Don't take your camera on a brewery tour...

After a day of socialising with animals at the Zoo, we had a day of socialising with the locals on Saturday.  We met up with Jo & Ian who had come down to San Diego to visit a couple of breweries.  We met them about 10.30 and drove over to Coronado Island.  We wanted to see the Hotel del Coronado, which is the largest wooden building in the US.  While the Old Government Building in Wellington that the Law School is curently using is a big wooden building, the Hotel del Coronado is massive.  And beautiful.  Siobhan took a panorama photo where the camera stitches together 3 photos to get an idea of the scale of this.

While the stitching together isn't perfect, it shows the character of the Hotel.  It is huge and grand.  It was where they filmed Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe.  The inside was amazing too.  Beautiful dark woodwork which made it too dark to get a decent photo, but the one we got of the chandelier turned out ok.

After that brief distraction we got back to the task at hand.  Beer.  We stopped at the Coronado Brewing Company, where "brewing" is their middle name.  They had a number of other great sayings on their walls too - "Great food takes time, yours will be ready in a few minutes" and "Don't cry over spilled milk, it could have been beer".  The beer and food was good and I particularly liked their Mermaid's Red Ale (which we've had in Wellington) and a coffee porter that they had.  They also had a cool vintage car with the Coronado logo on.  The photo of that is on FB.

After that we went on to the Ballast Point brewery.  It is a bit strange as it is in the middle of an industrial park.  Makes sense as a brewery, but not so much with the associated tasting room.  We met up with Mark, a friend of Ian's, and took the tour.  While there were about 50 people in the tasting room, only the 5 of us went on the actual tour.  Chris from Ballast Point took us around and it was really interesting.  Ballast Point is now doing spirits too, but the demand for their beer sees them in a nearly constant state of expansion.  Chris took a great photo of us all in front of the still at the end of the tour.

Me, Siobhan, Ian, Jo and Mark

The beers were all good there too.  They taste at least as good straight from the brewery.  The Black Marlin porter was my favourite as they didn't have any Victory at Sea.  They sold the last cases from the brewery the previous week so it is still apparently in the stores here.  I will track some down.

After that, we went (at Mark's suggestion) to the Regal Beagle.  That's right, there is a pub named after the pub in Three's Company - the knock-off of Man About the House.  However, the Regal Beagle was dedicated to craft beers and had 25 different ones on tap.  It was good.  I finished off (or was finished off) with the Sea Monster from Ballast Point.  An Imperial stout at 10% slowed me down considerably.  We then drove back to the condo and had gelato on the way.  We also had a discussion about canoeing or canoodling, which was apparently very funny but the details of which are sketchy.

Sunday morning dawned and we had to pack up and leave the condo.  On packing up our stuff, we couldn't find the camera that I had been entrusted with the previous day.  We searched everywhere and turned up nothing.  We tried retracing our steps, but without success.  What was more annoying was that we still hadn't taken the Zoo photos off it.  After driving back to LA in frustration, and planning where we were going to go to get a new camera, I turned my man-bag out one last time and found that in my inebriated state I must have secured the camera in a safe place so that it wouldn't get lost.  I am no longer camera monitor, and I'm not sure that this is entirely self-imposed.  Nevermind.  It was a great day at the breweries and we didn't lose anything.  Not even a camera. 

Anyway, here's thanks to Rick (a friend of Ian's that we never met for letting us stay in his condo in San Diego), and thanks to Charlie as well for his hospitality and putting up with us.  We really appreciated it.  Here's a photo of Siobhan and Charlie outside the condo.