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.
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.
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….
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.