Just in time for the weekend, Filling Stations is a weekly post that highlights one of Los Angeles’ destinations for craft beer, be it a bottle-shop with a great selection, a restaurant with great food to go with their beer list, or a bar serving excellent beers.

Red Carpet Wine & Spirits

• Neighborhood: Glendale View Larger Map View Larger Map
• Type: Bottle Shop
• Yelp Page
• Selection: 4/5 Price: 3/5 Staff: 4/5

We continue our look at craft beer spots in The Valley with Glendale’s Red Carpet:  a bottle-shop with a tasting room set-up and a nice selection of hard-to-find beers.

Primarily a wine-shop north of the 134 in Glendale, Red Carpet has increased their devotion to beer, and even added six taps to their very nice tasting room. They have a half-dozen coolers filled with craft beer and imported treats, and they host regular beer tasting events.

Prices are a touch on the high-side, and on a recent Saturday it looked like there stock levels were a little low. But they stock a good balance of six-packs and bombers, and the stock of rare and hard-to-find beers more than makes up for it.

In addition to hard to find beers like bombers from Rancho Cucamonga’s Cismontane Brewing  and various North Coast Brewing delights there was a selection of cellar-aged beers for sale at only a tiny mark-up on our last visit. Beer’s like Stone’s Old Guardian barley wine from 2009 were selling for only $1 over the 2012 bottles! We got the inside scoop on these aged beers, and the stock is extremely limited. If you’ve fancied trying some aged beer after our feature on cellarmanship head down to Red Carpet soon to snag some of their cellar-reserve stock!

The tasting area is comfortable, though it can get busy on weekend evenings, but they put together a nice tap-list with a mix of local brews and some harder-to-find special brews. Also, there is no corkage fee in the tasting area in case  you can’t wait to get a bottle that you have bought home to try! The staff is all very friendly and they certainly know their beer.

We don’t get up to Glendale all that often, but Red Carpet is a great spot if you’re in the area, and makes the perfect post-mall pit stop for decompressing after the maddening crowds.