Tucson Help

One more question, then I'm ready to pack my suitcase and head to the warm Southwest. Our friends who are hosting us are also craft beer lovers, and we will be hitting up all (or most) of the Tucson breweries next week. I want to buy a few bottles of something special (but not necessarily rare) to thank them for hosting us, but I don't know what to get. What would be a few suggestions for Arizona beers that are not from Tucson breweries that would be fairly easy to find in Tucson bottle shops? Thanks for your help. All of the comments above have been very helpful.

 

Here's a quick review of my visits. I just got home yesterday, so at this point I've calculated only my overall rating score for the beers at each place visited, and I'll be doing a written Review of each place (but not individual beer ratings) in the next week or so, at which time the rankings will probably change a bit when Ambiance, Food, etc. are factored into the score. My wife and I visited all of the breweries discussed above in this thread except Gentle Ben's, Iron John's and Noble Hops.

The following breweries that were visited are listed in order the overall beer ranking that I calculated for the beers that I had, and I did not have every beer at each brewery, although I did a complete sampler flight at most of them.

1. 1702/The Address - there was only two of their beers on tap and both were very good, so this score will seem inflated to most of you locals. (Barrel-aged Saison Dos Santos, and Down Pourter OG Imperial Porter). We had only an order of pizza bread for a snack, so I can't make an overall comment on the food. (They had bottles of Hopslam here too.)
2. Dragoon - this ranking should be no surprise to any local
3. Nimbus - this one will surprise you locals, but it may be another anomaly because they had no sampler glasses available, thus we had only two pints with dinner and chose styles that we knew that we'd like. (Old Monkeyshine and an American Brown Ale.) Both were very tasty, thus a high score by me for this much-maligned brewery. (Maybe you all need to give them another chance.) Food was very good.
4. Barrio - we liked everything they had on tap. Very good food.
5. Pueblo Vida - few of you were able to make comments about this brewery, but here's my vote of confidence that you need to go there. I scored everything from a C+ to a B grade.
6. Thunder Canyon - we went to the downtown location, if that makes a difference, and everything we tried there was tasty. (They also had Hopslam on tap.) Very good food.
7. Borderlands - all beers were average or average-plus
8. Sentinel Peak - only had 4 beers here, and they were average or so. Food was just okay.
9. Ten 55 - just average beers with a couple that were given a C+ grade

(In comparison, the beer scores from these breweries were all in a narrow range below Dragoon, so Ten 55 is still a worthy place to visit regardless of its last place ranking above.)

If any of you get curious about visiting the two breweries in Bisbee: Old Bisbee Brewing and Beast Brewing were both graded as average, with a slight edge given to Old Bisbee. Old Bisbee did not have their most popular beer available, so the score may have been higher if we could have tried that. (Holy Grail IPA is seasonal, based on the availability of the locally-picked wild hops.)