Tag: Paso Robles

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Firestone Walker + L.A. Beer Bloggers + RE:Find Distillers

What truly sets apart the trip that Firestone Walker provided the L.A. Beer Bloggers group is that it isn’t all about beer.  Yes, there is plenty of Easy Jack and Pivo Pils flowing but these guys want to showcase all that the Central Coast and Paso Robles in particular has to offer.

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Last year, the spotlight was on the bio-dynamic farming of Windrose Farms and the wines of Herman Story.  This year Andrew Murray Vineyards was showcased along with an amazing dinner and spirits extravaganza at Re:Find Distillery.

Alex and Monica Villicana are winemaker’s first.  But they wanted to find a use for grape juice that got bled off to enhance the finished wine.  What to do with what is technically called saignée.  Well, they went the distilling route.  They make vodka and gin and brandy and limoncello all from grape juice!

Now Firestone doesn’t just stop at the introduction.  I should have been hip to that after the Friday we enjoyed.  No.  We not only got to taste the vodka and gin.  We got to try our hand at blending our own gin for our own gin and tonics!  Now my first two stabs at it were over lavendered and way over Angelika Root’d.  My third attempt yielded a passable gin.  But now I know much more of what makes spirits so good and what goes into making and blending them.

But folks, that was not all.  Re:Find had been in contact with Firestone about our trip and they went even further and made us a white whiskey from a wash similar to the 805 lager recipe.  With the appropriate name of Writer’s Blanc.

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They could have stopped there.  Told us to get back on the bus and find our own food and we would have been happy.  But then out comes a five course meal from Chef Thomas Yun?

There was octopus which I tried but didn’t super enjoy but there was a glass of Opal saison to drink.  There was a lamp chop and a rib eye cap and, well… here’s the menu….

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It was an amazing melding of food, spirits and beer and people.

And we in the beer blogging community should be hailing passionate producers of cheese, lettuce, wine or whatever because they are the same as our brewers.  Artisans who are raising the bar on how we see our food.

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LA Beer Bloggers + Firestone Walker = More photos

Last year, Firestone Walker gave the humble L.A. Beer Bloggers group a grand tour of both their Paso Robles brewery and Barrelworks in Buellton.

That means more photos of the Paso Robles area.

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Me against the bear. I am not trying to break into the truck. Nope. Wouldn’t do that.

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The taproom menu board. Too many choices.

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Young whiskey from the distillers Re:Find. Made from an 805 lager wash. Just for our group. Amazing.

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My fellow blogger, Rich near the ride that Walker has made Wild.

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Food GPS Teaser – Firestone-Walker Invitational

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If you haven’t figured out that you should buy tickets for the 2014 edition, then tomorrow’s Food GPS column about the individual beers surely will.

But here is my list of beers that I wish I had sampled but did not:

Three Floyds – Dreadnaught IPA

Sun King – Batch 777 tripel

Pizza Port – Beer Hunter Belgian golden collaboration with Automatic Brewing

Odell – Loose Leaf hoppy session

Cigar City – Invasion pale ale

Braufactum – Colonia Kolsch

Avery – Hand of Buddha

Just not enough drinking time.

 

 

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Firestone-Walker Invitational (the recap)

Firestone-Walker-Invitational-Beer-Fest-2012

As threatened here is my recap of the Firestone-Walker Invitational that was held on Saturday……

With a beer stained shirt, I left the 2013 Firestone-Walker Invitational Beer Festival dizzy from the variety of beers and breweries on display and maybe the triple digit heat too.

The Mid-State Fairgrounds was hopping with crowds attracted by an impressive worldwide brewery list with beers that are rare within miles of their home breweries, let alone seen in California. Dark Lord from Indiana’s Three Floyds or Hunaphu from Peoples Choice winning brewery, Cigar City from Florida.

Both highly rated beers and both excellent but in my opinion, three others made my Best in Show List (plus an honorable mention in Tipo Pils from Birrificio Italiano).

#3 – Dos Osos IPA from Revolution Brewing. A collaborative hop bomb between the 3 year old Chicago brewery and Firestone-Walker. Was super fresh with a great bouquet.

#2 – Nefarious DIPA from Boneyard Brewing. For a big DIPA this (again very fresh) Double was light and nimble.

# 1 – Prickly Passion Saison aged in Peach Whiskey barrels from the venerable New Belgium. My first beer of the day and one that struck a chord that I measured all the rest of the days beers on. Had a bright fruit note that balanced with a smooth and light barrel flavor.

OK, on to my beer festival check list:
water: plentiful (they also had cool zone blowers and misters at most stations to keep things cool)

food: plentiful (and free with admission) I certainly enjoyed the cupcakes but you could really do some great beer pairings.

crowds: There were long lines but that was to be expected. You could easily move about the fairgrounds and if one line was too long another fantastic brewery was close by.

Considering the heat and the massive beer geek popularity of the beers on hand this was well-run and smooth operation. (Which was not a surprise to me)

This will be an annual pilgrimage for me.

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BarrelHouse Brewing

A “small batch barley and hop project” is open down the road from Firestone-Walker in Paso Robles…say hello to BarrelHouse Brewing Co.

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Here is the current list of beers being brewed:

Templeton Ale – Kolsch style blonde ale brewed with American hops
Belgian Wit – Belgian style wheat ale brewed with chamomile, coriander and orange peel
Pale Ale – American style pale that combines West Coast hoppiness and East Coast maltiness
India Pale Ale (IPA) – Our everyday IPA…drinkable and hoppy
Milk Stout – Dark and delicious bitter, sweet stout

They are open from Wednesday through Sunday.

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Parabola 2013

Earlier today, I gave you a shopping list with three excellent choices to take to your local beer shoppe, and now here is a fourth that you had better pick up from Firestone-Walker….

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I can only parrot back this quote that I found on the press release from the brewery, ““This is the best Parabola we’ve ever made,” Brynildson says.”

What else do you need?  Seriously?  Buy two or three if you are on a limited beer budget because these will age beautifully.  Or find a tap house that is hosting Firestone-Walker and get there when they open.

Here is the description if you need more impetus to buy it, “As always, brewing this massive barrel-aged Russian imperial oatmeal stout continues to be a challenge—“It’s like extracting liquid from a big oatmeal cookie,” says Brewmaster Matt Brynildson. The recipe is unchanged, but the 2013 vintage comes with a fresh twist on the barrel-aging front, specifically the incorporation of retired bourbon barrels from Four Roses Distillery in Kentucky.”

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FoodGPS Teaser – Bloggers at Firestone

Thanks to the largesse of the folks at Firestone-Walker, our humble band of L.A. Beer Bloggers caught a bus at Union Station early on a Saturday morning and made the trek to Paso Robles to partake in the beer culture created by David Walker, Matt Brynildson and the rest of the F-W crew.

I will use words in tomorrow’s FoodGPS post to paint a summarized picture of the weekend, but here are the final set of photos from that epic journey….

They seem to have won a "few" awards

Brewer Dustin Kral at the DBA tap

A flight at Barrelworks.

Would you like some rare bottles?

 

THANK YOU FIRESTONE-WALKER FOR THE TREMENDOUS RED CARPET TREATMENT!
THANK YOU FIRESTONE-WALKER FOR THE TREMENDOUS RED CARPET TREATMENT!

 

 

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Journey to the Center of the Barrel – Part 2

Firestone-Walker ain’t what it used to be.  It’s bigger.  My last visit to both their Paso Robles brewery and the Taproom and restaurant in Buellton was many years ago.  I had heard about the changes and the new equipment and the addition of Barrelworks but I was not prepared for the scope of the expanded footprint of their entire operation.

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They have added space everywhere on what is fast becoming a Firestone-Walker dominated stretch of land just off the 101.  They have a huge restaurant where you can get the Central Coast Locals Only beer, 805.  They have warehouse space for their “traditional” barrel aging that you see in such releases as their anniversary beer.  And these large tanks are another (albeit large) sign of the changes taken place.

IMG_4117The brewery has been tricked out as well as expanded.  Brewmaster Matt Brynildson now has new toys like a wet mill which maximizes yield from the grains while using less energy and added an automated hop doser.  Which will make the bitterness you get from Union Jack even more consistent.

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2012 proved to be a major year of growth for Firestone-Walker and it was great to get a tour of the whole facility and see all the changes firsthand.

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Journey to the Center of the Barrel – Part 1

Right up front, I have to inform you, the reader, that you are going to be hearing A LOT about Firestone-Walker in the coming days here on the BSP blog.  This will be part 1 of a series of posts about a recent trip that FW hosted for the L.A. Beer Blogger community.

Our writing and photo crew left Saturday morning from Union Station (LA) headed north to Firestone-Walker (Paso Robles) for the 1st stop of a beer tour of epic proportions.

The weather and scenery was gorgeous as our large bus navigated ever smaller roads on our first leg of our Journey to the Center of the Barrel, our lunch destination, Windrose Farms.

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We reached a fork in the road where we needed to go right on but the prudent bus driver was not going to go all Dukes of Hazard on us.  We rolled to a stop and waited.  What was the plan?  Then we see David Walker riding to us on a tractor!  We hopped onto the back of a flatbed towed by a tractor driven by Bill Spencer.  The owner of Windrose Farm himself.  Now I am not a country boy.  Far from it.  But that lazy, bucolic ride with the David Walker which ended at a table of Firestone-Walker Bretta Weisse was beyond cool.

photo courtesy of Firestone-Walker
photo courtesy of Firestone-Walker

Bretta Weisse is a new beer in the Berliner Weisse style with an addition of Brett.  (It may become the house beer for the Barrelworks location)  It pours a hazy orange/yellow and has a rounded flavor of toast, sourness and a smidgen of funk in there too.  Very refreshing and it clocks in at 3.4% abv.  This would not be the final time, I was lucky enough to taste this offering.

photo courtesy of Firestone-Walker
photo courtesy of Firestone-Walker

Then we got a talk about the methods and philosophy of Windrose Farm from Bill.  Most in our group (and I include myself) almost forgot to drink their beers as he described bio-dynamics or the 45 varieties of apples with book suggestions too!  We headed deeper into the farming operation for lunch after that and were greeted with a wild menagerie of salad greens and Chef Arlis Borden of the Taproom Restaurant.

photo courtesy of Firestone-Walker
photo courtesy of Firestone-Walker

Our four course lunch included four rounds of Firestone-Walker beers.  I saw the Double DBA with DBA caramelized apples and vanilla ice cream for dessert and knew that this was going to be good.  Our main course was lamb braised in Walker’s Reserve accompanied by Parabola Russian Imperial Stout.  I could have drank the whole bottle.  It was viscous and sweet and beyond tasty.  But the best of the lunch were the two salad options and that is saying something because I tend to avoid the green spectrum of the food scale.  But braised greens with Wookey Jack was one of the best pairings that I have had.  The lettuce stood up to the Black IPA.  The first salad was fresh picked greens.  Literally steps from where we were sitting.  It had a Union Jack vinaigrette and was paired with Double Jack IIPA that was bottled the day before.  That is seriously fresh!

IMG_4097Combine the setting with the great beer and the great food.  The freshness of both and the passion that both the Spencer’s and Firestone-Walker have and you can begin to imagine how great this lunch was.  If I had been driven home at that point, I would have been more than happy.

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But more awaits!  Including a trip to the top of the brewery, wine and blending sours!