Where to Drink in LA - Part 1, Westside

This month I thought I'd put together a little list of where to go in Los Angeles to find good Craft Beer on tap.  Now for some of you, this information may be pretty mundane, in fact you may not learn anything new at all.  However, there's a whole new generation of people just discovering Craft Beer and have no idea that there are great bars just down the street or around the corner from them.  Los Angeles has had a surge of beer bars in the past year and hopefully this post will help you to discover some new places.  In addition to some proper "beer bars," I've included some places you might not think of.  So, coming to you in four parts over four weeks, I've organized the best places by neighborhoods, starting with my own:

Santa Monica/Venice

Library Alehouse

Probably my favorite Westside beer bar.  Not only do they rotate their taps often, they bring in great selections, host events for charity, and put together interesting beer pairing dinners.  To top that off they have a great dining room with very excellent food.  They have 29 taps and a long menu of great options.

Father's Office

FO with their 36 taps, is probably the first place people think of when they think of Craft beer.  Even with two locations (one in Culver City) it can still be a bit hard to find seating at this jam packed gastropub.  The beers rotate seasonally, although they usually keep some select names year round.  Personally, I'd like to see them rotate a little more often, but their selection is always sublime.  When it comes to getting a burger and beer, there may not be a better place than this.

5th Amendment

This is a quirky little hole in the wall bar just off the Promenade in Santa Monica.  While I've never tried the food here, they have 20 taps, which they rotate often, and you won't have to fight for a seat like some of the other places.  It's a much quieter venue to grab a beer with a few friends.  Since their music is often run off a laptop, sometimes you can talk the bartender into letting you DJ.

The Daily Pint

An Irish Pub with darts, shuffle board, pool, karaoke, foosball, and TVs for big games, this bar is guaranteed to have something for everyone.  What's more, they have a really great selection of craft beers, including 2 cask ales every day of the week.  In case you're not feeling like beer, they have an amazing selection of reasonably priced Single Malt Scotches to choose from.

The Other Room

Now a Venice mainstay, this place can get pretty crowded on weekends and extremely loud.  While they're not known for rotating their taps much, or well... at all really, they do have some good standard Crafts on tap and in the bottle.  It's dark, hip, and very much a scene, but I appreciate that they still bring some beers to the party.

Venice Ale House

This place is literally brand new, and when I say literally, I mean last week.  When I visited, it seemed like they're going through all the opening week jitters, getting all their ducks in order.  And despite the fact that they had kicked about 6 taps when I was there, they do seem to have a number of decent drafts from California as well as some oldies but goodies from Oregon, Alaska, and Colorado.  The selection wasn't too mind boggling, but I certainly found a few beers I liked and they seem committed to bringing in better beer.  We'll see what happens with this place, but for now I'll get behind them since they're serving organic food and have the balls to open up this kind of establishment on the boardwalk.

Next Week: Hollywood!

Stone/Brewdog Bashah

Sitting down to a beer after a long hard day of work, on a Saturday no less.  As I sit back let myself relax into this glass of Bashah, I'm reminded of a mindset, or perhaps ideology, that goes deeper than the craft brew movement.  Regardless of what's in your glass, miller lite or Beer Geek Breakfast, after a long hard day of work, there really is nothing better than something cold and frosty to restore your spirit and vitality.

The Bashah is no exception.  I'm opening this beer with quite a bit of trepidation.  It's been exhalted for its collaborators, Stone and Brewdog, two of the industry leaders.  If you haven't already, you should watch Stone's 30 minute video about the making of this beer.  I was lucky enough to try this beer on tap at the Daily Pint about a month ago, but was pretty disappointed as it had a similar funk to my Shah Mat, leading me to believe that either I had stumbled upon some mysterious ingredient combination of Black IPAs, or my beer had simply gone bad.

It doesn't take too long after opening this beer to tell, that the batch I had on tap had simply gone bad.  Why? Because this is good.

There's practically no head on this beer and the aroma is almost entirely Belgian yeast.  The taste, however, is much more complex.  The front end is mostly hops and carbonation with a slight citrus bend.  The clarity and wildness of the yeast seems to take over in the middle and we finish with an incredibly complex mixture of chocolate roasted grains, and VERY bitter alpha acid hops.  Actually, those two descriptions should be reversed because while the bitter is settling in under the tongue, the chocolate roast subtley spreads out like a final shockwave: definitive punctuation on a very wordy sentence.

The body is understandably light to enhance the IPA qualities.  The Belgian yeast does the job it's supposed to, really enhancing the bitterness of the hops, but plays perhaps too much of a role in the flavor for my liking.  The flavors seem to swing from one to another rather than roll, and a bit of smoothing in this balance could hopefully be incorporated into future collaborations.

Lastly, in Stone spirit, they have adorned the label with typically Stone-esque long paragraph of sometimes wise, sometimes philosophical ramblings.  Unfortunately, this is not one of their better ones as it says little beyond commenting on the elusive and illusive qualities of their beer.  All that aside, it's well made beer with a lot to offer its happy drinkers with 8.6% alc.

Bashah: ****