Travel to North Coast and Microbrewery Tour

This Wednesday last, I finished packing and headed over to Chuck’s house to pick up him and his tent trailer. We were headed for the north coast to camp at the Paul M. Dimmick (link only renders correctly in IE) campground and then go fishing, kayaking and abalone diving. The rest of Chuck’s family would head up Friday and my Carol was home pet sitting for the neighbors. I imagine we made quite a parade what with a camper pulling a camper and all.

Pulling the fully loaded tent trailer with my fully loaded camper managed to make the BFT grunt a little, but we had no real problems. We stopped at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company for samples and a tour. The samples were good, but the tour was really interesting. They had recently brought some brew kettles imported from Germany online – big (85 barrels?), shiny, copper things for mashing and lautering the beer ingredients and for boiling the sweet wort (click me for a virtual tour). There was a big copper control panel with a bazillion valves, gauges and switches, all labeled in German, and all superseded by a touch screen computer monitor mounted in the middle of the panel. Progress, I guess, but not as cool as all those valves, gauges and switches. Back at the visitor center, we procured a good sample of the beers and headed on.

We stopped at a roadside fruit stand and I went browsing – picked up some plums and peaches; back at the truck I sampled a couple and immediately went back inside and got a bunch more. Peaches – the queen of fruit. As our friend Roger says, “the perfect blend of acid and sugar”.

Arriving at the campground, which is sited deep in a coastal redwood forest – the trees must approach 100 feet tall – we found others in our group, said hi, picked a site and set up camp. Dinner was beer, barbequed chicken thighs (marinated in orange juice, EVOO, ginger and garlic) and packets of veggies. Mmm…