The Session # 29: Will Travel for Beer

Its the first Friday of the month, which means its Session Time! The month's virtual beer tasting is hosted by Beer by Bart and the theme is Will Travel for beer. The goal is to talk about how we beer lover's travel when it comes to beers, how do we plan for brewery tours, do we do things at the drop of a hat, or do we spend weeks and weeks planning? Well for me, I must say I do both, however, my favorite "Beercation" was completely last minute.
My unplanned beercation all started last September. My wife and I were getting ready to fly out to San Diego and drive to Palm Desert for a vacation with her family. We had thoughts of sitting by a pool drinking cocktails, nothing in our minds were focused on beer. Maybe I could get to a store to checkout the local selection but that was about it. Then a hurricane popped up on the radar and looked to be headed straight towards Houston, Ike! It was forcasted to land before we were to leave Houston, so now we weren't sure we'd be going anywhere, luckily Southwest let us fly out two days early to San Diego. As we hurried to the airport and then finally got on the flight, we talked about what we should do for those two extra days. Well I knew there were quite a few breweries that I've admired and wanted to check out so we decided to spend one day doing brewer tours. As I've written about, we ended up heading to Solana BeachPizza Port, then over to Lost Abbey, before finally stopping at Stone Brewery. This last minute tour and beercation was by far one of my favorites, plus I was able to bring some beer home with me, to help me deal with all the issues that Post-Ike Houston brought. I also kept a couple of bottles around and decided that this month's session was the perfect reason to break one out. As my wife and I drank the bottle from our Hurricane beercation it brought back a lot of fun memories.
Lost Abbey Judgement Day: This is a dark Belgian Quad ale, made with Raisins and weighs in at 10.5%. It pours a rich black with a tan colored head. The nose is fruity, raisins, sour cherry, figs, roasted coco, malts. The mouth is creamy, with bitter coco and roasted malts, oaky vanilla. Its got some carbonation, but not a lot so it slides like velvet over the tongue. Figs and raisins and other dark fruit show up on the tongue. Dark chocolate and sour cherries, dusty coco nibs. A very tasty complex beer that hides its alcohol well. This was a good beer to drive the the thoughts of stormy times away from us, and help us remember the great time we had in San Diego.