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.