Mannerisms

At most Las Vegas bars, clubs and resturants, bars if you ask what beer they’ve got, they say: ‘Bud, Bud-lite, Miller, Miller-lite, Coors-lite, Michelob Ultra.’

These are all the same. Almost tasteless, freezing cold, fizzy and watery.

Ask for a brew pub and the usual recommendations are the brew-pub at the Monte Carlo Hotel and the Hofbrauhaus.

However the Monte Carlo brew pub doesn’t brew its own beer, though it’s decked out to look like a brewery, and what’s on offer is the usual litany of ‘Bud, Bud-lite, Miller, Miller-lite, Coors-lite, Michelob Ultra.’ The Hofbrauhaus doesn’t brew its own beer either.

Things get better at the Aladdin Hotel where, in Aladdin’s Desert Passage, a shopping arcade, there’s a place called The Sin City Brewing Company which sells four decent, freshly brewed draught beers.

Further research found two genuine brew-pubs, one a branch of Gordon Biersch, the well-known Californian brew-pub, which is on Paradise Road, about ten blocks from the Convention Centre, and the other is the Triple 7 brewery in the Main Street Station Casino.

Biersch makes more of a German style sweet tasting lager beer, which is not surprising because Biersch originally hailed from Munich. The Triple 7’s beer is nearer to the British taste.

On the way back to my hotel, I find a bar in a slot machine parlour called Penny Town attached to the Riviera Hotel which is close to my hotel and which sells draught Sierra Nevada the best, in my view, reasonably ubiquitously found beer in the USA.

OK, the local micro-breweries make better beer, but Sierra Nevada is still a damn good pint.