A weekly look at the draft selection in beer-friendly bars across the country.

The San Diego area has so many great breweries -- AleSmith, Green Flash, Port, just to pull a few off a list in alphabetical order -- that it certainly needs its fair share of great beer bars to showcase the local SoCal talent. They've got the goods. Perennial powerhouse Hamilton's Tavern always keeps a mighty draft list. Significant start-ups like Toronado's recent San Diego location offers tons of taps. Even Stone Brewery gets in on the action, featuring not only their own brews but favorites from around California and beyond.

Today, however, O'Brien's Pub gets the nod for a trend worth supporting: draft beer archives! Not only do they offer up their own "On Tap" link via their website, but patrons can also view a complete list of every brew they've ever had on draft ... or at least for the past few years. "It's everything we've ever posted on the website," says owner Tom Nickel, "but the site only dates back to 2007." Still, two years of beers is the kind of comprehensive compiling that What's On Tap nerds can get behind!

After the jump, a reprint of the most current draft list off their website.

"I have a quote for you," said Green Flash Brewing Co.'s Brewmaster, Chuck Silva. And when the man who hand-crafted one of your favorite beers in the world tells you he has a quote, you listen. "The harder you work, the luckier you are," said Chuck in response to my query of how Green Flash has managed to have such great success in such a short amount of time. "It's not that we've been lucky, it's just that we work hard and we've had good fortune."

Chuck Silva has been Brewmaster with Green Flash for approximately four and a half years now. In that time, Green Flash has grown from a small San Diego brewery to one of national prominence and availability. It's hard to believe, but Mr. Silva wasn't even Green Flash's first Brewmaster (they existed for two years without him), which just shows how instrumental he has been to their success. I was lucky enough to be able to accost Chuck during a Philly Beer Week event at the P.O.P.E. (fully known as the Pub on Passyunk East, which, as a bar, is post worthy in it's own right, but I'm going to stay on task for the time being), and he was polite enough to answer a number of questions regarding his brews.

I'm really bad when it comes to eating breakfast. I know, I know, it's "the most important meal of the day" and it gives you a good start and all those other slogans, but I find myself grabbing just a cup of tea in the morning and that's it. No oatmeal, no juice, no fruit, nothing. This is probably something I should fix.

Maybe I should move to San Diego. According to this survey conducted by Jimmy Dean, more people in San Diego eat breakfast than any other city in America. The whole list is here so I won't give away the rest of the top ten, but I will say that Detroit is #5, Pittsburgh is #14, and Atlanta is #22.

By the way, I haven't mentioned it yet, but February is National Hot Breakfast Month.

Nicole recently posted about fingerprint scanners used by school cafeterias to ensure that kids are eating healthy meals. Well, some graduate students have now used similar technology to make getting junk food easier. An engineering professor at the University of California San Diego started the "biometric soda machine" project and students in his department have since outfitted a regular snack machine with thumbprint and facial recognition, as well as a bar code scanner, CR80 News reported. The goal of the project, known as SodaVision, is an easy, debit-based system where people can walk up to the machine, be recognized, choose their snack and walk away. A visit to the SodaVision site also has examples of the machine's interface, which looks like a screen from Star Trek.

[Via Pure Pedantry]

The U.S. Navy recently threw the world's largest pizza party ever to celebrate the completion of the construction of the USNS Lewis and Clark. A total of 13,500 Papa John's pepperoni pizzas were delivered to 6,000 workers at the shipyard in San Diego. The previous Guinness record for pizza delivery was a mere 13,386 pies.

The enormous takeout order required enlisting the ovens of all Papa John's San Diego restaurants and used over one ton of cheese. What I'd like to know is how many 55-gallon drums of garlic powder and crushed red pepper they needed.

Surfing is big in California, but for me, I'll stick to surfing on the web. We have lots of good food blogs - cooking and recipes, restaurant coverage, and some that do a little of both - out of San Francisco and LA, but we can't forget about San Diego! There are quite a few food blogs based out of San Diego! Here's a list of several I've come across, but let us know if there are more.

• crazy salad - "fine women eat a crazy salad with their meat"
• firefly fifty five - "eating my way through san diego"
• good eats in San Diego - "all manner of other eating experiences from a half vegetarian couple"
• gourmetish - "a food object, idea, or activity that somebody is irrationally obsessed with or attached to"
• journey of a culinary student - in san diego
• milk and honey - "diary of a dilettante"
• mmm-yoso - "as in, yoso-silly, yoso-hungry, yoso-full, or best of all; mmm-delici-yoso!"
• tabemochi - "love your mochi as you love yourself"
• what we're eating
• zen-foodism 

Want to experience the glory of running a four star kitchen - without wasting all that time at culinary school and all those hours on the line? Chris Connolly did just that, signing up for the "Expedite Tonight" package at the Rancho Bernardo Inn. For $698, Chris was able to button into a white chefs jacket and call out the orders to the cooks behind the scenes at the El Bizcocho restaurant, dine with the staff afterward at the staff meal and, the next night, eat in the main dining room of the restaurant he just "worked" in.

Unlike the semi-controlled chaos, ruined dishes and expletives that many would expect to see in a professional kitchen, Chris was impressed with the smooth flow and seemingly relaxed pace of the evening. The skill of the cooks, combined with their practiced familiarity with tasks like searing foie gras, made the evening very controlled. The cooks joked around and admired each others' handiwork, while plating tasting menus and generally cooking everything to perfection.

Was Chris ready to toss in his pen and pick up an apron? No, but after an evening of watching, sampling and spoon stealing, which the article has a full account of, Chris has a greater appreciation of the workings of a real kitchen - and knows that it is more difficult and more interesting than previously imagined.

It all started at a restaurant called Spread in San Diego, California where a couple of inventive people reinvented one of the most classic comfort foods: peanut butter. Instead of sticking with the traditional "butter" label, the restaurant turned all natural ingredients into a wide variety of nut "spreads." Not only are they organic and without preservatives, but the gourmet peanut spreads and almond spreads are all made by hand and sold in 4-ounce containers. Some varieties are seasonal, but many offerings are available year round and all can be ordered online. Their best seller is the Seasonal Cinnamon, which began as a seasonal flavor, as the name suggests, but is now so popular it sells all year. Dark Chocolate with Pretzels sounds like a combination made in heaven to me, but Chili Mango and White Chocolate Espresso Almond sound fantastic as well.

Today was the first day that three new Viticultural areas, or wine regions, in Washington (Wahluke Slope), Texas (Texoma) and California, can be noted on wine labels. NPR has a nice piece on how this happened in Ramona Valley, near San Diego, Calif. In order to be designated as its own appellation, a region must prove that it has unique topography and climate; that there is some history of the area being called, in this case, "Ramona Valley"; and that wine grapes can, and are, being grown there.

Ramona Valley is distinct thanks to its position about 20 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and about 20 miles from the desert. It cools off quickly during the evening, but the days provide long hours of warmth and good ripening time. Grapes that do well in Ramona Valley, says a winemaker, include Zinfandel, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon, Viognier and Sauvignon Blanc.