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.

The four-beer draft list is well-curated, with good a stout, pilsner, hoppy American beer, and Belgian all represented — and nothing shitty. If you’re looking to slum it, the menu digs deep in that direction too, with cans of Steel Reserve for $4. And taking some direction from Room 11, they’re offering punch and cocktails by the pitcher. I sampled a lovely sherry flip, with two types of sherry, brandy, falernum, nutmeg, and raw egg whites (yes!) beaten into a light, frothy mix. In fact, I sampled several of them.

The menu also features several wines by the glass, all three Dolin vermouths, and some fancified bar snacks, including a $7 kimchi hot dog you couldn’t pay me to eat. (Note to staff: It’s just that brand of kimchi, I can’t do it.) Fortunately there’s other options — see the whole menu here.

And if my photo leaves you wanting despite all its frontal-flash glory, ReadysetDC has the sights, as usual.

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.!

Williamsburg AleWerks, yet another excellent Va. brewery, is trickling into the District. You can’t buy it in stores yet, but CommonWealth has added their deep, hoppy brown ale to their draft list, under the name “CommonWealth Brown.” But rest assured, it’s an AleWerks brew (and $2.50 a pint during happy hour). Bottles of their chocolaty, roasty Washington’s Porter have also made their way to Chef Geoff’s downtown, a happy development for a spot better known for its 33 oz. “Super Mugs.”

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.

It was my second attempt at tasting the rare beer, because the first tasting I meant to attend was the morning of Savor, the day after an event that left me irreparably drunk and broken. But I showed up to Vidalia yesterday, spry, sober, and ready to taste.

As the snifters of Utopias were set on our table, wafts of alcohol clouded our airspace, carrying bracing brandy and raisin aromas. I ventured closer to my snifter and singed a few nose hairs. Swirled, the thick amber liquid clung to the sides of the glass like whiskey. I sipped, fearfully. Gin I can do straight, but I am not a brandy drinker. I can manage whiskey with the aid of ice and bitters. My first sip of Utopias was a shock, hot in the mouth. I swished it around a bit and swallowed; light burn. Then the flavors started to come out: buttery caramel, toffee, some more raisins and brandy.

After a few tooth-sucking sips, my tongue got sleepy and cranky at me for the beating I’d given it. I traded my snifter with a fellow of scholarly age at my table for a second helping of the Samuel Adams Triple Bock, the other extreme beer we received. (The man was a distinguished retiree, with cardigan and tie, who in my mental caricature sipped cognac at home in his burgundy robe. He could get more out of this firewater than I.) And there I sat with my Triple Bock, like a kid licking a spatula of cake batter.

The Triple Bock was my discovery of the night, a warming barleywine of 18.5% abv with notes of chocolate, booze, chocolate and chocolate. It poured a near-black with violet edges and tasted like raw brownie mix. My dad’s brownie mix, to be specific, with it’s red, rusty cocoa powder. A little buttery, a little grainy and even salty. They only made it between 1994 and 1997, but apparently bottles are still floating around, and if you find one they’re only about $10.

Moral of the story: Utopias is extreme in ways that I am not. I couldn’t finish my glass, and I wouldn’t be excited about tasting it again. But if you find a dusty bottle of Triple Bock, pay the $10 and, um, let me know if you want to go halfsies.

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.

But the 1997 Old Foghorn held up, emerging a mellow, plum-colored ale with vanilla and oak flavors. Even a naysayer would have to admit it was more on the leather-jacket side than, say, varnish.

Now the 2005 Thomas Hardy’s. Oh my, this beer was delicious. Beer historian Bob Tupper introduced it with what sounded like a truly touching story about first tasting this on the day his wife Ellie brought home their newborn daughter. Forgive me if the details escape me; I was lost in the huge melted-butter aroma wafting up from my glass. Melted butter poured over top of peanut brittle. I had never been seduced by a beer before. The warming, golden ale drank like butterscotch cream, with deep touches of oak in the background. I wanted to drown in it.

Thomas Hardy barleywines, made in small batches in southern England, are hard to find in the area; it’s typically the kind of beer you make a road trip for. And of course at The Brickskeller, if you see a bottle on the menu, that doesn’t mean they have it; if you don’t see it, that doesn’t mean they don’t.

I know I’m not being helpful here, so how’s this: Also in the tasting was Rodenbach a wonderfully tart and oaky Belgian red ale unique to the Flanders region. The bar is currently serving it on draft. Go forth, drink, and be merry.

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.

Beer director Greg Engert assured me that come tonight there will indeed be beer flowing from all 50 taps and all 5 casks, and from the looks of it, a bottle menu that will have the nerdiest beer nerds returning for “special occasion” beers. But for me, the casks were the real question mark. Cask beer is fresh, unpasteurized beer hand-pumped from the barrel rather than pulled out by carbon dioxide like regular keg beer, giving it a velvety feel. But it’s also more perishable, which is why nowhere in D.C. keeps more than one or two on tap. They’re hard to track down, and hard to sell.

Engert showed me a dozen casks in storage, ranging from regional session beers like Troegs Hopback Amber to rarer breeds like Allagash Hugh Malone and Harviestoun Ola Dubh 40, an English old ale aged in 40-year whisky casks. Tonight, taste the Ola Dubh side-by-side with BrewDog Paradox Isle of Arran, a whisky-barrel-aged Scottish imperial stout. Also on cask will be Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale and two others TBD.

Of the 50 taps, about half will rotate every week or so, while the other half will be good standbys. The dependable session beers include: Victory Prima Pils, Allagash White, Brooklyn Lager, Stone Pale Ale, Smuttynose IPA, Green Flash Hop Head Red, and Climax Nut Brown Ale. $5 for about a 12 oz. glass.

But tonight, I’ll be there for the cask ale, the spectacle, and hopefully some surprises on tap. For pictures, check out ReadysetDC, whose photography is much better than my own.

(Bonus question: Anyone notice that Birch & Barley’s address is 1337 14th St. NW? The number 1337 holds a special place in the heart of many a computer geek.)