PlanetSeth

21st Amendment is a cool brewpub\restaurant in San Francisco, a stones through from the PacBell Park (or whatever they’re calling it this week). It is named after the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution which famously (and thankfully) repealed prohibition. That is definitely something that deserves commemoration.

By the time BART had delivered Nathan, Andy & I across the bay to the city we were all well ready for a pint along with some meat based sustenance. I had skipped the 21A IPA at the IPA festival as I thought I’d get one from the source but unfortunately they were out of it, along with their highly reputed Watermelon Wheat. Instead they had the excellent Russian River Blind Pig IPA which I has sampled at our previous stop. I did feel that I should try one of the 21A brews so after a glance at best designed beer menu ever seen I opted for the Amendment Pale Ale. I can’t rave about their beer board enough; a good description of the beer and it’s ABV is highly valuable but telling you how many IBU’s it has is the dog’s bollocks.

I’d given up on taking notes at this point so all I can tell you about the Amendment Pale Ale or the South Park Blonde that followed is that I enjoyed them both, as I did the nice big burger. Mmm, mmm, mmm, tasty.

It was quite quiet (I thing that is the typing equivalent of a tongue-twister) as we were there mid-afternoon but if my first visit is anything to go by, it’s a great place with tasty beer & food. Well worth a visit.

On August 12th, I made it to The Bistro 9th Annual IPA Festival along with a couple of good buddies of mine, Andy & Nathan. The Bistro isn’t a big space so they commandeered half the street to fit in the 50+ IPA’s they had on tap. Even then it was pretty crowded as you can see.

It’s popularity was entirely deserved though as they had a hella lot of tasty beer. Teaming up the three of us made about half way through the list of beers, each of them a new favourite. Even though every beer was an IPA there was remarkable diversity of flavours. It must have been difficult work for the judges attempting to clear the palettes after every hop-bomb was dropped on their taste buds. Not that I feel bad for them of course.

After roughly 25 different IPA’s we took a look at the queue to buy more tickets in order to keep going and decided what we really wanted was to sit down somewhere & drink beers by the pint, not the 6oz taster. So off we headed to our next destination…

The folks at The Bistro in Hayward, CA are holding their 9th annual IPA festival this coming Saturday. I’ve not been before but the place has a good reputation as a beer bar & I’m a huge IPA fan so it should be fun. The 50+ IPAs on tap should certainly keep me busy.