Philly Beer Week

With the arrival of our baby Paxton last Wednesday, this Philly Beer Week won't be like the others, but I'm going to be able to go to a few events. Quite possibly, I'll still go to more events than normal people but I went to a ton last year so it'll be different for me. Plus, we can't bring a one and a half week old to restaurants so it limits Jo's involvement regardless.

Right now, we've only discussed this coming weekend and Monday so not sure what I'm doing next week yet. It seems like we'll try to hit up Kite & Key midday since they are starting their events early and have an outdoors area but we'll see how things are going. For this weekend I'm going to be at:

• Alla Spina on Friday for Four Hands
• Perch Pub on Saturday for Goose Island
• Tria at 6:30 on Monday for the Lost Abbey event

That's it for now. Possibilities are Funky Buddha at Devil's Den on Tuesday, Dark Horse at the Cambridge on Thursday, and maybe Bell's on Friday at Strangelove's. We'll see.

So, if you care where I'm going to be next week, this is the post for you. Otherwise, well, you read it all anyway so joke's on you.

Philly Beer Week Day 9: Nodding Head & Hawthornes

Finally, the last day of Philly Beer Week. Well, my last day at least. Others went out Sunday too. I was really excited for this Saturday from the beginning of beer week as the Dark Horse event at Hawthornes last year was one of my favorites. Adding the Nodding Head Second Saturday event on top of it just increased my excitement.

Starting off the day was the Second Saturday event at Nodding Head. This event was named Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful and consisted of a couple sours and couple variations of Crosby Tears. I started with a glass of Phreddie, a sour tripel.

Philly Beer Week Day 7: De Dolle & Deschutes

For the seventh day of Philly Beer Week, the beer gods gave me De Dolle and Deschutes. Originally I had only planned on the Deschutes event but it turned out that De Dolle was at Monks when I got there so win win! Of course all of this meant that I had to brave the waters of Monk's back room again but I was hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as Sunday's Funky Buddha event. For the most part I was correct though it did get pretty busy later during the Deschutes stuff possibly because Monk's was the only place they visited during Beer Week..

When I arrived the back room was only a little crowded and so it wasn't too hard to get my first beer. I realize I was at a De Dolle event, but I didn't feel like one of their beers. Instead I went with the intriguing De Molen Bakker Wort Brouwer, a whisky barrel aged imperial stout.

Philly Beer Week Day 6: Tired Hands

After our busy fifth day of beer week, Jo and I were originally going to take Wednesday off. Well, mostly off as I was still going to get one drink, but then the Friday before, it was announced that the Tired Hands cafe was finally opening! Immediately I said so much for our day off, time to go to Ardmore!

When I arrived the first floor bar was about three quarters full but still plenty of room for me. I took a seat and ordered my first beer, EWBANH (apparently Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt), their India Black Coffee Saison.

Philly Beer Week Day 5: Founders & Funky Buddha

After my day of rest (hah!) on Monday, Tuesday was planned to be a long day. I had lunch at Jose Pistola's, a stop at Kite & Key, and then finally Prohibition Taproom. Maybe seems like a lot for a Tuesday, but Philly Beer Week! Woo! Okay, okay, I'm a little crazy, I know.

The first stop of the day was the Founders lunch at Jose Pistola's. They were going to have CBS, two years of KBS, Curmudgeon's Better Half, and a few others. To say it was going to be popular isn't giving the crowd the credit it deserves. I arrived about five minutes before opening and the crowd was already like forty or fifty people long.

For those that don't know Jose Pistola's, the entrance is over past the green sign in the middle so pretty far from where I was standing. Lucky for me, my friends showed up at about 11:10 and were twenty to thirty people ahead of me. Pays to have friends who took the day off, I guess.

Philly Beer Week Day 4: Goose Island

After our pretty crazy Sunday, it was refreshing to only have one event on Monday. This time we planned to head to City Tap House to check out some beers from Goose Island brewery. Goose Island entered Philly rather recently and, at least in beer nerd circles, is well know for a ridiculously great stout named Bourbon County Brand stout, a bourbon barrel stout that clocks in at 14.5%. I knew they were serving it at this event which is partly why I chose to go to that one instead of others.

When I arrived at 5 for the 6pm event, the place was actually still pretty empty. What a nice change of pace from the Monk's event. I got a seat at the bar ordered a glass of the Yards Bourbon Porter to pass the time until the Goose Island stuff was available.

Philly Beer Week Day 3: Eulogy, Capone's, and Monk's

Our Sunday was looking to be a pretty busy day as we had three different events we wanted to hit. Well, I wanted to hit. Luckily for me, Jo offered to drive me around from spot to spot. I'm really lucky. We started out with our new tradition of Eulogy's Coffee Beer Brunch. This event is pretty self-explanatory, as it's a brunch with a number of coffee beers on draft. Here are my thoughts from last year's event.

When we arrived, we happened to get a parking spot across the street and then found two seats at the bar. Really convenient. The brunch menu was a little small this year having only two dishes, but the chicken fried steak was pretty tasty so that sort of made up for it. Hopefully next year they have a couple more things available though. We ordered a Ballast Point Victory@Sea, a vanilla coffee porter, first.

Philly Beer Week Day 2: Kite & Key

Originally for day 2 of Philly Beer Week we were going to go down to South Philly for the saison event at Tapestry, but we decided instead to just hang in our neighborhood for the evening. So around 5pm we wandered over to Kite & Key, missing the Gladiator games part of the event but in time for great beers. The real event looked like a lot of fun but maybe next year. The beers being poured were a combo of Allagash, Dogfish Head, and Yards and at least all of their beers were still pouring when we arrived.

I started with a glass of the Yards Bourbon Bart, the bourbon barrel aged version of their Olde Bartholomew.

Philly Beer Week Day 1: Devil's Den

We decided to start off the this year's Philly Beer Week the same way we started off last year's by going to Devil's Den for the Bella Vista Beer Bash. It was so awesome last year that I figured it was a good choice for this one. I got there plenty early this year to ensure I got a seat and got one right on the side of the bar. By about 6:30, the place was pretty jam packed so it was a good thing I got there when I did. Here's what it looked like then.

Okay well that doesn't actually show the crowd real well but it was busy, I swear.

My Philly Beer Week Schedule

I learned last year that the best way for me to get the most out of Philly Beer Week was to make mostly solid plans for the week before it started. It was a little more difficult this year since we were in Belgium recently but there were enough events listed that I mostly chose what I wanted to do before leaving.

For the most part, we've decided on everything we want to do except for the last Sunday. We won't necessarily be right on time for them but we should make it at some point.

The Last Day of Philly Beer Week

The most glaring omission from my Philly Beer Week posts has definitely been Jose Pistola's. It's easily my favorite lunch spot during the year so it seems like I should have planned to go there during the biggest beer week of the year. Well, I did have a lunch planned, smart guy, and if you had looked at my schedule you would have known that! So there. It just happened to be on the last day of beer week so it took me a while to get to it. For this lunch, Adam had been saving up Jolly Pumpkin beers so he had a decent variety by then.

I started with the Jolly Pumpkin Luciernaga which turns out to be a Belgian Pale Ale.

Avery at Kraftwork

Now we come to what turned out to be my second favorite event of Philly Beer Week. The London Grill dinner was my top favorite, but this night came pretty close. There were two reasons I found this event at Kraftwork so cool. One, the Avery draft list was quite amazing and I got to try a whole lot of them because of their awesome flight deal. And, two, they hired a group called the Olde City Sideshow who were pretty awesome. Kraftwork is located on Girard St. in North Philly. Decently large bar with tables ringing the room. Avery is a brewery out of Colorado best known for, hmm, probably their Joe's Pilsener but for me it's their super high octane beers like Mephistopheles, Samael's, and The Beast. Thursday's event was named "The Greatest Show on Earth", I believe, and some of the staff actually dressed the part which was cool. Nice to see a bar have an actual theme and then follow through on it.

When we arrived, there wasn't any room at the bar so we stood near a friend's table and I enjoyed a glass of Avery Dihos Dactylion, an American Wild Ale.

Dark Horse at Hawthorne's Plus some Time

Wednesday of Philly Beer Week was pretty busy for me. I needed to fit in a visit to Hawthorne's cafe to drink a bunch of rare Dark Horse beers and then meet my wife for dinner. All without getting wasted since, well, it was Wednesday and I'm not an alcoholic. Tough, I know, but I figured I could manage it.

I arrived at Hawthorne's around 4:30 and it was still basically empty which was nice. I figured it would fill up at some point but all I needed was one seat so success! It was really difficult deciding what beer to order first, but I decided on the one sour on the list, Lambeak Wants Raspberry.

Weyerbacher Blasphemy

On Tuesday of Philly Beer Week, I was planning on taking a night off to recover, but didn't really succeed. I had been wanting to try Weyerbacher Blasphemy, their quad aged in bourbon barrels, since it came out and the With Love Beer Garden gave me that chance. How could I take the day off?

Bourbon sweet nose with some dark fruit notes from the base quad. Thick mouthfeel, really inviting. Tasted of caramel and dark fruit with a sweet bourbon finish. It was pretty sweet and skirted the edge of being cloying, yet never fell over which is an impressive feat. It felt like it should be boozy, not because there were strong alcohol notes (there weren't), but because of the sweet, bourbon flavors and syrupy mouthfeel. Really great bourbon barrel quad and very tasty.

As a side note, I wasn't terribly impressed with the With Love Beer Garden outside the Four Seasons. I understand it was created as a sort of meeting place and headquarters for Philly Beer Week, but it was just unimpressive to me. It was big and open and having different breweries as sponsors each day was a good idea, but there was barely anything there other than that. Maybe I'm missing the point or something, I just wouldn't have felt the need to stop in if it weren't for this beer.

London Grill & Deschutes: East Meets West

Finally we come to one of my favorite (possibly the favorite) nights of Philly Beer Week, the Deschutes dinner at London Grill. However, lets back up about 45 minutes before the dinner started. Kite & Key was doing a Founders Brewing event (named F*CK Monday for Founders Unites Canada and Kentucky, clever) and advertised that they were going to be tapping Canadian Breakfast Stout. Since it is one of the beers that I really wanted to try at some point and is super rare, I knew I had to stop there before heading to London Grill. I arrived around 4:30 only to find out most people arrived at 4 and all of the placeholder cards for a glass were already handed out. Sucks to be me. Luckily, I had met a couple guys the day before at Eulogy and they offered up an extra seat at their table to me. This meant, when the waitress came around for who wanted what, she did her best to include me in the order. Fingers crossed, I just had to wait and see what happened. Waiting paid off as I got my first glass ever of Canadian Breakfast Stout!

Beers at Monks

The final event of the weekend for me was being held at Monk's. Now, I don't know if I've talked about Monk's before, but even on normal days Monk's gets ridiculously crowded. Add in rare Lost Abbey beers and the owner Tomme Arthur and I figured the crowd would be monstrous. I was totally right although some would say it was worse than monstrous. For some background, Lost Abbey is a brewery near San Diego that makes interesting but expensive beer. The unfortunate thing is their bottles sometimes have quality control issues but at least the stuff on draft is always good.

I got to Monk's around 3:45 while the event was supposed to start around 4:30. Since I had some time to kill, I got a glass of Flying Fish Exit 9, an imperial red ale.

Coffee Beer Brunch at Eulogy

It's been three days and I'm finally almost done with the weekend events for Philly Beer Week. Woo! We started Sunday with the 2nd annual Coffee Beer Brunch at Eulogy. The idea behind the coffee beer brunch is sort of self-evident. Eulogy had about two-thirds of their tap list as coffee stouts and they had a bunch of brunch specials. Really good idea in my opinion and Jo and I had a great brunch.

Since we had things to do that day, I wasn't going to be able to try everything so instead I just took some sips of Jo's first beer as well.

Voodoo at the Khyber Pass Pub

After a great couple of beers at Capone's for lunch, Jo and I took a few hours off to run some errands and prepared for dinner and beers at the Khyber Pass Pub. The event Saturday night was with the Voodoo Brewery with head brewer Matt Allyn and his assistant. Voodoo is a Pennsylvania brewery located all the way on the west side of state. It's a really small brewery with just Matt and his assistant as the employees and then a group of volunteers for when they need more people. They make a few really good beers that can be found in Philly although I don't know how far their distribution really gets. On Saturday, the Khyber also still had some taps from their Ballast Point event the night before, some Duck Rabbit stuff, and then a whole bunch of other awesome beers on their 20 taps. So it really wasn't just a Voodoo night as far as beers go which allowed for variety.

Ballast Point at Capone's

With the first day of Philly Beer Week under my belt, my wife and I planned some errands around stopping at Capone's for lunch for the Ballast Point event. I knew this would be the only day I could get out there and how could I have a beer week without involving Capone's?

We arrived around 12:15 and while there were a few people, it wasn't too crowded. Apparently the Hill Farmstead event the day before was ridiculous as a bus full of beer geeks showed up so that would explain that. Even though this was the Ballast Point event, I noticed Hill Farmstead Fear & Trembling was still on draft and decided to start with that instead. This was brewed with some smoked malt then aged in some sort of red wine barrels if I remember correctly. There are a bunch of different versions of it on BeerAdvocate but I think it was the Cabernet version.

Bella Vista takes over Devil's Den

Ahh, Philly Beer Week finally begins. I put up my schedule the other day and so far I've kept to it pretty well. While this post is going to concentrate on the Devil's Den event, my first beer of beer week was actually at the Kite & Key. It was the Troegs Scratch 42, Razzmadizzle, a chocolate raspberry dubbel as far as I know.