Located on the beach on the Oregon coast, The Pelican Pub and Brewery has a great view, great food and even greater beers. In 2006, it won the Large Brewpub of the Year at the Great American Beer Festival. My brother in law took me there and it lived up to his bragging.
I had a flight of the brews (Kiwanda Cream Ale, MacPelican’s Scottish Style Ale, India Pelican Ale, Doryman’s Dark Ale, Tsunami Stout and Riptide Red Ale). My favorite was the Tsunami Stout, Doryman’s Dark Ale and the India Pelican Ale. The Stout is full bodied with a dark aroma and a very creamy head. The Doryman’s Dark was surprising as it was lighter than what I was expecting. My favorite was the India Pelican Ale. A nice dark gold color , a great Hop aroma and an awesome IPA that you can savor the Hops in each drink. My brother in law’s favorite is the Kiwanda Cream Ale, which is very creamy, as you would expect.
For lunch we started with Calamari and the Tower of Rings. The creole remoulade is fantastic. For lunch I had the Bangers-N-Mash which were pretty good. The homemade mustard definitely made the sausages better.
The service was very good, as it was packed for lunch, but we had about a 3 minute wait before we were seated and after we ordered the food came out very quickly. When we asked about the brews, our waitress was very knowledgeable and suggested the flight when we were talking about which one to try. The view is on the coast and you can see watch the people playing on the beach while watching the waves roll in. I think it would be a great view at night while enjoying the brews. Oh and the best thing? You can take home any of the brews they have on stock. So take a trip to Oregon, and bring a big sack to take home and try every one of the brews.
Food 4 Dancing Livers
Atmosphere 5 Dancing Livers
Brews 5 Dancing Livers
Service 4 Dancing Livers
Total 4.5 Dancing Livers
One of my all time and old time favorites was The Gingerman in Dallas. I found out there was one in Fort Worth ( http://ftworth.gingermanpub.com ), so my girlfriend and I went and checked it out. If you like many different types of beers, then The Gingerman is for you. They have 67 beers on tap and over 100 more in bottles. Most of the draught beers are reasonably priced at $4.75 per pint and the selection is fantastic. Since it was the first of October, they had 5 different Oktoberfests in which we sampled them all.
October is a great season in Texas, so we sat on the patio for the evening. The service was good considering it was busy, but not packed and we never longed for beers. The patio allows people to bring their dogs, so there were quite a few people outside with their mutts.
They have a food menu with 4 sandwiches, some sides, 3 salads and “solids”. We weren’t very hungry so we chose from the solids. We had the German Bratwurst, the Spinach and Artichoke Dip and some of the Route 11 potato chips. The homemade kettle chips come in all different flavors and we tried the sweet potato chips which were very tasty. The Bratwurst tasted good but it was rather small. The Spinach and Artichoke dip was great. I definitely will have that when I go there again.
Overall, I love this pub and highly recommend dropping by for a pint or 5.
Beer Selection 5 Dancing Livers
Food 3 Dancing Livers
Atmosphere 4 Dancing Livers
Service 3 Dancing Livers
Overall 4 Dancing Livers
Ah, the first Hop Trip of the season; I enjoyed Deschutes Brewery‘s annual fresh hop beer this evening—one that’s been brewed every year since 2005—and every year it’s the seasonal variations that keep this (style of) beer interesting and help highlight just what an agricultural product beer actually is. Last year, Hop Trip was much less aromatic due to an early harvest of the hops; this year, the aroma is there and it seems more “fresh” overall.
Even though Hop Trip is classified (by people who care about such things) as a Pale Ale, it’s really much more of an American Amber with brown sugary, caramel malts that provide a nice backdrop to showcase the fresh hops. (The hops themselves are Crystal hops from the Willamette Valley.) It’s brewed to 5.5% alcohol by volume and 38 IBUs—though honestly, with fresh hops I imagine there’s enough of a utilization and/or chemical difference that I’m not sure IBU numbers have meaning in this context.
With the Sierra Nevada Tumbler review last week, it appears as though I’m on a roll with new seasonal releases from two of my favorite breweries. Anchor Brewing’s Humming Ale is their first autumnal release since 2005 and comes courtesy from a co-worker of mine.
This Pale Ale is brewed to commemorate the anniversary of the company’s first brew after moving to their current location 30 years ago. The 5.9% ABV beer is brewed with Nelson Sauvin hops that carry a pretty bold character. It’s an easy drinking beer that is crisp, refreshing and just damned tasty.
Read the rest of this entry »
The timing couldn’t have been better.
This 25th anniversary celebration from Bell’s Brewery was a great way to commemorate a visit from Jay, a long time childhood friend — we’ve known each other since the 8th grade. After picking him up from Dulles airport, we stopped by a local shop on the way down to my place.
Much like the Narragansett Lager I sampled in November last year, this wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting. Sure, it’s an Oktoberfest style brew in a tall boy (16 oz. can), but it actually had some flavors to it that weren’t half bad.
Now, that said, this won’t be bumping Paulaner off the top spot of my favorites of the style list any time soon, but it may be enough for fans of macro lagers to take that much needed baby step towards American craft beer.
Read the rest of this entry »
When I first heard of this new seasonal release from Sierra Nevada, I was thrilled at the prospect of the brewery expanding into an item outside of their normally hoppy range of beers. Then I heard that it was replacing their annually released Anniversary Ale — a product that is be retired — and I got a little bummed.
I really enjoyed the three year run that the Anniversary Ale had going, but I complete understand the brewery’s reasoning behind it’s retirement and the introduction of a more seasonally appropriate release.
Abita Brewing out of Louisiana brewed up this German pilsner in an attempt to raise money for those affected in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. 100% of all the proceeds from the sale of this beer (and other retail items) will go to charity.
You have to admire what the brewery has done for their community with this and a post-Katrina chartible beer that raised over $500,000 for those affected by that hurricane. While I’m not a huge fan of some of the products the company produces, I did find this unfiltered beer — brewed Pilsner and Wheat malts — quite enjoyable.
Read the rest of this entry »
The first Friday of the month means one particular thing for beer bloggers: The Session! It’s a monthly collaborative blogging effort where we all write a post following a common theme, which is chosen each month by a different blogger who gets the “hosting” duties. This month’s host is Ashley Routson, better known amongst the bloggerati as The Beer Wench, and true to Ashley form (that’s a good thing!), she has picked a perfectly appropriate topic for October: Frankenstein Beers.
Many craft brewers are like Frankenstein. They have become mad scientists obsessed with defying the laws of brewing and creating beers that transcend style guidelines. These “Frankenstein Beers” challenge the way people perceive beer. They are freaks of nature — big, bold and intense. The ingredients resemble those of a beer and the brewing process might appear to be normal, but some aspects of the entire experience are experimental, unorthodox and insane.
An altercation with these beers produces confusion in the eye of the taster … is it a beer, or a monster?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a blog post on “Frankenstein Beers.” There are no rules about how to write about this topic — feel free to highlight a Frankenstein brewer, brewery, beer tasting notes … or just your opinions on the concept.
This (intentionally) ties in with this month’s Theme Week I’ve been doing here at The Brew Site: Unusual Beers. So in addition to drinking and reviewing a number of unusual beers (I notice they were all—unintentionally—herbal/botanical in some way), I’ve been thinking about this topic of “Frankenstein” beers.
From one end of the spectrum, it’s perfectly valid to call any non-Reinheitsgebot-adhering beer a “Frankenstein” beer: once you start breaking the boundaries of the malt-hops-water-yeast cycle and throwing in other ingredients, you’ve got the “monster” beer in the eyes of the purists. Of course, without this (constant) experimentation we wouldn’t have the vast array of beer styles that exist today—so it’s also perfectly valid to call any such styles Frankenstein beers.
The next step up that scale is to consider the established styles—be they Reinheitsgebot-friendly or not—as “normal” and thus the various beers we might consider “extreme” or some other such adjective the Frankensteins: the Imperial IPAs, the Cascadian Dark Ales, the various Belgian styles blending beers, the fresh hop beers… In fact this week I’ve been thinking a lot about how the autumn season’s “unusual” beers—the fresh hop beers and the pumpkin beers—qualify as Frankensteins, and almost wrote about one (or both) of them.
(But, I’ll be doing Pumpkin Beer Week later this month as it is, and in a way pumpkin is almost a normal style of beer—after all, it’s been present in the Americas in one form or another since the Colonial days.)
Ultimately I decided that, of all styles of beer that can (and do) qualify as the Frankensteins, I had to drink and write about a beer that signifies what I think defines the original Frankenstein style: the sour wild ale.
These are the true “monstrous” beers—brews that are purposefully infected, inoculated with wild, unpredictable yeasts and bacteria, left to sour and bubble away for years at a stretch, often quite ugly along the way. Really, who was the first person who looked at the moldy, snotty mess that these beers can look like while they’re fermenting and think, “Yeah, I’m gonna drink that“? Truly a class of beers worthy of this month’s topic.
So to celebrate The Session and do an actual beer review (feels like the last few Sessions have been more abstract than liquid), I stopped in at my local Whole Foods today and selected an appropriately sour beer to drink and review: Monk’s Cafe Flemish Sour Ale. This beer is brewed by Brouwerij Van Steenberge in Belgium for the famous Monk’s Cafe in Philadelphia. It’s a 5.5% ABV Oud Bruin style of sour ale—a sour brown.
Appearance: Deep and clear brown that’s bloody red when held to the light. Light tan head piles up on top with the pour.
Smell: Sour notes punctuated with sweet rock candy and funky Brett notes. The tart is a bit “cherry.”
Taste: Mellow, ascetic tartness (vinegar) with very crisp and nicely fruity wine-like presence. Really nice, smooth. Sour cherry mousse and the vinegary tartness punctuates the fruit.
Mouthfeel: Super smooth, crisp and fruity with a light(ish) body that finishes dry (sour).
Overall: Really good—the sour blends with other flavors amazingly well (and the funk is minimal). Graceful and elegant.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B+. On RateBeer, it scores 3.47 out of 5 and is in their 92nd percentile.
http://www.thebrewsite.com/2010/10/01/the-session-44-frankenstein-beers.php
Individually, any beer from both Stone Brewing and Dogfish Head could very likely qualify as an “unusual” beer. And I would easily call any of the collaboration brews Stone participates in unusual. So when Stone, Dogfish, and Victory Brewing all collaborated earlier this year—you know the resulting beer, Saison du BUFF (Stone page, Dogfish page), was destined to be reviewed this week.