i was the classiest bloke at the toronado

exhibit a: i combed my hair before going
exhibit b: i combed my beard before going
exhibit c: i have no tattoos
exhibit d: i have all my teeth plus a crown you can't see, but certainly no gaps
exhibit e: i wore a suit jacket

when struggling to make my way through a dense crowd later that night at The Trappist, I remarked less wittily than it seemed at my then-current BAC that this was only the second most crowded bar I'd had to navigate that day.

the Toronado was crowded for this year's barleywine fest. it's my second visit to the bar, and i thought it was crowded the first time: on a weeknight. little did i know.

some dude was having a birthday and his mates brought a cake and were passing it around. one patron was more blunt than i, and instead of simply passing the cake on, declared that it was idiocy to mix chocolate cake and high alcohol beverages. you said it, mate. not to mention that it was proudly touted as "baked with guinness". hello, we're at a festival celebrating the malty excess of american brewing, and you think an overblown, watery (not-really) euro-brew is appropriate? baked into a cake? okay, well, maybe if it's baked into a cake.

but not while there's green flash on hand!

speaking of green flash, i had their barley wine. i know because their barleywine tastes just like their DIPAs, of which I had two last weekend, which taste almost just like their IPA. now, if green flash produced a bad ipa, dipa, or barleywine, it would be a black mark in my book that they all tasted the same, but all three (technically, four) are best-in-class IPAs, and the reason they taste the same is clearly because green flash has a "house hop profile", not because "they suck". so maybe they didn't "get" the barleywine category (or maybe I didn't!). it could be worse, they could be...

anderson valley. yeah, i'll name names. i always have high hopes for them, they're semi-local, they have funny marketing, good attitude, and all the rest. it's just the beer that disappoints me. well, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, hey, it's a festival, but fool me three times: no sir, i'm not that drunk. the bastids had the nerve to be on tap #23 and hops nearly ordered them for that reason, but i think i was able to restrain her, which brings me to another point: no notes. not only was there no room to write, there was no way (well, there were placemats that would help but we didn't have one) to keep the barleywines straight. even if we'd had a magic mat, we kept on passing the brews between the four of us, and after a couple of barleywines, let's just say i have trouble keeping them straight.

which is not to say they tasted alike! no sir, not at all. broadly, they fell into five categories:

1) the DIPAs. these were brews that seemingly "didn't get it" and came out tasting like a DIPA. I like a good DIPA so i can't complain too much except to say "i was there for barleywine, dammit!"
2) bigfoot. huge, dry malt, balanced hops, golden/amber color, eminently drinkable. a barleywine!
3) nutella beer. what? gooey, smelling of hazelnut butter, maybe some gross earthy hops. interesting flavor that occurred too many times to be a "mistake" (despite what you'll say, 777!)
4) syrup. nuff said.
5) barleywine only with some interesting caramel addition that didn't taste like nutella. magnolia had one, or was that 21st amendment? i don't remember but it was fabulous, as it should be, coming from the city.

right off the bat i had a good couple of nyuks. the bartender handed us a 2oz glass of what looked a lot more like imperial stout than barleywine: opaquely dark. i exclaimed, "this is opaquely dark!" or something like that, and a nearby gentleman with uncombed hair, an uncombed beard, probably a tattoo somewhere, missing teeth, and no suit jacket shook some of the cobwebs from his head and drawled, slowly, and with great assuredness, explaining to me with a face as straight as could be mustered with so few teeth, that that is how it should be, and moreover, that if it were not dark, it could hardly be a barleywine. the reason it's so dark, he explained, is that it's got more grains in it, and the more grains you put in a beer, the darker it gets. they have to put so many grains in there to get the high alcohol content that makes it a barleywine, so you end up with a very dark beer.

i smiled and nodded until he went away to finish his imperial stout. it took longer than i wished. later on when i was ordering sausage... next door? in doors? the toronado is shaped like a horseshoe, and in the middle of the horseshoe is a sausage store which is independent but has a free trade agreement with the bar. locating this sausage shop caused me some consternation in my post-barleywine state. as i said, this was my second visit to the toronado. at my first, chefjef left the bar to fetch us sausages. he walked downhill to get them.

i exited the toronado and walked downhill. somewhere between the toronado and san diego i realized that i wasn't getting any closer to the sausage shop. in fact, while my brother had exited the upper arm of the horseshoe and walked downhill, i had exited the lower arm and totally missed the sausage shop. what a revelation!

in the sausage shop was the same barleywine aficionado, insisting to the cashier that he had ordered sausages ten minutes ago, so where were they?

the poor sausagemongers -- they have their hands full (of, uh... sausage...) on a normal day, i'm sure. on a festival day -- and the toronado has many -- they surely must deal with all manner of drunken mistakenness. they apparently deal with it skillfully and tactfully. i asked how many orders were placed but never picked up. the cashier told me not to ask.

anyhow, i like barleywine. i like douple ipas better, and fortunately, if i'm drinking green flash, i can have both at once! i am grateful that bigfoot can be found in bottles (so grateful that i took piazza's last sixer off their hands last night, unless the clever bastids have more in the back!) and sad that i'll have to visit 21st or magnolia to figure out which one had the one i liked.

after the fest we walked to buckapound to sober up a little and hear sailing disaster stories. once we'd sobered up we decided it was time to top off and headed over to oakland, of all places, to visit The Trappist, which Darwin had been agitating to visit since it opened. It was indeed the second most crowded bar i'd been to all day.

I tried some thick dubbel and a Chimay tripel -- the Chimay because it was on tap and i didn't get Chimay. whelp, now I do, it was quite good. i always wondered how it could be so popular, and i guess that much of it is marketing, but beyond the marketing lies a pretty good beer. don't think i'll be buying any bottles but i don't regret ordering it (unlike the 5 bottles of "hop ottin" still occupying space at sullen beaver).

i could go on, but sadly, it's monday, and you know what that means: time to brew!