Beer & Blog, GoWalla, SuperBowl & More

One busy week sandwiched in between two busy weekends had caused me to fall behind in my blogging duties. Not to make it sound like it's a job or anything, but it is a lot of work in my spare time. So let's do a recap of what happened this week.

Beer & Blog last Thursday on another side of town, nice dynamic, nice turn out and super great service and co operation from Gordon Biersch (@Gordon_Biersch). We had a good time and some great discussion that evening.

Friday night featured the new tapas style addition to Town Square, Cana.  I enjoyed a couple cocktails and some tastes of serveral dishes, over all it was very good, but a tad pricey.  They are rolling out a happy hour menu very soon, so we are looking forward to a return visit.

Also rolled downtown on Friday night and enjoyed the new Hardway IPA at the Chicago Brewing Company, nestled atop the Four Queens Casino. 

Going into the weekend we had dinner trip planned to head out to the Nellis area of town and visit the Big Dogs Bar & Grill. Manya (@Manya) needed to add the location (along with a few from the Friday evening excursions) into her GoWalla Las Vegas brewery trip.  So we headed down there for a nice dinner at the older establishment.  Bit of a different vibe from the Draft House where we spend a lot of time, but same good beer and food.

Also did a ton of shopping over the weekend for our planned Super Bowl party this weekend. Got me a lot of stamps and visits in FourSquare (@FourSquare) and GoWalla (@GoWalla). Not as many as I would have liked in GoWalla as suddenly the ability to add new venues on mobile web for the Android platform was missing.

Moving into the week I ended up going out Monday & Tuesday, knowing I had plans on Wednesday for the previously mentioned GoWalla Swapmeet A large number of met up at Diablo's Cantina to exchange items, and get some swag that the kind folks that develop GoWalla sent along.

There may have been an excessive number of check ins that evening, but hey, when you are in the middle of the Las Vegas Strip... it's hard not to sneak a few drive by check ins.

Beer & Blog last night was back at the Frog, which had an excellent set of taps last night. All currently updated on Taplister.com (@Taplister), check it out to find out what craft beers are on tap around town. Another good turnout for Beer & Blog, the new year is starting out strong.

Finally heading into the 5pm on a Friday, anxious to get home and get prepping for the party on Sunday. Another huge week next week, pretty full with upcoming events.

Monday Night Draft House

So, I cannot stand keeping my house keys on my car keys ring. Small car, short legs, the keys bump my leg when I drive. So I keep it light.

This however has led to me locking myself out of the house. We have to lock the door to the house, in the garage locked because my girl won't stop feeding the neighbors cats. Trust me all this randomness does collide into a point of commonality.

The neighbor cats think they live in our garage now, so girl also leaves the door cracked so they can go in and out as they please. Hence why the house door must be locked. Did I mention the pigeons?

So I have on occassion forgotten to throw my keys in my bag. Today was such a day. So with a couple of hours to kill I made my way to Big Dogs Draft House, our local watering hole.

Hey how can you say no to two for one burgers and cold micro brew. My favorite Red Hydrant Ale so not too bad a night for locking myself out of the house.

Bite of Las Vegas

Las Vegas is known as a party town, they feature a lot events as one might expect from a major city.

However, some of the execution is less than optimal. Events can be a let down compared to many of the San Francisco Bay Area events that I have attended in the past.

Of course, our memories are hard to surpass, so we will get with the present.

BOLV 08, the music, food festival of Las Vegas featured many local restaurants and some fine bands, headliners incluced Puddle of Mudd and Lifehouse.

We arrived to POM playing and they were good, definetly going for crowd participation. Our long wait in the beer line was accompanied by their "tribute" to AC/DC, doing a cover of TNT. That was cool, especially on the cusp of the Black Ice release.

They were followed by Lifehouse, whom seem to frequent LV and the events of the sponsoring radio station. This is the third time I have had the chance to see them play life in LV and they are certainly a guilty pleasure band of mine. Their set started with a number of lesser know, but excellent songs. They were excellent as always, becoming a consistent band that flys under the radar for the most part.

Food wise, it was unimpressive, the problem with the LV bite event, is that too many fast food / chain restaraunts participate. Pizza Hut, really? Really? Panda Express, Fuddruckers, and a number of other places that, I am not thinking oooh, I need to sample their food. We kept our sampling light as we arrived late in the day and went more for the music then the food.

We did have some greasy but awesome lumpia's from a local place, oh but they were good. Other than that, I did not sample any food, nothing caught my eye and even late in the evening the lines were long.

We settled on hitting our local brewpub for a late night snack after we left the event. There I had some lovely beer cheese soup and we snacked on an assortment of brats and the most delicious saurerkraut ever. Washed down with a lovely Big Dogs IPA, excellent meal but for our overly obnoxious waiter who so busy trying to upsell us everything under the sun, that he did not see to our needs. Oh well it was his tip.