From the ashes, and stuff!

After a bit of a beerblogging hiatus (and what better word? "Latin, from hiare to yawn"), we here at Casa Pfiffa hope that the hallucinagenic inspiration that the holiday's gluttonous overindulgence can provide will be the catalyst for some more regular installments here. Until that magic happens, however, I'd be remiss if I didn't pass along this nugget of wisdom from kind reader Michael, aka Horsecore (!) aka Demonseed (!) in regards to a little treasure hunt I initiated many moons ago. In response to this blatheringly pleading post from April of 2005 (here's to the glorious eternal nature of blogs!) regarding the most hircine of ales, Michael writes:

I happened upon this ale quite by chance at a well known wine merchant in Pleasanton, California. I took a bottle home and was REALLY impressed with it. I understand that the ale is only made once or twice a year and in very limited quantities [he later emailed me to say: "The guy that makes the ale actually bottles around 600 bottles a month (I must've been thinking of a different ale that's done in limited quantities)." Still sounds limited to me!]. All of the production and bottling takes place on the brewers goat farm. The store is called The Wine Steward in downtown Pleasanton. The ale it tucked away in the back of the store on the bottom shelf of their white wine/champagne cooler. Not many ale drinkers shop there if you haven't guessed. They currently have two bottles, one of which I plan on buying as a gift today. If you're anywhere near the SF Bay Area and liked the ale well enough to make the trip I'm sure it'll be there for a while.

He included some related links worth checking out as well, here, and here, which lead me to find out there's actually 10 bottles of the stuff sitting on a shelf in SOMA right now... To be continued!

Beer alert - Abt 12 on tap

Almost deserving of those high tech little Drudge sirens, new Belgian-inspired beerstaurant in the Mission The Monk's Kettle looks likely to draw a certain breed of drinker purely on this promise alone: They're serving St. Bernardus' awe-inspiring Abt 12 on tap. That's like finding the monks of Westvleteren singing Christmas carols on my doorstep on choral risers made of cases of yellow cap.

Here's a quip from their info page:

We looked around this city recently and saw that the choices for beer were too limited for a city that thrives on good tastes. Plenty of wine bars, yes, but what about the beverage we all love to love? We are in a city saturated with breweries (in California, and up the coast in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska as well), but there is so little in the way of a place to get a quality beer. And so, we are changing that.

Hear, hear! I'll admit I'm a little skeptical, purely based off the shiny-fancy Cigar-Aficionado-color-scheme website. But I'm easy to persuade. Verrrrrrrry easy....

Thanks, Alex, for the tip...

PS - Yes, we're all quite aware that there hasn't been much action lately on the old Pfifferroo, but that's all about to change, what with updating this site being #78 on the new year's resolutions list (#32: design a bottle opener for infants; #29: figure out where all these flies are coming from; #8: learn Uzbek) and a huge deluge of backlogged half-posts and photos and reviews and all sorts of crazy crap. But don't expect much until the holidays are through. Have a crazysafesexybeer holiday, all!