
Saturday we attended Green Flash Brewery’s 9th Anniversary party at their new Mira Mesa location. They poured 10 different beers at three different tents, including the Hoppy Tent featuring the 9th Anniversary IPA, the Belgium Tent and a rare beer tent with Silva Stout, easily the most saught out beer of the day, and the Barleywine. A few locals I talked to came just for the Silva Stout, named after Green Flash brewmaster Chuck Silva, and it was GOOD. Brian was able to grab a taster before the crowd caught on, the line was pretty long for the rest of the day when it was pouring. From there, we took Abby’s advice and head towards O’Brien’s for the Million Zillion Speedway event.
We heard rumors while at Green Flash of the epic nature of the MZS. People told us that the line went out the door and wrapped around the building last year, so I was relieved to find there was no line when we arrived about 1.5 hours early. O’Briens is a pretty small Irish Style pub located on the corner of a strip mall. The place was packed and about 20 minutes after we got there the line started to form, despite the fact that it was pouring rain and they weren’t tapping the Speedways for another hour. Luckily, Brian already had a nice buzz going from all the beers sampled at Green Flash, so he happily waited in line with our friends from TheFullPint.com, Co-founder, Danny Fullpint and Events Contributor Pat Callard, while the other co-founder Jonny Fullpint and I held down the table inside. About an hour later the madness begun.
You could definitely feel the excitement as 5:00 drew near. People prepping their tables with tape, numbering out 1-13 very carefully tracking what beer would be placed where. One kid we met came sporting his own muffin tin, with taped labels for each beer. Here we were, never having tried Speedway before Thursday night, having the honor of sampling it 13 different ways, among AleSmiths biggest fans that undoubtedly look forward to this event all year long. This beer is no joke at 12% they were only pouring 3 oz pours, but it definitely still had it’s effect on us, along with all the other rare bottles that were being passed around and shared. It seemed as if the overall consensus had 3-4 top favorites including the Vietnamese Coffee Stout, toasted coconut and vanilla bean and the Orange/Rum Speedway and the Madagascar Cocoa nibs and vanilla bean.
It was such a fun night, we’ve been meeting the nicest people here in SoCal and feel honored that we can witness the beer-geekedry that commenced over the past few days. We are definitely looking forward to meeting up with everyone we hung out with over the weekend in the near future and keep on tasting and learning more about the great beer the Golden State has waiting for us.