Attention attention! The next D.C. Food Blogger Happy Hour will be December 2 at Churchkey — as always, the first Wednesday of the month. We’ve reserved the space by the windows, so all the world can see your sun-deprived blogger faces. Come have a beer and meet up with some fellow key-tappers! RSVP in the comments here, and make sure you include a link to your blog. Cheers!

Photo by Amanda McClements

Take some of D.C.’s best-known cocktail and wine bartenders and you get…a good neighborhood beer bar, obviously.

Well, not quite; I have selective vision that turns pretty much all bars into beer bars. But The Passenger, which opens tonight at 5 p.m., is nay Cork nor Gibson, the wine and cocktail pedestals that the Brown brothers are known for. It’s a relaxed bar with a neighborhood drinking-room feel and some tasty beers, wines, and even cocktails if you ask nice.

The space at 1021 7th St. NW, which was formerly the bar space at the Warehouse and home to Punch Club, still has all its best parts: unfinished walls, old wood floor, and sweet wrought-iron tables. (Disclosure: I organized/bartended a non-beer event there once.) (Disclosure pt. 2: I really, really like this space.) The bar top is bigger and more comfortable, and what was once dead space in the back is being rebuilt to mimic a dining car.

Read More “First Look at The Passenger” »

Virginia’s great beer is pretty much the only thing that gets me to take Metro’s blue/yellow across the river (well, beer and pho). And Galaxy Hut has several on tap this week by Virginia microbreweries that don’t distribute to the District. Here’s a quick guide to the highlights:

• Blue Mountain Double IPA – I haven’t had this yet, but Blue Mountain makes Full Nelson, a wonderful English-style IPA, so I see no reason this shouldn’t be tasty.
• St. George Fall Bock – Another one I haven’t had by a good brewery — the brewery that’s actually behind the revival of Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale.
• Legend Brown Ale – A big, dark, and roasty brown ale that is to Newcastle what Ray’s Hellburger a live cow is to a Big Mac.

Bonus after the jump: Virginia beer in D.C.!

Read More “What to Drink This Week–Yes, in Virginia” »

I was bested last night. The subject of the beer tasting was the vaunted strongest beer in the world, Samuel Adams Utopias. It’s brewed every other year in limited quantities — they made 10,000 bottles of the ’09s — and comes with a proportionately high price tag of $150. This year’s batch weighs in at 27% abv, about two-thirds the strength of whiskey or vodka.

Read More “Beerspotter vs. The Strongest Beer in the World” »

Since being turned onto sour beers, I’ve never gone back. Lambics, the most common style of sour beer, is a Belgian style made by spontaneous fermentation, in which beer is kept warm and uncovered while little beasties of wild yeast settle in and essentially spoil it. Think of it as blue-cheese beer.

What’s most impressive about these intensely puckery beers is the pure intensity of flavor — something unrivaled by any other beer with only about 5% abv. They can be intimidating, but Forbes has an article today that’s a friendly and straightforward intro to the style. Or, take my approach to beer education and just go to a good beer bar and point to something you’ve never heard of.

While I was costume shopping and downing the first of the Christmas beers, Gothamist reported the news that Brooklyn Brewery received a New York state grant that will help it expand, upping its production from 8,000 to 50,000 barrels a year.

This is big news not just for the neighborhood, which will see new business and jobs as a result. It’s great for the beer world because Brooklyn is what I call a major “ambassador brewery” — that is, they introduce many people to good beer because they’re widespread and available in places that don’t serve much craft beer. As with Sierra Nevada and Samuel Adams, it’s good news for anyone that likes beer when these guys do well.

Attention area food bloggers (floggers?): November’s Food Blogger Happy Hour will be this Wednesday at the beer-friendly Black Squirrel. If you write, come. If you come, and you don’t try Dale’s Pale Ale on draft, you’re doing it wrong.

Cheers to ModernDomestic, The Arugula Files, Gradually Greener, Capital Spice, and Capital Cooking for putting it together. See you there!

November Food Blogger Happy Hour
Wednesday, Nov. 4, 6 p.m.
The Black Squirrel
2427 18th St. NW
www.blacksquirreldc.com

I mean no disrespect to the Lager Heads, who had great coverage today of a beer vs. wine competition — I’ve levied plenty of jokes at wine myself. But NYT’s Eric Asimov wrote a wonderful call to sanity today on his blog The Pour, “A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence” (likely in response to the same event the Lager Heads covered). The crux:

The irony is that great beer and great wine are on the same team. The enemy of beer is not wine and the enemy of wine is not beer, just as the enemy of bread is not fruit and vice versa. But the enemy of good beer and good wine, and good food in general, is bad beer, bad wine and, yes, bad food.

This is exactly the kind of clear, sober (ahem) thinking that informs my philosophy about what beers to review, and how. The enemy of good beer is bad beer, and by far the largest propagators of bad beer are macrobreweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors. Hell, they’re the largest propagators of any type of beer — macros make up 96% of the market.

Cheers to Asimov for addressing this topic in a large, mainstream publication. But a wag of a finger for tasting 10 stouts and not including a single entrant from Bell’s or Founders, which are both available in New York and, among widely distributed microbreweries, two of the country’s most dominant stout brewers. Eric, can you help me out here?

Photo by Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

I was seduced at The Brickskeller last night, and it wasn’t by the gents pictured above. It was by a barleywine.

The beer tasting was called “Why is there beer?” and featured a well-curated lineup by an expert panel. All 10 beers were tasty, except the Grozet gooseberry and wheat beer, which was more like soapy fruit. But a pair of rare, aged beers — a 1997 Anchor Old Foghorn and a 2005 Thomas Hardy’s barleywine — elevated the night to a special occasion. Going in, I was skeptical, nay fearful, of tasting a 12-year-old beer. Even an aging beer like Old Foghorn typically peaks in the first five years, and the last time I had a beer that old at Brickskeller, it tasted like furniture.

Read More “I Was Seduced at The Brickskeller” »

Birch & Barley, the oft-promised beer bar and restaurant, will open tonight at 5 p.m. And while we’ve drooled over it for months, we’ve heard little about it other than the numbers they promised: 555 bottles, 50 taps, and 5 casks. I admit I was skeptical, worried that the list would be vaporware like the 1,000+ beer menu at The Brickskeller — but a swing by the bar yesterday put me at ease.

Read More “Birch & Barley Opens Today. What’s Inside?” »