Monthly Archives: June 2013

First Coast Road Trip

Beer, , ,

We decided to drive over to St. Augustine and Jacksonville for Father’s Day, and stop by a few brewpubs we’ve been meaning to visit along the way.

We got to St. Augustine mid-afternoon, walked around Old Town, up to Castillo San Marcos, and back down to the center of town.  After a couple hours walking in the hot sun, we were glad to get to A1A Ale Works, which as the name suggests is on State Road A1A, right at the Bridge of Lions which connects downtown St. Augustine to Anastasia Island.  The downstairs was a nice, airy pub where we would have been fine taking our kids for dinner.  But we were much more comfortable upstairs in the restaurant area, with a cozy booth and a nice view of the Intracoastal Waterway.

We got a flight of their 5 year-round beers, plus their seasonal Belgian Wit:

  • The Belgian Wit was pretty similar to one we just reviewed for Grasslands Brewing — a nice, sweeter, fruity wit — but just not quite as good.
  • I’m not a big fan of light lager, so I didn’t like the King Street Light Lager much.
  • The Porpoise Point IPA was a very herbal and citrusy — a solid IPA.
  • Bridge of Lions Brown Ale was roasty and nutty — brown ale is not my favorite style, but this one had more complexity than most.
  • Red Brick Ale is an amber ale which I liked more than I generally like ambers (which I usually find very bland).  This had a mildly resiny finish that I really liked.
  • We finished with A. Strange Stout, very smoky and spicy.

All told, the beers were all solid — though none of them was really outstanding.  The food was also good, but not great.  The prices were pretty expensive, but not outrageous (especially considering the excellent location in a very touristy town).

After dinner, we headed up A1A to Vilano Beach — the quieter coquina beach to the north of St. Augustine and got had a fun hour at the beach before the light started to fade.  We spent some more time at the beach the next morning, then continued up the A1A towards Jacksonville.  We had some car trouble, but it was all sorted out in a few hours.  So lunch at Engine 15 wound up being dinner instead.

Engine 15 is in a strip mall on Beach Blvd, just as you head out of Jax Beach.  So the location is not as impressive as A1A, but on the upside, they have plenty of parking.  They have a pretty good food menu, but the ambiance is more like a bar with a couple tables up front.    They are loosely firehouse-themed, and pretty industrial.  My 5-year-old complained about the “stink”, but we found it nice to be at a brewpub that smelled like a brewery.  They had a good taplist, with a few dozen beers on tap including a bunch of their own.  They had mix-and-match 4-taster flights, so we got 8 of them:

  • (904) Weissguy was a hefeweizen, with less wheaty twang than you often find.  Another style that’s not my favorite, but this one was very good.
  • Rye of the Tiger was a strong rye, which, like most rye, I could barely tolerate. (Wind really liked it, though.)
  • Old Battle Axe IPA was a very piney IPA — we’ve become more interested in hoppy beers and more tolerant of piney/resiny bitterness, but this was pushing it a bit.
  • Route 90 was an IPA we liked quite a bit more, which is listed as a session IPA and is more in keeping with Florida IPA in general, with a solid grapefruit note (we got a growler to take home).
  • 15 Wolves (collaboration with Aardwolf Brewing) was a light saison that we probably would have liked more if we had it before the IPAs — not very sour or funky, and so paled in comparison.
  • Nutsack Imperial Brown: a standard English brown ale (and I’m not crazy about the single-entendre name).
  • Oolong Milk Tea Stout: a creamy, spicy stout we both liked quite a big (growler #2).
  • Grease Monkey Stout: an inky black, with roasty and chocolatey notes.  A very good stout, but not as good as the Oolong.

We also picked up a growler of their Doolittle saison, which we loved when we had it at the Hogtown Craft Beer Festival back in May.

On balance, we found Engine 15’s beers a lot more adventurous and interesting.  We loved their Doolittle saison when we had it — it stood out even among dozens of other beers we sampled at the festival.

Free Beer from GrassLands Brewing Review Club

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Everybody loves free beer, and we’re no exception.  So we were excited when Redbeard heard about GrassLands Brewing — a new brewery just getting started in Tallahassee, which has a monthly lottery to give away samples of the beers being developed.  So, even though he “never wins anything,” Redbeard threw his email into the hat a few months ago, and was selected to receive a bottle of the first test batch of King Oliver’s Citrus Wit in the latest drawing. This was met with joy by Wind (who loves wit beers as a rule) and cautious enthusiasm by Redbeard (who generally doesn’t like wheat beers, but likes wit more than hefeweizen, etc.).

The bottle showed up well-padded in bubble wrap, with a few odds-and-ends and a letter from owner/head brewer, Gabe Grass, describing what he’s aiming for with the beer, and thanking us for our feedback to help him improve the beer before launch.  We don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone so enthusiastic about giving us free beer before. Definitely off to positive start.

The positive vibe continued on to the beer itself. Yesterday, we sat down to give it a proper tasting. The bottle was a plain brown bottle with a plain green cap – amusingly similar to the dozens of bottles still sitting on our kitchen counter from the batch of homebrew that we’d just bottled (post forthcoming).  King Oliver’s Citrus Wit poured hazy and straw-colored, nicely effervescent with a modest but stable head that took a while to dissipate.  The aroma was classic Wit: spicy and estery, fresh and inviting.

The taste was a touch sweeter than typical Wit, with zesty citrus and lemongrass.  The letter mentioned using zest from Florida citrus, and that really comes through.  Importantly for Redbeard, it didn’t have the wheaty tang that usually put him off wheat beers.  Importantly for Wind, it was still very clearly a wit. The citrus taste is strong, and reminded Wind in particular a bit of the radlers that we drank in Koln last year. It seemed to have a little more body than many beers in the 5% range, maybe because of the relatively high carbonation.

Overall, we liked this beer – it’s a very fresh, pleasantly drinkable beer with a lot more character than most easy-drinking summer beers.  It had a delicate, nuanced flavor that was very interesting to sip by itself, but would probably also be good paired with light, summery foods like salads, fruit, and cheese.

Wind especially really liked it – and is already looking forward to enjoying it on our hot, swampy Florida evenings. But, she’ll have to wait — the brewery hasn’t even launched yet, so probably no bottles or kegs around town any time soon.  Still, we’re both forward to tasting their other beers when we get the chance. Thanks for sharing, Gabe!

Florida Pale Ale, Part #2 – Brewing, Dry Hopping

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Brew day went smoothly.  We didn’t get quite the gravity we hoped for, but it was pretty close (1.067 instead of 1.070).  Thanks to some new hardware and the judicious application of thread seal tape, we got almost no leakage from the wort chiller this time around.  We had a little more than 5 gal., so we put 1 gal. in a growler like we often do.

Primary fermentation started quickly and got down to target gravity in about three days.  We just pulled them to secondary today, and added 1/4 oz. of leftover Nugget hops to the 1 gal side batch.  This is the first time we’ve dry-hopped, so we’re really looking forward to how much of an impact it will have.

I did some reading about dry-hopping, and in typical fashion there seems to be a pretty wide range of contradictory opinions.  The traditional view seems to be that you should dry-hop in secondary with low-alpha hops, and not leave them in more than a few days to avoid grassy off-flavors.  But other people seem happy to add hops in primary or directly to their kegs, and point out that many well-regarded IPAs are hopped with high-alpha hops like Simcoe.

Jai Alai, the beer that inspired us to make this batch, is dry-hopped with Simcoe, for example.  We didn’t like that very much, and the hops we liked the best were Nugget.  There is at least one well-liked IPA that’s dry-hopped with Nugget (Troegs Nugget Nectar).  So we decided to give that a try.