Author: timandjohnna

All we can say is wow. As the picture shows, this place offers up flights of 10 beers however, we only ordered 5 to get things started. The tap room is decorated with hundreds of pewter stiens reminding us of our days at Old Chicago. We had their Rudy lager, Table Rock pale ale, Black Hearted dark lager, Wilson Creek ESB and their Thallo IPA. All of the beers were top-notch, especially for a small brewery. A must-visit if you are ever in the area.

All good things come to an end: so does our CLT mini-tour here in the Queen City. As mentioned in an earlier post, there is something to be said about the beers in this area. After 25 breweries in two weeks, CLT rivals the nearby Asheville when it comes to quality. We have never visited so many good breweries, met so many nice people and drank so many great beers. Totally impressed with CLT and would recommend this brewery especially after drinking their Blue Daisy, Hyde in the House, Chad’s Stache and Nut Up Or Shut Up

Only 2 minutes from the last brewery, this brewery only has 4 beers on the flight but they are delicious. The Golden Boy blonde ale is nice & crisp and the 3C west coast IPA is ha, ha, hoppy. The Boneyard Bock is great but we need to do a better job reading the menu when it says ” BBA gingerbread stout” on the Baking Cookies With Grandma. The gingerbread was nice but the BBA stands for ‘bourbon barrel aged’ which was quite the shock when we first tasted it. We are not whiskey fans and the only worse that that was a sample of the Good Golly Miss Moly pickel gose. Yuk! 🙁

Now this is more like it. After the last place masquerading as a brewery, this tap room named after the brewmasters dog gets back to the basics of what beer is supposed to be. And, on top of it, their flights are made up of 6 half-pours, not 4 or 5. Today’s inflight selections can be found in the seatback guide……..wait, I mean, we had the Let’s Dance pale ale, Czech Please pilsner, Mirage belgian tripple, Creature Of Habitat german helles lager, Proper Pint english brown ale and Diplomacy double india pale lager. All of them were top notch craft beers but our favorite was definitely the belgian and DIPL. Uh oh, are our tastes changing?

So our Sunday-funday is starting off with some confusion as to what this place really is. We initally weren’t going to stop because we thought it was a craft beer bar but some of the info coming up on Maps let us to believe it was a true brewery. Turns out its kinda in between – they call themselves a “collaboration” with Sixpoint, Victory and Southern Tier, none of which are local to CLT. All of their regular beers are on tap (total of 31) that we would consider “guest taps” but they do offer five locally brewed beers under the 4001 Yancy flag. We tried all five with a flight of Slow Breeze, Bock, Hefelemon, Sunny Monkey and Queen’s Wit. They were all too sour or tart for our liking except for the Bock which wasn’t too bad.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner! The thing about drinking flights that are only 4 oz. each is you can handle the heavy beers and not get wasted. All of our flight beers at this brewery are at least 7% abv which is equal to about one and a half regular beers. The I Did It All For The Wooke, Forty Dollar Bill and Neon Distraction are all west coast IPA’s and the We Are Out Of Peanut Butter Frank is a porter. This round of IPA’s are a little more hoppy than the last three places but good none the less. And yes, this is #5 for the day and my thumbs are still working fine! 🙂

Things just keep getting better. You can’t beat a brewery AND barbeque! To top it off, this place is our favorite style of taproom: a small hole-in-the-wall. About the size of a four-car garage, this place has about a dozen great beers ranging from simple to exotic. We tasted the Gold Standard lager, Jitter Bean vanilla bean blonde, Check Yourself vienna lager and the Horizonal Thought west coast IPA. The beers were tasty but we prefer Texas-style BBQ over the Carolina vinegar.

There must be something in the water here in North Carolina that make the beer taste so good. Or maybe they take brewing so serious that they don’t believe in serving crap. Even the hazy & hoppy stuff is starting to grow on us. We stumbled upon another event going on at this brewery where the parking lot is full of vendor tents and a band is playing on stage. Either we are getting lucky today or CLT loves their parties. Along with a huge outdoor event comes the risk of running out of beer and so is the case here as well. Even though they have a large selection of nearly two-dozen beers, 6 were “kicked” by the time we arrived forcing us even further outside our box. We enjoyed a flight of Bitchin’ Betty brown ale, Reville peanut butter stout , Shake That Axe light lager , and Bang Bang hazy IPA. So delicious!

Located in the heart of downtown, we caught the tail-end of a street party celebrating First Responders with food trucks, comedians and a live band. The beer here is awesome and is brewed by a couple of veterans offering a dozen different styles. We got a little adventureous with the flight this time getting the Redline, Blueline, Khaki Chums and the Lost Lieutenant. The golden ale and red ale were light and refreshing followed by the pale ale with a hoopy kick. The vanilla coffee white stout was the real winner here today with only subtle notes of vanilla & coffee.

There is nothing better than pretzels with beer but lately, the warm pretzels we’ve been ordering up haven’t been that good and this place is no different. They are usually too mushy or the dips taste like they came out of a can. However, the beer here is awesome. We started this Saturday afternoon off with a flight of Miss Susie Blue, Loki’s Pilsner, Holloman’s Studwizer and Valkyrie IPA. Perhaps our taste preferences are changing but we really liked the west coast IPA. Not too hoppy or bitter and the blueberry lager had just the right amount of sweetness & fruit.