21st Amendment

When you become locals at your favorite bar, 21st Amendment on 2nd Street, you know you've hit it big time when you get a personal tour of the brewery and FREE beer!  We pretty much go there ALL.THE.TIME.  I mean, COME ON, they have watermelon beer 6 months out of the year!

We were in there last night and we were given a behind the scenes look at their brewery and got educated about their new location in San Leandro.  Their current brewery has been here since 2000!  15 years ago they had no idea what a great location they were building in!  It was built before the SF Giants AT&T ballpark was built I think they said they have a 30 barrel capacity and now with their new location being 95,000 sq. foot they can brew 500 barrels! And they can brew 8 different beers at once!  That's as much as they could previously over an entire year.

Their new location is in an old Kellogg's factory, hence their new beer being called Toaster Pastry. We haven't cracked open our free TP beer, but this article describes it as "the brew's biscuit malts give it a slightly nutty, crust-like taste, while pale and dark crystal malts offer flavors reminiscent of strawberry jam and your favorite childhood breakfast pastry." Hmm....hope it tastes good! Right now, its only offered in 19.2 oz cans, but in two weeks, it will be offered on draft at their 2nd street location!

Locations:

21st Amendment Brewery
563 2nd St
San Francisco, CA 94107

AND

2010 Williams St.
San Leandro, CA 94577

Bachlorette Partaaaayyyy

We continued the weekend off with visiting several wineries in Charlottesville!  We had a full day of wineries, breweries and cideries...just the way I like it!  We had a chauffeur that drove us from place to place.

First stop was King Family Vineyard, such a cute little place!  The outside was BEAUTIFUL!!! 

But first, let's take a selfie! Me, Erika and Melissa.  If I could only count just how many selfies we had over the last 9 years....

MMMM getting the day started off right! Their rose was ON POINT!

Next stop was Veritas Vineyard & Winery.  We got to take a winery tour!

Where they separate and crush the grapes

This is where they ferment the grapes into wine

They re-use the barrels for several years.

Grapes under the overhang

Panomramic picture of us sampling the wine!

Here's a better picture of us all!

After all of that drinking, we were thankful to make a stop at Devil's Backbone Brewery for lunch!  I love that Erika loves beer as much as I do!  We sampled several of their beers while shoveling food in our mouth!

 

And the group photos continue...stay tuned for more bachlorette shennanigans....

Locations
King Family Vineyard
6550 Roseland Farm, Crozet, VA 22932

Veritas Vineyard & Winery
151 Veritas Lane, Afton Virginia 22920

Devil's Backbone Brewery
200 Mosbys Run, Roseland, VA 22967 

Anchor Brewing Tour

I took the B Man to the Anchor Steam Brewery here in San Francisco! Man, was it hard to get in. You have to purchase a ticket for $15 each and they only have tours Monday-Friday at 10 am and 1 pm. Um...when do you have free time in the middle of the week?  Well, B Man had the day off and I took the afternoon off to go!

Anchor Brewing began in 1896 and survived prohibition and made some changes throughout the years and settled in its current location in Potrero Hill in 1977.

Waiting for our tour to begin.

Viewing the beginning of the process in the huge copper vats.

What makes Anchor Steam so unqiue is their cooling process.  From their website:

UNIQUELY ANCHOR BREWING The fermentation of Anchor Steam® Beer takes place in our shallow, very wide, open fermenting pans, cooled entirely by filtered San Francisco air moving through the fermentation room. These fermenters are an important part of our unique brewing history and represent a marked difference from the vertical tanks found in other breweries in America. Except for the occasional hot day, we still simply use the naturally cool air from San Francisco's foggy coastal climate.

Which you can see here:

And since it was December, they had their Christmas beer out!  Every year, Anchor brewing makes a unique formula, no two years are the same! AND the Christmas labels change yearly too, the same artist draws a new painting that is used for the label.

All of the types of beers they brew

All the different Christmas labels.

And then at the end of the tour, they took our picture and posted on their instagram account!

Shout out from their instagram account after they posted the picture from that day!