. Favourite Beer of the Week

I like to drive to work on Interstate 280. It is much prettier than 101, and on the way home you go past this funny house




and this funny pointy guy.




That's Father Junipero Serra, an 18th century Spanish Monk who went around California building Missions and enslaving the native population for Jesus.

Opinions are divided as to what exactly he is pointing at. Some say it is due west in a gesture to the future. Some say it is at a fleeing Indian who has mistakenly chosen freedom over conversion to Catholicism at gunpoint. Some say it is at the freeway.




Father Junipero's first Mission was in San Diego, and just down the road someone built the Mission Brewery.




where they make this rather nice IPA.




It tastes... like an IPA. And it looks great - sunset orange with a thick head of foam.





Monks are well known for their beer.

In the middle ages, Franciscan monks had to fast for extended periods. But beer is not food, it's drink, so the monks got brewing. And drinking. Some were putting away 10 pints a day. And there was more left over, so they opened pubs.

For Buddhist monks, drinking is a sin. Although they built this temple entirely out of recycled beer bottles.




A few years ago in Cambodia a Buddhist monk was found on a doorstep, passed out and covered in mud, after having run naked through the streets of Phnom Penh following a heavy night of drinking rice wine laced with toads. It was claimed that the monk was drinking the alcohol-toad mix as medicine to treat an unspecified illness.




The same thing happened last week to Charlie Sheen. After police found him naked and apparently intoxicated in his trashed New York Plaza hotel suite, his publicist stated - "What we are able to determine is that Charlie had an adverse allergic reaction to some medication and was taken to the hospital. Everything else is speculation."

Neither Sheen nor the monk faced criminal charges.




The prettiest bit of i280 is when you go over the Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is piped in from Yosemite. It's especially nice on the way home when the sun is setting and the fog is rolling in over the Santa Cruz mountains.




like the foam on top of a Mission IPA.




Many endangered species live around the reservoir, including the San Mateo Thornmint.




And the Woolly Sunflower.




Fortunately the reservoir is off limits to drunk monks and Charlie Sheen and everyone else, just in case they have an allergic reaction to their medication and trash the place.


Not-very-fun fact: The famous Franziskaner beer drinking monk logo was designed by Ludwig Hohlwein -



who was the lead poster designer for the Nazis from 1933 to 1945.