthday:

Here's a six-barrel rack, among the many in the tasting room, which was like a hanger, a warehouse in a spot between San Marcos and Escondido, down in San Diego County:

This was day two, or day one, depending on how you feel about the day I was told to stop using the crutches, of me being a crutchless hobbling dude, instead of a crutched hobbling dude.

The last place we went to was Stone Brewing's Bistro in Escondido. We sat staggered so we could all talk and have a good time, but it really happened more organically.

It was Saturday night and busy, and we had a good time talking and sampling their stock. Stone's most famous for its Arrogant Bastard Ale, high octane stuff only available in 22oz bottles (or on tap). It's good stuff.

We'll need to do this kind of thing again.

I used Escondido in the title of the post because it sounds more exotic than San Marcos, maybe. Like the movie Fargo...the other choice for the title of the movie was Brainard.