Summit Beer Festival

A summit for craft beer?  You don't have to ask me twice whether I'm interested in going!  We're talking 160 California craft breweries and over 450 different varieties of beer.  Sign. Me. Up.

I think the first thing to ask is, "What exactly is 'craft beer'?"  It sounds very hipstery and fancy, but it's really pretty simple.  It just means the brewer is small, independent, and traditional.

And the state of California has almost 700 craft breweries in operation across the state.  We got to sample a tiny sliver of them at the festival.  What fun!

I sampled everything from Hefeweizens, to saisons, to Kölsch style, to pilsners, to blondes, to stouts to sours.  Such a variety.

One of my favorites was this outrageous peanut butter chocolate cream porter called Nukin' Futz from Track 7 Brewery, which is here in Sacramento.

Is there such thing as a dessert beer?  Because that's exactly how this tasted.  I could imagine using it as a base for a boozy float with vanilla ice cream.

Another notable were the sours.  Wow!  Talk about a departure.  We tried pineapple sours, honey ginger lime sours, orange sours, you name it.

Sours don't even taste like beer.  They're so refreshing and cleanse your pallet right out.  Perfect for summer and after a sample of a dense porter.

The festival was on the capitol mall, so we had the capitol building on one end of the street, and the Tower Bridge on the other. The street was blocked off, and lined with tent after tent of brewers, so we could wander up to whichever brewery we wanted and get a sample in our tiny, 3 oz pour cups.

If I had a buck for every hipstery, long bearded brewery guy we saw!  They were rampant.

As we were strolling around, we saw a brewery tent we absolutely had to beeline toward.  Who knew the Dude had his own brewery?  Ha.  I tasted a peach wheat from the Dude's.  It was extremely peachy.  Or, I guess I should say it was veeery un-Dude.  Not my favorite!

There were food trucks there too, but the lines were outrageous, so we ended up getting a bite after we had our fill of beer at the festival.

We took a short walk to a pub I'd been wanting to check out called The Fox and Goose.  One mushroom Swiss burger later and I was ready to call it an early night! 

That would be the fox.  And the goose.

Another dip into our new scene in northern California.  I have no complaints!  Bring on the bearded hipsters!

Ta-ta for now.