We’re always on the hunt for a new place to find great beer, and we recently came across some of the best. We found Oggi’s on through the tubes (Internet.) I think pub-crawler gave us the lead. Oggie’s is a small chain of Pizza brewerys.

We stopped by in the evening and they were packed. Even so, we were sitting at a table within a few minutes. The atmosphere is like a family-safe sports bar, with sports on TV covering the room but none big enough or loud enough for anyone to get rowdy. Their menu had a large selection of pizza, pasta, salads, and hamburgers. We’ve been there several times now, and have never been disappointed with their food.

They have 8 different beers on their menu. They brew 6 of them themselves, and Left Coast Brewing brews the other 2 and allows Oggi’s to re-brand them. We tried a sampler of all but Left Coast’s Hop Juice, and were impressed by all of them. Pizza places always seem to make great blondes, and theirs was no exception. My favorite was their IPA - possibly the best IPA in the state. It is brewed with 5 different types of hops, leading to a very complex and pleasing profile. The only beer I’m not entirely fond of is the Hop Juice. It is a double IPA brewed by Left Coast on behalf of Oggie’s. It just seemed like their were trying too hard with it - like they sacrificed flavor and profile to fit in more hop taste.

I highly recommend both the beer and the food at Oggi’s. They have several locations in California and Arizona, so check them out if you are looking for someplace new.

Been a busy summer, what with the new job and all. Haven’t managed to keep my adventures blogged. I should be settling in at this point. We’ll see.

My birthday has been pretty awesome. We’ve been sorta celebrating for over a week. Went to a Live/Collective Soul/Blues Traveler concert a few weeks ago. The venue was terrible but the concert was pretty good. I think Blues Traveler was my favorite. I’m not the hugest fan of their music, but they were really laid back and put on a really fun show. Live played awesome music, as always. It surprised me how superficial and egotistical Collective Soul is. I never really got that from their music, but they are definitely a bunch of premadonas.

Went down to Tuscon last week for an event at Hotel Congress. They had a few bands and some vendors. I had a lot of fun just hanging out with That Girl and watching people. Monday, on my actual birthday, That Girl cooked me dinner with champagne and gave me some socks. I love new socks! It was a great night. Tomorrow we are having a party at my place. Should be a good time.

Ok, to be fair, I know what people like about it. It’s pretty and glossy. It has some neat features. It makes some things a lot easier. It crashes less and gets infected less. But I hate it.

Everything takes an extra mouse click than it should. It takes 4 clicks to select the text in the address bar. The same thing takes 1 click in Windows and 2 in Linux. 4 clicks. And what is up with using ‘apple’+c for copy and ‘apple’+v for paste? I’ve never used a system that used a key combination of anything other than ‘ctrl’+c and so on. It annoys me that Windows pushes the ‘Window’ button onto people, but making me push the ‘apple’ button to copy and paste is over the line. How am I supposed to use that button without lifting my hand from the keyboard.

Everything tries to hang out in the dock. Everything! Its worse than the system notification bar in Windows. The home and end keys are broken if at least half of the application for no apparent reason. An Apple mouse STILL has no right click button. It was excusable in the ’80’s, but come on… You can buy a 12 button mouse for Windows and put usable functions on all 12 of them but Apple can’t figure out more than 1 button. And those side buttons on their mouse are impossible to push. Sure, you can plug in a PC compatible mouse through USB and the right-click feature works, but OSX still has absolutely no concept of a middle click.

I’m a Linux guy, and I really, really wanted to like OSX (since it is based on BSD.) I realized the other day that OSX makes me miss Windows. That is sad coming from me. Everyone should use Linux. Seriously.

Finally got a chance to try out BJ’s. We got their appetizer sampler platter and a beer sampler. The appetizers were pretty good overall. The beer on the other hand, wasn’t impressive.

We sampled 6 beers - the blonde, the heff, the red, the brown, the porter, and the stout. The blonde was good. It was sweet and malty tasting. It didn’t skunk as it warmed up, but did flaten out. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t necessarily better than any other blonde I’ve had other places, it just wasn’t any worse. The Heff was very clovy and spicy tasting. It also fell very flat as it warmed up. Again, not any better than any other heff, but not any worse. I think I enjoyed the Nut Brown the most. It was more nutty than sweet, which I like since most browns are overwhelmingly sweet. It has a slight hop flavor to it. Once it warmed up, it did become sweeter and start to fall flat.

Their red smelled distinctly of cinnamon, but the taste mostly coppery. When it was cold, there was a distinct hop flavor for the first part of the profile, but the copper flavor came on strongly shortly after that. After it warmed up, the copper flavor completely took over, which was a slight put-off for me. The porter tasted like a glass of water with 5 drops of chocolate, 2 drops of milk, and a drop of coffee. The stout was also very weak and flat but featured a distinct imperial flavor. I’m not always a fan of the whiskey taste in imperial beers, but in this case it was the only thing providing memorable flavor or body.

I would have liked to have tried the Pale Ale, but the other beers I did try didn’t give me much hope it would be anything more than a mild disappointment. For a well-known chain of breweries, I expected a lot more out of BJ’s. Their food was decent, but you can get decent food lots of places. You visit breweries for their beers, and this beer isn’t worth any special trips.