#Roadtrip! Part 1

Starting the tour at Anchor

Our posting was light over the last week, as your blogger was on the West Coast. We had set a couple of posts to publish while we were away, but it looks like something went wrong. We apologize for any inconvenience.

We were on a brief beer and wine road trip in San Francisco and Sonoma. If you have the opportunity to include winery, brewery or distillery visits on your own vacation travels, we highly recommend it. At some of our stops, we visited wineries that don't do business at all in New Jersey, and we were just another tourist at others. We can say that, uniformly, we were always treated like our business mattered, and the customer service was exceptional. Below are a few highlights from our trip.

Bagged hops, for dry hopping

Anchor Brewing. This is a tour that sells out quickly, as it's only offered twice per day, and the group size is limited. The tour really starts outside the brewery, as the sweet smell of roasted malt is in the air throughout the neighborhood.

The tour guide offers tremendous detail about the company and the brewing process. All of the Anchor beer products that we sell are produced at that one brewery in San Francisco. The tour starts with a sample of Anchor Steam their flagship beer, and concludes with samples of several other beers.

Tips: parking is difficult in the area, especially on school days. Uber and Lyft are great options in San Francisco. The tour, with the tasting, lasts about 90 minutes. Food is not available at the brewery. Anchor Distilling is a separate tour, with an even more limited schedule.

Wine on tap at Wente

Wente Vineyards. While other California appellations may be more famous, you shouldn't miss the opportunity to go east from San Francisco, into the Livermore Valley. Wente, one of our best-selling labels comes from that AVA. And if you want to go exploring, there are many other wineries within a very short distance of Wente.

Because we're not yet in harvest season, things are generally quiet at California wineries. For our wine tasting purposes, it also helped that we were there on a weekday. We got a nice walk through the various stops that the grapes make on their way from the vine to the bottle, which was followed by a tasting across the range of Wente wines.

We did talk about "wine on tap" in earlier blog posts, and we got to see that in action in one of the tasting rooms at Wente. Wine growlers just

might be available here one of these days!

21st Amendment Brewing. We didn't have time to pre-arrange anything at 21st Amendment, but we made sure to pay them a visit for lunch. The brewery is only a few blocks from where the San Francisco Giants play, so that's a great twofer, if you have that chance. We didn't see any baseball, but we did enjoy the beer sampler, served in an old-fashioned muffin tin. You design your own six glass sampler from whatever is on tap during your visit. Our choices ranged from the El Sully (back row, on the right) to the Back in Black IPA (front row, on the left).

That covered our San Francisco area visits. In Part 2, we'll discuss our visit to Sonoma County.