Even if I had that much Duck Duck there’s no way I’d be giving it to you for free. But it did get you here, which was my intent all along.

And now for my real, much more nefarious, purpose:

Dan from the Full Pint

The slightly blurry gentleman (and I use the term loosely) to the left is Dan of The Full Pint fame.

Dan recently blasted out an email asking everyone to vote for what they thought was the best brewery in Southern California, an email I had planned on ignoring, right up until Lisa from Green Flash blasted her email list asking everyone to vote for them.

Well, that and I went to thefullpint.com and found that the graphic Dan is using to represent Southern California a) pretty much defines Southern California as “everything south of San Francisco”, and b) uses the USC logo to represent Southern California.

(Side note: As a Berkeley grad, I happen to know that all you need to do to get a master’s degree at USC is drive your Mercedes across campus without hitting anything. But whatever — that’s UCLA’s problem.)

(Extra side note: Stanford sucks.)

…But I digress.

Anyway, checking the website now, I see that Green Flash is leading the vote, no doubt due entirely to Lisa’s email ballot box stuffing. So I am calling on the countless dozens of readers of this blog to do your own ballot box stuffing and vote for Port Brewing/Lost Abbey as the best craft brewery in Southern California.

As many of you may know, my wife, Terri — aka: “Beer Molly” — is the tasting room / special events manager at the brewery (some would call her Evita Perón with 16 taps of great beer), so I have a vested interest in PB/LA winning this thing.

Plus Dan’s wife is about to have a baby, and she’s pressuring him to get one of those “real jobs” so many wives of craft beer enthusiasts are always talking about (not really sure what that is). So a big bump to him would allow him say, “See honey, I need to drink this beer. People are looking to me.”

Plus, I believe in old school bare-knuckle, vote buying politics. If Port/Lost Abbey wins and you come into the tasting room, look me up and tell me you voted for the brewery. I’ll buy you a beer.

No, it won’t be a Duck Duck Gooze, but it’ll be a pint of something you can count on being great.

» Click here to vote for the best craft brewery in SoCal

I lieu of flowers I will accept pints of beer.  If our paths don’t cross enjoy a pint yourself and observe a moment of silence for your last fallen growler, bottle or decanter of choice…and support your local brewery.

Broken Port Brewing Growler...and not even 3.5 years old..sad, sad, sad

(Bonus: The instructions are in a wiki, so if you’ve got some expertise in kegerator construction, you can add your own tips and tricks.)

And for those of you who find that whole reading thing too difficult, you can watch the video instead:

The Original Growler

But rather than dwell on the ever-growing pile of glass jugs around my house, I decided to do something creative (and justify all those jugs) by turning my collection into a game called “Guess That Growler”.

You can play along at home. The rules are simple. Below you will see a series of growler photos in which everything but a 50 x 100 pixel area of the growler has been blacked out. It’s up to you to guess what brewery the growler came from. For every correct guess you get to take a drink. For every incorrect guess you get to take two drinks (this eliminates the stigma of guessing incorrectly).

Naturally, because I’m in San Diego, my growler collection is heavy on San Diego breweries/brewpubs, so if you’re not familiar with the breweries around here, you might want to brush up on their logos, locations, etc. before diving in. We’ll start with some easy ones that are well-known, and get progressively more difficult.

Okay, ready? Here we go:

Growler #1
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Growler #2
Guess That Growler:

Click for the answer

Growler #3
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Growler #4
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Growler #5
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Growler #6
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Growler #7
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Growler #8
Guess That Growler:

Click for Answer

Growler #9
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

Guess That Growler:
Growler #10

Click for answer

Growler #11
Guess That Growler:

Click for answer

• 11 Correct – You are a growler genius. People should admire you. (We’re all shocked that they don’t.)
• 8 – 10 correct – Pretty dang good. You obviously know your way around a brewery or two
• 5 – 7 correct – not bad, but you could obviously spend some more time “studying”
• 1 – 4 correct – could be a number of things: you’ve never been to San Diego or had beer from here, you’re new to this whole growler thing, or you like drinking good beer more than being right. Keep working at it.

If you’ve got growler photos of your own, feel free to send them to me at beersage (at) mybeerpix (dot) com. Maybe we can put together a national championship game.

Molly's Beer (l) and mine (r)

The best I can say is that we have a happy situation. Both of us love great beer, but niether of us like the same great beer.

One look at Molly and it’s pretty obvious that I (as a gentleman) prefer the pale — the blonder the better (though a red or two has been known to turn my head). And one listen to Molly and it’s also obvious that I also like a sharp tongue. So it hardly comes as a surprise that I enjoy nothing more than IPAs — and the higher the IBUs the better.

Molly on the other hand likes them big, black and thick. So it’s hardly a surprise that her favorite refresher is a huge stout. The blacker and stronger, the better.

Wait a minute… I’m skinny white guy.

Okay, never mind. I have no idea why I’ve been married for 20 years.

Enjoy the weekend and enjoy a cold beer or two. You can even share it with that special someone if that works for you.

Cheers.

No doubt at some point during the day you’ll be standing about at a party staring at the really loud and obnoxious person at the other side of the pool wondering “how much beer has that guy/girl had?”

How much has that person drank?

Fortunately for you, the folks over at regretfulmorning.com have put together a handy little chart that shows just how much a person has had to drink based on their behavior. (Hopefully, that person is not you.) Have a great 4th!

» See 4th of July Intoxication levels (regretfulmorning.com)

Share your beer pix live with us this Memorial Day weekend!

It’s Memorial Day weekend, the un-official beginning of summer and the official beginning of beer drinking season (which around here happens to end the day before Memorial Day weekend begins.)

Being who we are, we naturally like to celebrate the season with (what else) Beer and pictures!

But this time around we thought we’d do something cool and invite the entire world (well the countless dozens of you who read this anyway) to share their own beer photos with us via mybeerpix.com’s live photo blogging feature.

All this weekend you’ll be able to post your photos and comments directly to our website via your mobile phone, computer, camera, or whatever else you use to connect to the interwebs. Here’s how:

• How to post via email or your phone’s MMS
• How to post via Twitter

How to post via email or your phone’s MMS

To post a photo to the website from your computer or your mobile phone’s camera, simply send your beer photo to:

mybeer@mybeerpix.com

Make sure to include a subject (i.e., “Beer photo from Moosedrool, Wisconsin”) that gives viewers a little info about the photo.

If you’d like to include text (beyond the subject) along with your photo you’ll need to enclose it in the “#” sign like this:

#Hello mybeerpix readers! I’m Larry and this is my buddy Moe. We are enjoying a pint of Moosedrool IPA at the pub. Cheers!#

(If you don’t use the “#” sign to enclose the message, the server will strip out the text.)

That’s it! You can post from any email program, or if you’re one of the cool kids like me and have a cameraphone, you can post directly from your mobile phone.

Every 15 minutes or so our web server will check for new photos, automatically resize them and post. (So if you don’t see your photo right away, wait a few minutes, the server is probably between check cycles.)

How to post via Twitter

Just send your pic to Twitter the way you normally do (e.g., via twitpic, ping.fm, etc. etc.) and include the keyword “#mybeerpix”.

Our server will pick up your tweet from Twitter and display it on the Twitter Feed page here. (You’ll also find a link to the page at the top of the website.)

That’s pretty much it. Now get out there and have a beer and show us what you’re drinking!

Caveats and (not very limiting) limitations:

1) Please keep the photos beer-related. They can be of just beer, people with beer, at beer places, events, beer signage, etc. — it simply needs to somehow relate to beer. This is after all “my beer pix” not “my day at the zoo pix”.

2) Please keep your photos (and language) to PG-13. A little racy is fine and fun, but our 15 year-old daughter sees this and we don’t want to have to explain anything. (If you’ve got anything beyond PG-13, feel free to email them to us privately. )

3) Make sure they’re your photos. Posting other’s pictures can be a big legal mess that we don’t want to deal with.

Ok, that’s it! Now go out there and show us what you and your beer are doing this weekend!

Samual Adams Imperial Double Bock

Home after a nice lunch and decided to try the second of my Samuel Adams Imperial Series, the Double Bock.  At 9.5% I may just need to take this sitting down.  Nah..it just made me thirsty for something with hops.

The (in)Famous Pizza Beer

Weird “it’s a small world” sidenote: Yeah, the beer wasn’t much, but apparently it’s great in pizza dough. So great in fact that one dough made with it won the national pizza championships (or whatever it’s called). Turns out the winner was from right here in San Diego and he knows the Seefurths (the folks who make the beer) and now they’re coming to California soon to do a tasting at one of our local beer shops.

Sweet! (Well… garlicly and basily anyway…)

The end of the rainbow

1/3 up the mountain on the 58

Almost to the top and it's snowing

At the top we pulled over for a needed potty break

By the time I got to Crescent I had to pee again.  I requested the use of the restroom at the lodge I was checking in at but was denied.  So I squirmed a bit while filling out the check-in paperwork.  Once given my key I quickly found and entered my room, turned to the bathroom to be greeted by this….

Bullet Toilet Seat

Bullet Toilet Seat 2

A clear toilet seat with large bullets embedded in it.  It was new to me, but as an owner of the lodge I could see it having its advantages;like being able to see if the toilet is clean without having to lift the lid.

Once relieved, it was time to find a beer.  Next to the lodge was the Mohawk Restaurant.

The Mohawk Restaurant

I grabbed a bottle of Deschutes Black Butte Porter for $2.50 and wandered the restaurant admiring the taxidermy and bottle collections.  And yes, I have already been chastised for not taking pictures of the taxidermy collection.  Though another beer would have been welcomed, by 9:45pm it was time for Crescent to turn off it’s lights for the night.

FYI – Per the sign in the front window, the Mohawk Restaurant is for sale, which includes the collections.

]]> http://www.mybeerpix.com/crescent-oregon/feed/ 1