A Little Help Goes A Long Way

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am heading to the UK in a few weeks, mainly for work, but with a little personal time chucked in as well. While I own the fact that I am a terrible beer tourist, I really don't plan my trips around breweries or beer cultures I want to visit - rather I go places and just see what is around. A key part of my planning process then, and maybe I a sad bandit for this, is to use Google Maps to find places in the locations that I will be, and then check out their websites to see if it is likely to be the kind of place I want to visit.

It is almost exactly 15 years that I wrote a post called "Do Pubs Help Themselves?" in which I lamented the standard of many a boozer website. My biggest beef was that many pub websites go to great lengths to tell you about their wine list, their cocktail list, their food options, but almost nothing about what beers are actually on draft, which is just as true for a tied house as it would be for a free house. So you would like to think that in our increasingly online world, pubs would have upped their game then, right?

Errr.....wrong. Sadly.

Maybe it is a product of the parts of the UK that I will be visiting, the north of Scotland, and London, with a minor detour to Windsor when I first arrive. Let's start with the positives though, the Windsor & Eton Brewery website is really useful, and as a result of reading that, and watching the Tweedy Pubs video on Windsor and Eton, I made the decision to spend my several hours between flights in and out of Heathrow by going west instead of east. I really like that they have their draft list in the taproom readily available, and so they will definitely be on the list of places to hit. Admittedly I'll probably go to their tied house, The George, as well, but they don't keep an up to date list of beers on their own website.

Also on the good side is the site for The Two Brewers, again for actually having a beer list on their website, but extra kudos for having the price of a pint on the list as well. I imagine I will be popping in for a pint of London Pride at some point in my day then.

My biggest challenge though, and I am sure there are reasons for this, but with so many tied houses in the English part of my trip, it does get really frustrating when there is a shared platform with generic information, and almost universally no list of what is on cask in a given pub - this goes for chains like Wetherspoons as well. Yes, the many Fullers pubs in the city have elegant, beautifully designed websites, but again I can't find out which beers of the Fullers Brewery range are available, making it pot luck to stumble across less regularly seen beers (at least from what I have been told) such as London Porter. I don't want to single out Fullers, as I have seen the same with Shepherd Neame, Greene King, and Nicholsons, though several Young's pubs tend to have at least a list, and occasionally pricing as well.

In the spirit of sharing around the opprobrium, places in Inverness and further north don't fare much better when it comes to an absence of useful information for the drinkers among us.

So, in the fifteen years since I first broached this issue, we seem to have gone from generally crap to being something of a curate's egg, which is progress I guess. Surely I am not alone in wanting to get a sense of what is on tap before I visit a boozer, whether this side or that side of the Pond?

Places New...to Me

I am sure I have mentioned this several times, but I am an abysmal beer tourist. I do have a rule that I like to give a new brewery at least 6 months before visiting so they can get the hang of their equipment and start churning out the best beers they are able to. If brewing systems were just plug and play, we wouldn't need brewers now would we? The problem with my 6 month rule is that I am not strict about getting to places once that 6 months is up, and so there are a handful of breweries in central Virginia that I haven't visited because, well, like I said, I am an abysmal beer tourist.

Recently though, I have resolved to try and be better at getting to some of the newer breweries within easy reach of my house, as a result of which I have found a few places that have become, or are very likely to become, fairly regular hangouts.

Patch Brewing is just on the outskirts of Gordonsville, basically a large village that for some reason gets to call itself a town. It is not the first brewery in Gordonsville, that honour goes to Champion Icehouse, but it is the one that I go to with way more regularity. Housed in a former Veterans of Foreign Wars building, they have, I think, 14 acres of land, and plans to basically become a beer hall, beer garden, pick your own berry farm, and several other things all rolled into one. The brewer, Erik, spent several years working under the tutelage of Jason Oliver at Devils Backbone Basecamp, and so you know he knows what he is doing.

Despite being open since October 2021, they have only recently got their own brewing equipment installed (yay COVID!), and so have been brewing at Devils Backbone. Erik has clearly brought some of the Devils Backbone influence to his equipment with him, with horizontal lagering tanks being part of the setup - maybe I am crazy but horizontal tanks are just nicer to look at that endless rows of CCVs. My first trip to Patch was actually last November, when they had only been open for about 6 weeks, as my best mate was in town and we'd been hiking in the Shenandoah National Park, along with my neighbour, stop 1 was so horrific that I will never grace the place with my presence again. It was our second stop of the day before heading home for continued boozing around the fire pit. Being something like a 7 minute drive from my house to the brewery, it is supremely convenient, and I have several friends who work there, so it is always good to get along for a pint, or three.

On the beer front, their Pylon Pilsner is a good, solid German style pilsner, replete with the requisite, at least in my world, noble hop bitterness that so many other pilsners seem to shy away from. I also have a soft spot for their brown ale, A Stone in the Woods. Hopefully this weekend I will find some time to venture out into the remnants of Hurricane Ian as it impacts central Virginia and try their new märzen, Germanna, and a dunkelweizen (a rarity in the US) called 1714 for the year the first German colonists came to Orange County.

Heading into Charlottesville, one new name on the Fuggled Top Ten Virginian Beers this year was Decipher Brewing, and I can tell you now that they will be featuring quite a bit for the annual Fuggled Review of the Year in December. But first a story. As you may recall, I made a batch of my homebrew best bitter with Murphy & Rude Malting Company back in the late spring, using just their malts - which have now become the standard for that recipe as they improved it so much. On the day that I was due to go and try the beer with Jeff and co at the malthouse, Mrs V and I arrived early, so wandered up to Decipher Brewing for a quick pint whilst waiting for Jeff. There were still 10 minutes to opening time, but the bar staff that day welcomed us in and soon enough a pint of their 80/- Scottish ale was sitting in front of me, and I loved it. When I saw that they had a Czech style pale lager coming soon, I naturally inquired as to dates, and resolved that the following Friday I would get along to give it a bash, and I loved it.

Saaz, lots of Saaz, that's how I would describe Krypto, in the case of the picture above poured from a Lukr tap. This is a very, very respectable Czech style pale lager, if I were to quibble (what? Beer bloggers quibbling? Never!) then I would say that it would be even better with a decoction, or two, chucked into the mash schedule for some Maillard reactions to fill out the malt profile a little. Sitting in their little garden area with a pint after work on a Friday afternoon has become something of a thing for me in recent months. The beer is very good, as evidenced by their taking the Virginia Craft Brewers' crown this year, the ambience is chilled out, laid back, and decidedly unsceney (Mrs V and I have a shared aversion to places that become scenes). Oh, and they did a grodziskie, and I loved it.

Oh, and they did a smoked bock, and I loved it.

Decipher are one of only 4 Virginia breweries that are pouring at the Great American Beer Festival next week, so if you are there, check them out - I believe they will be pouring Krypto and the smoked bock.

Last week I got a message on Instagram from the brewer at Selvedge Brewing, also in Charlottlesville, just round the corner from Decipher actually. The message, accompanied by a picture of a fine looking glass of beer, was to tell me that they were releasing a German style festbier and that he knows I do a big Oktoberfest (märzen and festbiers) tasting around this time year, come on down and try the wares...

A couple of days later I tested positive for COVID, so that had to go on hold until the 10 days of quarantine were over. With that suitably out of the way, I finally made it to Selvedge, which is located in a renovated wool mill, in the Woolen Mills area of the city. Think repurposed 19th century brick and glass built factory and you'll get a sense of how it looks, as a fan of industrial architecture, I loved the high ceilings and light streaming in through the windows. There was an outdoor event going on when I was there, thankfully the inside bar was empty, so I pulled up a seat and ordered a pint of Tracht...

What a lovely beer it is. The crackeriness of pilsner malt, the sweet bready malt of Munich, and hops, a good amount of hops for a clean bitterness, if I remember rightly from Perle, and dollops of Hallertau Mittelfrüh for a slightly spicy finish. While I was sat at the bar, Josh, the brewer, came and sat for a chat and we discussed his plans for the brewery, having only taken the reins in the summer. From what I understand there will be a new larger location in the near future, and he plans to make authentic lagers a central theme of the brewery - any guesses how excited I am at that?

Naturally I tried a couple of the other beers on tap. Poplin is an Italian Pilsner - admittedly a style that seems a little contrived to me, if dry hopping a German pilsner a la Tipopils makes it Italian, does that mean Port City's dry hopping of their Czech style pale lager, Downright Pilsner, makes it a Virginia Pilsner? Either way, Poplin is a veritable carousel of noble hop flavour and aroma that I rather enjoyed, though I have to admit to following it up with another Tracht. 

One of the beer styles that I often find annoying in the US is Kölsch, I just find that they don't live up to the bright, sparkling, refreshing beer that the breweries of Cologne churn out, Selvedge's Linen bucks that trend, and is glorious into the bargain. Mrs V is a fan of the Kölsch style, so I look forward to getting a baby sitter to deal with the twins, so we can have a date afternoon/evening. As we sat discussing the merits of decoction mashing, open fermentation, and the like, Josh mentioned that it took being in Cologne for 16 hours to really get a sense of what Kölsch should be, and how important authentic yeast is to the style, pointing out that many a US brewery just uses good old neutral Chico...and thus it made sense why I found it disappointing over here. For fear of being type cast, I followed it up with another Tracht, did I mention yet that it is a lovely festbier, and hopefully there will be some still knocking around this weekend.

Each of the three breweries here have been open since at least last November, and in Decipher's case for a few years now, but as I said, I am an abysmal beer tourist, even on my own front door. I am glad though that we have them, and when I talk to folks working in them about their plans, I feel like times are going to be good ahead for this unbashed lager boy.

Echt!

It used to take about six and a half hours to drive from Central Virginia to Columbia, South Carolina whenever Mrs V and I would head down to her parents'. Since the advent of the twins, now 20 months old, it often takes about eight with all the additional stops to change diapers, feed, etc, etc, etc...

We've been making the trip down US Route 29, I-85, then I-77 for almost 10 years. I am fairly sure I have some kind of muscle memory for the road, and for the longest time our single stop on the trip was at a place called Eden, very close to where the 29 crosses the Virginia/North Carolina state line. There is pretty much nothing at the rest area other than well cleaned toilets, drip coffee, and vending machine soda. This weekend though we eschewed the delights of the Eden rest area and pushed on the ninety minutes to Charlotte for our break.

I don't recall the first beer from the Olde Mecklenburg Brewery that I ever had. I feel confident it was the Copper, an absolutely on point altbier, but as to where I had it, I don't remember. What is true though is that whenever the family and I head south, or in-laws/friends come north, I make sure to stock up on Olde Meck beer, usually the Copper and their, on a par with Rothaus, Captain Jack Pilsner. I had long held ambitions to pop into the brewery some time, but just assumed it would need to be part of a longer trip to Charlotte.

For nearly ten years, as Mrs V and I were making the road trip to and from Central Virginia we were unwittingly driving within a couple of blocks of the Olde Mecklenburg Brewery and their eight acre biergarten, yeah you read that right, an eight acre biergarten right in the heart of Charlotte, just off the I-77. How that knowledge was not in my head sooner is a mystery to me, you live and learn, and having learnt, we jumped off the interstate, parked up and headed into the brewery's beer hall and biergarten...

Once through the hefty wooden doors it was delightfully cool and to be honest had Mrs V and the bairns not been with me, I would have parked at the bar and never bothered with the biergarten itself, the South and I don't agree with each other when it comes to suitable summer weather. The interior is everything you expect from a central European beer hall, dark wood, benches, and a bar with banks of taps.

The boys both needed changing so Mrs V took one at a time, while I kept tabs on the other and ordered myself a flight of the 4 beers I have not tried before:

• Mecklenberger Helles
• Southside Weiss Ale
• Hornet's Nest Hefeweizen
• Fat Boy Baltic Porter

No notes were taken, but the Fat Boy will make an appearance or two in the fridge this autumn and winter, to go head to head with Port City's divine Porter, and the other three were perfectly lovely beers.

The boys suitably refreshed, and thankfully cheerful despite 4 hours cooped up in a car, with the dog in his flexi crate between them, Mrs V ordered a pilsner and I got to have my first Olde Mecklenburg Copper on draft. Naturally in the excitement of having a properly brewed altbier served in a proper altbier glass I forgot to take a picture, so take my word for it that it was superb, and looked the part to boot. With beers and bairns in hand, we headed out in the sunshine to take a place among the benches of the biergarten.

It was pretty quiet when we were there, so we took a place on a bench near the children's play area, tied the dog up to a heavy bench so he could nose around, and waited for our food buzzer to go off. Mrs V was being very responsible and had a Cobb salad that she has raved about to all our friends since, and I had the currywurst...

It was perfect. Everything about Olde Mecklenburg was perfect. The biergarten was actually a garden, you know with trees, lots of shade, and the cool air that brings. The food was bang on, the service exemplary, and the beer, oh the beer. I love Copper, but when I wandered back to the bar to get a second, I knew it was Captain Jack Pilsner that I wanted, and having inquired about the possibility of getting a litre it was back to the table to sit in the shade with my little family.

If we hadn't had another ninety odd miles to go to get to Columbia, we would have sat all afternoon, enjoying the very chill vibe, and letting the boys run off some pent up energy. It is though now a given that we will be breaking our journey at Olde Mecklenburg as a matter of course, especially as I got a couple of their one litre growlers and they have a system akin to getting propane at the hardware store where you swap the empties for filled ones at a superbly reasonable price (finally it seems someone is taking the pricing side of Reinheitsgebot as seriously as the ingredients).

The presence of a place with the ethos of Olde Mecklenburg Brewery gives me hope that the future of craft beer is not all "wacky flavors, cheap ingredients, or added colors", that there are breweries out there who share my ideal of the perfect beer experience, and who deserve to thrive because of their commitment to quality and not taking shortcuts, heck they don't even sell to retailers that will not commit to keeping their beer in a refrigerated environment!

With all that said, I think I will be filling my Olde Mecklenburg branded altbier glass with Copper from a growler when the boys go to bed tonight.

Every prospect pleases.