The pub will be open normal hours on Monday and Tuesday, December 29th and 30th.  Tuesday, December 30th will be our annual New Year's Eve-Eve party.  It is another night of great cheer and lots of champagne (roederer estate sparkling wine to be precise) and cham-Pliny cocktails (champagne and Pliny - very good, just ask Kat) and Malheur Brut and Dark Brut and Deus!  It is a great place to ring in the new year a little early, without having to worry about all of the real drunks that will be out on the road on the 31st.  So help us raid Lindsey's Champagne supply and toast farewell to 2008 and a welcome to 2009.

THE PUB WILL BE CLOSED WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 31ST AND THURSDAY, JANUARY 1ST!

Coming in 2009!

So I am not going to detail all of January's 15th Anniversary events, since I haven't made up all of the details yet.  I can tell you that we will be tapping special beers and special casks throughout the month and releasing special bottles.  We will start off with a bang on Friday, January 2nd - our first day open in the new year.  I am putting some very special beers on tap for our employee party and we will have all of the beers on tap on Friday the 2nd.  The line-up will include - Alpine Bad Boy, Ballast Point Sculipin IPA, Pizza Port Solana Beach Swami's IPA and Deschutes Abyss among others.  I will probably find room to tap a few more special beers, but suffice it to say that we will have an incredible tap line up from the very first day of the year.

The main promos for the month focus on Thursday/Friday, cask/tap combinations.  Each Thursday we will be featuring some fantastic cask beers and each Friday we will feature a huge line-up of beers from that brewery on tap.  Here is the line-up of our great brewery events:

Jan. 8/9 - Green Flash (West Coast IPA cask)
Jan. 15/16 - Pizza Port Carlsbad (Poor Man's IPA cask)
Jan. 22/23 - Port Brewing and Lost Abbey (Hop 15 cask and a special barrel blend just for O'Brien's!)
Jan. 29/30 - Russian River - Southern California's first TION night with a dozen of Vinnie's Belgian-style beers on tap!

For each brewery night, I expect to have at least 10 beers on tap.  Each brewer is pulling out some great beers and some will only be in five gallon kegs.  I will be going up to Lost Abbey in January to blend the beer with Tomme for our Anniversary.  I have no idea yet what it will be or how much we will get.  For the Russian River TION night I expect to have nearly 20 Russian River beers on tap and Vinnie Cilurzo himself will be there.  All of Russian River's Belgian-style beers end with TION, like Damnation, Supplication, etc.., hence the TION night.  We will also have some special library/reserve bottles for sale inlcuding 3 liter bottles of Damnation.  I will have a complete calendar of events along with some expected beers in the first email of 2009.  All I can say is that every Friday in January at O'Brien's will be an unforgettable night of beer (unless you drink too much and then it will be all too forgettable).  And expect the kitchen to be kicking out some amazing food to go with all that great beer.
 
And as if the beer gods smiled upon us for our 15th Anniversary, Beer Advocate magazine just named O'Brien's the 15th best beer bar on the planet!

Cheers!!!