In Prague, I visited two breweries, one of them that has been brewing since 1499. I also found some interesting craft beers at a restaurant including a double IPA and an imperial stout. I avoided visiting any breweries that only make a pilsner but I was quite impressed by the rest of the beers I tried.
St. Norbert brewing offered only three beers but each one was quite delicious. They served an amber ale, black ale, and an IPA. The amber was so smooth and delicious that I now have a new standard by which to judge San Diego ambers. The black lager was surprisingly smooth and quite a tasty beer that my husband enjoyed as well. This is a style of beer that I hope a San Diego brewery will explore properly soon. I’ve had a few black lagers but most of them were much higher in alcohol. The IPA was quite tasty and again well-balanced. Still I liked the malts used enough that it did not bother me being so balanced.
The next day I went to U Fleku, a brewery that has been open since 1499 and only serves a single black lager. The black lager was also quite smooth and really made me wonder why we don’t see more of this style in he states. Because they only serve one beer, they go around the tables with a tray of beer and offer them to whoever is sitting there and mark a paper at your table to keep track of how much you drank.
U Fleku Black Lager
I could have just stuck to U Fleku for the rest of my trip and been satisfied, but I knew there were some stronger beers around so I had to search them out. I was going to visit one bar to get my fix but they were not serving any food and I happened to stop by when I was really needing some food. Thankfully, the restaurant I visited had a few nice selections, including a double IPA, and an imperial stout.
The double IPA was very much in the style of the previous IPAs I had in my trip. I actually started to grow fond of this balanced IPA flavor. The Imperial stout was unexpectedly strong with a heavy flavor of peat. It was a combination of a strong Scotch, and some licorice flavor. Thankfully the peat did not get too much and I really enjoyed this one. I would recommend that you drink plenty of black lager if you make your way to Prague, especially if you don’t really like pilsners.
Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.
When you think of Italy, you tend to think of wine. Italian wines are quite good and well-known for quality. However, there is also a growing group of Italian craft beer. I didn’t spend much time searching out the craft beer while there because you still have to go out of your way to find it. What I did try was quite delicious and showed that the Italian brewers know what quality beer tastes like and strive to produce the best.
The first place I had Italian craft beer was a small beer bar called Pub 38 about half a mile from the hotel where I stayed in Malgrate, an area south of Lecco, a small industrial town about an hour north-east of Milan. I expected to see some Belgian beers and was surprised to see two beers from The Wall, an Italian craft brewery in Varese not too far from where I was, on tap. They had both an IPA and a barley wine. The IPA was well-balanced and yet had some nice grapefruit and citrus flavors that reminded me of home.
I later returned to the same bar to try the barley wine. I was surprised that the flavors I tasted in the barley wine were more on the Belgian style. If I had to compare it to something more well-known, I would say it reminded me of a Duvel but with some added hops. The flavors worked very nicely together. I was also quite glad that the bar I got these at was very careful about giving proper glassware and cleaning everything properly.
I got to try a few more Italian beers in a bar in Milan after we decided to spend our last day in Italy exploring Milan. It seemed as if most of the craft beer bars were some distance away from the tourist areas so I ended up taking a metro to cut down my trip length a little bit. The bar I visited, called Bere Buona Birra, only had four beers on tap but tons of bottles. I was glad that the bartender and most of the people I met inside spoke quite good English. I ended up having some interesting chats with them about the San Diego craft beer scene.
The only beer that jumped out to me on tap was an imperial saison dry-hopped with citra. Despite generally not liking saisons, I was quite impressed by the flavors of this one. The higher alcohol made it more smooth and the hops added a nice citrus bite. After trying this one, I was offered a lighter extra-pale but since my palate was likely shot I had a local bottle of double IPA from Brewfist instead. The double IPA was also quite malty but had plenty of hop flavors going. I learned later in Prague that this is the style that Europe tends to brew IPAs. The San Diego style of lighter colored IPA doesn’t seem to have obtained popularity there yet.
Thankfully Italy is easy enough to get around that finding some of the out-of-the-way beer bars isn’t too difficult, though you may end up walking a decent amount.
Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.
This post has been updated now to reflect some changes that took place in May of 2015. Update is at the bottom.
The area around Alesmith, Green Flash, and the new Ballast Point is increasingly becoming crowded. Recently added in that area is a new brewery called 32 North. The owner partnered up with a brewer who previously brewed for Karl Strauss and White Labs and opened up with a nice-looking tasting room and a solid selection of beers to start. The Karl Strauss influence is especially noticeable in the peanut butter cup porter and imperial stout, both very similar to Karl Strauss’ offerings of the same style.
One thing that sets this brewery apart from many of the places around the area is its operating hours. They are open every day from Noon to 10PM. For a while most breweries closed on Mondays and many also close on Tuesdays. Plus this is one of the few that remains open until 10PM. Also impressive is the lineup of beers to start. I didn’t get to try everything in my first visit but I came back the next day to try the other three. I always like to see a brewery that focuses on a few core beers.
The four core beers are a 3.8% berliner weisse, a 5.5% pale ale, a strong 7.5% IPA, and a 6% coffee milk stout. Also on tap when I visited on October 28, 2014 was a 4.5% toasted coconut English mild, 6.3% rye pale ale, a 5.5% peanut butter cup porter, and a 10.5% imperial stout.
The berliner weisse is an interesting light-bodied beer that is quite tart. It really isn’t my thing but I was glad to see something from a wheat beer that is a bit different than the usual. Since there has been some mention of future sours in the works, I expect this would be the basis for those sours. The pale ale is quite tasty with a lot of peach and citrus flavors going on. It is lightly malty, which sets it apart from many of the malt bomb pale ales around.
Left to right, Coconut Mild, Berliner Weisse, Pale Ale.
The rye pale ale was a little strange tasting to me. It had plenty of the rye flavors but the hops used didn’t seem to mix properly, giving it a really herbal flavor. There is some room to tweak this one, maybe with a different type of hops. Especially when comparing this to something like Aurora from Modern Times there is a way to go. The IPA was solidly flavorful and bitter. It boasted plenty of tropical fruit and citrus and a powerful bitterness. This is a great start and a solid beer to have as a core.
Left to right, imperial stout, peanut butter cup porter, rye pale, IPA.
The peanut butter cup porter was very similar to the Karl Strauss one and had a good mix of nutty flavors and sweetness. The milk stout had some solid coffee flavors and a little more sweetness than I typically prefer but that is balanced by some roasted malt flavors. I would personally prefer a little more pronounced coffee but then I did try it after the imperial stout, mostly because I didn’t realize the milk stout had coffee in it until I chatted with the bartender. The toasted coconut mild was especially tasty on nitro. The mild underlying beer takes on the flavor of the coconut really nicely, giving it a strong lightly sweet coconut taste.
The Imperial Stout is very similar to the fantastic Karl Strauss Imperial Stout sporting plenty of coffee and chocolate flavors. 32 North uses fresh roasted local coffee from Dark Horse Coffee Roasters in both the imperial stout and the milk stout, and it tastes great.
With a spacious amount of seating inside and a good set of core beers, 32 North is off to a great start and seems poised for great things. The initial lineup seems to indicate a recognition of the demand in the local market where a solid IPA and solid imperial stout are both essential.
Update May 23, 2015:
I hadn’t visited 32 North in a while so I thought I would drop in to see how they are doing and I was surprised by the lack of core beers on tap and the number of sours available. I had dropped by previously to try some of their fruit flavored berliner weisse beers before but found that they were way too tart for me before. This time when I dropped in the tap list was pretty sparse but they had a Black Currant Berliner Weisse, a Passion Fruit American Sour, and a key lime gose.
Tap list on 5/23/15.
I got a taster of each of the three sours on tap to see how they were. I started with the Black Currant Landfall, which was my favorite of the three. It had a nice blend of sweet and sour with a bit of citrus tart flavor and sweeter berry. The Key Lime Gose was pretty much like drinking limeaid. It was interesting for sure but surprisingly not very tart and mildly sweet. Finally the passion fruit had a nice wild flavor going with a mild passion fruit flavor and very little tart going on. I think both the key lime and passion fruit could be a bit more tart while the black currant was the right balance.
Left to right, blackcurrant, key lime, passion fruit.
As for how regularly we will see the core beers around, it seems that they are doing smaller batches now and many of them don’t stay on very long. Hopefully these sours will continue to become a main thing for them because it is nice to have someone so close by doing sours.
Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.
I got excited about IPAs because of the flavors that hops bring to a brew. More recently I started to notice the difference freshness makes and how quickly the hop flavors fade. Thanks in part to Stone releasing their Enjoy By IPA series, which expects people to drink the beer within a month of release, general beer drinkers are starting to understand how important freshness is. Follow the Enjoy By link for Stone’s explanation of this. But simply having bottles at home that are fresh is only half the battle. You also have to store those beers properly to avoid losing those hop flavors.
I am not going to go on about specific temperatures but I will simply keep things as simple as possible. Refrigerating your IPAs once you get them home in a bottle (like I know you would with a growler) ensures that your beer tastes as good as it did when you brought it home when you open it the following week. This is only half of the battle though. The other part is making sure that you purchase your beers from a shop that stores their beers properly, or go direct to the source.
There are a lot of steps a beer takes from when it leaves the brewery until you find it at your local shop. Thankfully a lot of the big breweries in San Diego that bottle their beers distribute through Stone. Stone takes the necessary steps to ensure that until they drop the beer off at the next step it is properly refrigerated. Read about how Stone explains it on their distribution site. However, you don’t always know how properly the beer was stored by a particular company before putting it on the shelves.
Sometimes finding beers from certain breweries in a shop is a good indication that the shop stores the beers properly. Russian River is known for being very strict about how their beers are kept both during shipping and once on display. Alpine is also strict so if you can find beer from either brewery at a bottle shop you know that they store the beers properly. Alpine has a list of places where you can find their beers on their website. One thing to look for is coolers that don’t have bright fluorescent lights on the beers.
More recently though, I’ve found that it is worth going direct to any local brewery and buying the beer from the source. That way you are guaranteed that the beer you are buying is as fresh as possible and stored properly. Stone has a few smaller tasting rooms where you can buy bottles without trying to park at one of their big restaurants. But for beers from out of state or out of county proper storage makes all the difference and helps ensure that you enjoy the beers as they were meant to be tasted.
In summary, make sure that you keep your IPAs away from sunlight and/or fluorescent lights and that you store them in a cool place. You should notice the difference right away. Because some of the things I discuss here is based on discussions I had on Facebook with fellow beer friends, if something here is inaccurate, please let me know in the comments. If you think I am making a big deal about something that is not very important, also let me know.
If you are interested in some of the science behind how light affects beer, check out this article from Mark Dredge on Pencil and Spoon as well as a more detailed article from someone in The Bruery’s lab.
Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.
Quantum Brewing Company has been open for a little bit as a test but just recently opened officially. I stopped by on September 19, 2014 for a few tasters to see what it was like. I had already gone to Council Brewing before hand so I had to limit my tasters. I decided to try the Uncertainty red, Antimater IPA, Yellowcake double IPA, and Singularity stout.
The uncertainty red was an interesting combination of floral and fruity flavors that I don’t normally taste in a red. These flavors were most likely from added hops, though they didn’t bring any heavy bitterness. The Antimater IPA was a bright tropical fruit beer with a light amount of citrus and medium bitterness. Yellowcake double IPA was again strongly floral and had a solid bitterness that didn’t taste like what the board said. So far the beers were solid but not particularly exciting.
Then I tried the stout and I was quite happy. Though it is only 5% and quite mellow it has a good amount of flavor and was served on Nitro. Flavors in the stout were a nice combination of roasted malts and light coffee. I ended up ordering a pint after the tasters and enjoyed it quite a bit. The brewer happened to be wearing a Guinness shirt that day so I expect he was trying to create the proper Irish experience of Guinness which everyone says is better in Ireland. Though I haven’t been to Ireland yet I expect he did a pretty good job here. It hit all the right points.
Quantum is still in the early stages and so still exploring new beer styles. Others have been more excited about the IPA than I was because everyone has different preferences for hop flavors. Quantum is off to a good start with a solid stout as their standout and should hopefully start to nail down a few of their core beers soon.
Have you been out to Quantum yet? Let me know what you think in the comments.
Paul McGuire is a craft beer enthusiast. He likes to travel with his husband and enjoy the great outdoors. In his day job, Paul is a divorce attorney serving clients in San Diego California.
