Friday 4 June 2010

Beerymoon Part One


So, we're back, Mrs Rabidbarfly( or Mrs RBF as she'll now be known) and I got back today at about 11am this morning. Here's the first part of the beery side of the trip.
So night one we wanted to go somewhere close to the hotel because we weren't oriented with the city and we were also knackered, so up to Columbus we walked and went looking for a couple of bars we'd heard about there.
The first one we walked into was Vesuvio, recommended by Beer Troll Burgess himself, what a great little place, bags of character. As it was my first beer in San Francisco I went for the Anchor Steam, a beer that I have enjoyed over here on many occasions, I had heard rumours that Anchor have had some consistency issues with the Steam beer but I went for it anyway and frankly I shouldn't have, it was old and lacking the life that I have become use to. Lucille went for the safer option of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale which I tried and was on top form.
Needing to get rid of the taste of stale steam beer from my mouth we went looking for the San Francisco Brewing Company, a brewpub that was among the favourites of Jeff Pickthall although I didn't know that until we were out there, we saw it in our trusty Time Out San Francisco guide and it piqued my interest enough to go looking for it. When we finally figured out where it was meant to be we found out it had been closed and reopened as a posh(ish) cocktail bar/bistro thing called The Comstock Saloon. The service was good and the guy on the door apparently worked there when it was the SFBC, he told us it had been mismanaged and the business couldn't be sustained any more.
Not having been put off by the Steam I ordered another one at the bar and in this place it was superb, top notch, as it should be, so 100 yards apart two completely different tasting Anchor Steams! Lucille had Trumer Pils a Czech style pils. We had dinner there which was very nice, probably a bit experimental but what the hell if they've only just opened they've still got time to get it 'right'.
After our dinners, I had beef pot pie with rocket and Lucille had a Seafood Salad which was amazing apparently, we went to the other side of Columbus because we spotted a bar called Specs opposite and I'm only telling you about it because it seemed like a cheap shite rip-off of Vesuvio, the barman was shit and the beer wasn't up to much(have to point out here that we did go back to Vesuvio and the beer was a lot better, although I didn't have Anchor Steam the second time).
So that's part one done, part two to follow shortly, watch this space.

NOTE: I have changed the title of this post slightly because I like it better.

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