Mmm, beer!

Another business trip, another quest for great beer. The last day of the trip saw four of us staying the night in Tucson, AZ, waiting to catch our 6 AM flight back east. The airport is on the southeastern side of town. I’ve flown in and out of here several times now, but never actually stayed, so I didn’t even know how to find the city itself until yesterday evening. Actually we drove around so much looking for a place to eat that I’m not sure I would be able to get back if I tried. If I stay here again, I’ll make sure I have a better map. We should have stuck to the original idea, which was to go near the university and drive around until we found a likely area to grab some grub, but instead we kept searching for an elusive Historic Tucson. At one point, we’d nearly driven the 20 minutes back to the airport on the way to the University, and I’m pretty sure we were only a few blocks away from it when we took the first wrong turn. The AVIS map was at best not to scale and more realistically was horribly misleading. I should write a letter, but it takes so much more effort to lick a stamp than it does to post to the ol’ blog.

We finally found a strip of about two blocks of interesting places. When faced with the decision on where to go, we did what any reasonably savvy tourist will do when faced with this situation: we asked a local. She pointed us a block away to the B Line Cafe, which provided a sort of eclectic AZ-MEX and sandwich fusion cuisine, along with a beer list featuring four IPAs on tap! Who cares about the food, line me up with some crisp, hop-monster beers! Perfect for taming the blast furnace temperatures we experienced that afternoon while racing around trying to see all the planes at the Pima Air Museum, and also to cool the fraying nerves from our unplanned and extended tour of lovely Tucson. B Line has an interesting set-up, really more of a short order workflow than a full-service restaurant, but the food was easily better than many more pretentious places I’ve been, and the atmosphere was very friendly and relaxing. The cashier and bar maid asked me what kind of beer I liked and when I said I would really love a crushingly hopped IPA, she suggested two. Scott had the Racer 5, and I had the Stone IPA. They were both really good. I’ll have to work a return trip to that comfy little cafe next time I find myself in southern AZ.