As for bottle shops, I think San Diego is a bit weak in this realm, but luckily you will be in the North County where 2 of the best bottle shops are.
Holiday is a great shop, but I've only ever been there once. There is also a bottle shop associated with Pizza Port Carlsbad and it is insane. The PP bottle shop does have some odd hours I think though, so check them out before heading over.
As far as where to find Lost Abbey on tap, that may be a bit tough. I would recommend checking out this link
http://sandiego.taphunter.com/location/ You can see all the bars they keep track of and any decent place with beer is on there. It's also VERY accurate so click through the bars on there and see if any of them have any Lost Abbey on tap. They do seem to be more of a bottling brewery than a kegging brewery though and we don't see too many of their kegs around town.
With regard to buying Lost Abbey bottles, beware. I know Tomme very well, consider him a good friend and feel bad for saying this, but they have had massive carbonation problems with their bottles lately. I've had 6 different bottles of their 4th Anniversary IPA, an INCREDIBLE 10% IPA, and only one of the bottles had any carbonation and it had very little. I've also heard of many others paying $20 or more for flat bottles of their other stuff.
We've resorted to pouring their beers into 1 liter plastic bottles and force carbonating them through a carbonator cap. I'm going to keep my eye out for cheap cases of the Anniversary IPA and if I can get enough of them to fill a 3 gallon corny, I'm going to have that stuff on tap at home!
As far as other places to go, the list is long. As I'm sure everyone knows, I would recommend staying the hell away from Stone. I've had lunch & dinner there and sure it's a pretty place (for San Diego, doesn't compare to Hawaii) but the food I've had has been AVERAGE at best. The servers have talked to me like I've never had a beer in my life and then when they've realized I know my beer, they start making shit up to make it seem like they know beer too. My biggest gripe is that the place is AS EXPENSIVE AS HELL!!! Having said that, if you haven't been, definitely go. The tour of the brewery is great and it is an impressive place.
All right..new direction. If you want to stay in north county and drink up there there are several other breweries up there you can check out. There's Stone and Lost Abbey and Pizza Port Carlsbad that everyone knows. There is also Breakwater Brewing in Oceanside, Back Street Brewing/Lamplighter Pizza in Vista and Green Flash (!!!) is in Vista too.
As for bars up there, you can check out Churchills. They're in the Vista/San Marcos area and are close to Lost Abbey. They just upgraded to 50 taps.
With all those places up there, I kind of don't think it's worth it to head down south to the central city area. It's 45 minutes away with no traffic and if you're only going to be here for a few days, there's PLENTY to do up north.
For more info about all the breweries in the county, check out
http://www.sandiegobrewersguild.org/brewery.phpIf you decide to make the trip down south, let me know and I'll post places down here not to miss and maybe we can even meet up and argue about public employee pension systems
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