As usual, Saturday Night was spent at the Toronado. Upon our 11pm arrival, were immediately faced with the typical crowd of people. So we decided to forgo pushing through the crowd so we could place our order and decided to just talk to Tad for a while.

A few minute later, Carmen (a long time regular) stopped in and immediately obtained two choice seats at the bar. About 15 minutes later, our typical seats opened up and we pounced on them.

Ian immediately greeted me with a barleywine called “GWB 1987″… I have no idea what it really was, but it tasted exactly like a tawny port. I then ordered a Hop Ottin IPA. Janet had a Framboise.

Five minutes later… Steve from Speakeasy Brewery comes in for a beer… and he asks if I had the IPA yet. My response: I’ve only had Prohibition (the IPA like beer that they brew) a couple hundred times… of course I have, Steve. He then informs me that this wasn’t the Prohibition on tap… it was their hundredth batch commemorative IPA. I immediately downed the Hop Ottin and started on this yet unnamed IPA.

The IPA, which I will call Barfly’s Pale, was the beer that could really win mainstream support from the Sierra Nevada / Anderson Valley IPA crowd. It was a extremely crisp, pale beer… so hoppy that you could practically chew the beer. I easily rate this to be as good of an IPA as my current favorite Pale Ale (Hop Ottin from Anderson Valley). Unfortunately, only 2.5 BBL (5 kegs) were produced… but at least all of the publicly available kegs are at the Toronado. Sometime while I was drinking the Barfly’s Pale, Janet ordered a Weinstephaner Lager (from one of the oldest breweries in Germany).

Though we only had two beers each (I don’t count the taste of the barleywine), we ended up not getting home until after 4am, about three hours later than we initially intended.

Still, it was worth staying late… not only did we get a chance to finally talk to Ian, we got the grand tour of the new shelves that he and Johnny built in the keg-storage closet.

Last night we went to the Toronado to visit with Ian and have a few barleywines, since it was the barleywine festival and all. But as it typically happens during one of these big festivals, Ian was too busy serving $1.00 tasters of barleywines to these pseudo-beer-geeks (who didn’t seem to tip well at all), which made it difficult to order a round of beer, let alone talk to Ian for any length of time.

Since it was a festival, the usual cast of characters were there: the group from Magnolia Brewing, Dave and Jennifer (the owner and his girlfriend), Nico Freccia from Celebrator Beer News and a ton of people who I see at every special event. It was nice to see Stu at the bar again… he was released from the hospital last night. His hair was green, his Guinness was black and the pins sticking out of his shoulder were a bloody shade of gun metal (long story, we’ll tell you about it later).

So we spent the night talking to Todd and Tad (who showed up for a quick pint) and drinking our beers. Janet got one of those 30oz buckets of Hoegaarden White. I decided to go on a barleywine kick. My tasting notes follow:

• Alaska Brewing Co. – Old Growth What a strange little beer. It smelled of pine trees (they brewed it with spruce tree tips), tasted of strawberries and had the kick of a small mule. A fantastic barleywine.
• Broken Drum – Percussion Eh. Nothing special. Passable.

• Lagunitas – Brown Shugga A favorite… candy-sweet and potent as hell.

• Stone House Brewing – Old Mjolnir Dangerously drinkable. Dark, strong and not too sweet. I’d get this again, if I had a chance.

Since Barleywines are so strong and sweet, I needed something to wash them down, and a De Koninck did the job perfectly. I would have had a taste of the Barley and Hopps 1995 Big Head Barleywine (which closed last year due to the smoking prohibition at their brew pub) or the aged in bourbon-barrel Hair of the Dog Batch 29, but the three gallon keg ran out within a few hours of its tapping.

We’ll be back on Saturday to sample the few remaining barleywines, so expect a Sunday night update.

In the Fun Facts and Useless Miscellaneous Trivia Department, upon finding out that Avery is a M*A*S*H fanatic, Tad challenged him to name the five characters that have been on the show from start to finish. Avery’s first answer was “Nurse Kelly.” “Nurse Kelly!” cried Tad. “She’s the crux! No one ever gets Nurse Kelly!” See, he is a fanatic. He even has a blue and white Hawaiian shirt that we refer to as “the Hawkeye shirt.”