Ever been to a brewpub? You know, one of those places where the beer you drink there is beer they make there. Right there, often right in front of you, close enough to hear the brewer whistle. Anyone can drink beer, but you’re drinking beer at the brewery. It’s like being at the game, instead of sneaking looks under your coat at a little three-inch screen while you follow your wife around at a craft fair (you poor bastard).
I like brewpubs for a lot of reasons: the main one is because there’s beer there. One of the other reasons is the history. Brewpubs are kind of like missing links, throwbacks to the way a lot of brewing used to be: house brewing.
I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of history just to pad the column (that’s next
week), but I did get a chance to visit the world’s oldest brewpub back in April. It’s a place called
U Fleku in Prague (where the locals pronounce it “oo FLEHK-oo”), a rambling joint on a small side street – as most of the streets in that twisty old part of Prague seem to be. U Fleku (pictured here to the right) makes only one kind of beer – a delicious dark lager with just a spicy hint of anise to it – they only sell it in their halls, and they make it all on the premises in their own little brewery, the way they have for 500 years.
They’ve been doing it since 1499, through wars, through Austrian imperialism, through Communist domination, when the brewery was taken over by the state ... and given back to the family owners after the Velvet Revolution. U Fleku has gained a reputation as a tourist trap, but the rep is mostly with the locals because they think the beer is outrageously expensive: about two bucks for half a liter (for those of you metrically challenged, that’s a damn good deal by American standards, a half-liter is a bit more than a 16-ounce pint). I found the solid feel of age to the place almost as irresistible as those double-buck half-liters of deliciously dark lager.
The first time I went to a brewpub was 18 years ago, a place called the Front Street Pub, in Santa Cruz, California. They made three beers – gold, amber, and porter – on a small system that they stirred with a canoe paddle. I loved it, it was new, and it made me want to try new things. I tried squid there for the first time, too, and shark, and oyster shooters: a shell glass filled with a raw oyster and porter. (Oysters and dark acrid beers like porter or stout go great together.)
It’s not the age, or personal history, though; I get a good feeling in brand-new brewpubs I’ve never been in before, too. There’s just something about being there where they make it. As one brewpub in Arkansas put it, “Who cares about ‘born-on dates’ when you’re drinking in the delivery room?”
I’m not going to try to tell you that the beer’s better at brewpubs because of some crap-mystical terroir de biere or because the smallness of the brewery makes it special; there are plenty of great beers that come out of big breweries. But there is definitely something to be said for the freshness of the beer at a good brewpub. It has to be a busy one, or the beer won’t move fast enough to make a difference (and the same thing goes for bars, by the way).
At a lot of brewpubs, they never even put the beer in kegs: they brew it, ferment it, age it, filter it (or not, sometimes), and run it to a serving tank. The beer never moves more than 80 feet, and that means a lot. The less you move beer, the better. Once you find a busy brewpub, you’re going to taste beer that’s so fresh your mom would slap it.
You’re also going to find a variety you won’t find anywhere else. Oh, sure, beer bars have more beers, and plenty of types of beer, but brewpubs are where the experiments are taking place. The staff’s more likely to know what they’re talking about, the brewer might be around if you have any questions, and you can usually get taster glasses or sampler trays to try a little of everything. They also usually have a light ale or lager of some type, something to make the transition easier.
Brewpubs are always about the beer, of course, but they are also very much about the beer and the food, not surprisingly. The chefs have beer in front of them all the time, and the taste of the beer inspires the food choices. Last week, I was at the
Triumph brewpub in Princeton, New Jersey, for a beer dinner that the chef was completely jazzed about: French cuisine paired with Triumph’s great beers (the brewers were kind of jazzed too; they’d just won four medals at the Great American Beer Festival two weeks before). We got smoked beer (made from smoked malt for a rich, smoky flavor in the beer) with sausages made from wild boar and pheasant, a spicy witbier with seared tuna crusted with peppercorns, and a half-beer/half-cider mix with a bunch of those fat, stanky French cheeses.
I was relaxing after the meal with head brewer Jay Misson and part-owner Brian Fitting; Fitting was telling me how they kept getting inquiries about bottling their beer. “They just don’t get it,” said Misson, waving a dismissive hand. “It’s a brewpub. We make beer here, people drink it here. That’s what we do. That’s all we do.” Sitting there with an after-dinner glass of Sumatra-laced coffee stout (a buzz within a buzz), “all we do” sounded pretty good to me.
I’ve seen plenty of pizzeria brewpubs, burger joint brewpubs, real barbeque brewpubs, a brewpub in a fish market, a steakhouse brewpub, and unfortunately, a whole mess of brewpubs with a menu that looks like it came right out of friggin’ Applebee’s. I’ve seen brewpubs in train stations, airports, malls, an old poorhouse and a church. I’ve been in over 300 of them, and the one thing that sticks out is that damn few of them have really bad beer. Only about 6 or 7 come to mind – pretty good odds.
Bust out of your rut, and track down some freshness. You can punch your town or ZIP code into the database at
www.Pubcrawler.com and find one near you. You’ll be surprised to see how many people are already there, quaffing the fresh.
