Dulles Airport Take-Off Tasting Tour:  Sterling, Ashburn and more:  House 6 Black Hat Oatmeal Stout from Ashburn, Virginia

Date:  April  19, 2019

The Story—  We don’t know how many “firefighter” breweries there are in the US right now, but it’s a considerable number.  Many are in retired engine houses and more are brewers who have traded their gear for brewers’ boots.

We like the vibe and we liked the people at House 6.  It’s a welcoming place, kid friendly and neighborly.   But the beers are better than the neighbor down the block brews in his garage and unlike most of these small welcoming breweries, they didn’t miss on any one of the half dozen beers we tried there.   We could have as easily chosen their Imperial Brown Ale or, more remarkably, their Tripel.  This oatmeal stout is a good example fo the style– oats give a silky smoothness to the beer, but some versions are so creamy smooth that they’re hard to stik with for a while.  This one shows a nice bit of moreish balance.

The Beer—  Oatsy smooth, but with a black dark acrid edge that gives, I guess, a bit of a balance– it certainly prevents cloying.  Lots of bakers chocolate, some dark fruit and a creamy end.  Ellie found good flavors for a less than huge beer.

Value —  Good.  Pretty much going rate for a good house beer.

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.

For the next several weeks we’ll feature fun places to explore beer — and much more–a different destination each week.   Our beers of the day will feature beers from this wonderfully wet destinations.  This week we’re featuring beers in the Dulles-Sterling are of Northern Virginia.    A caveat as always: the vast majorities of craft breweries may have a few beers that are usually available, but their most interesting beers are usual season or one-off brews that we may rave about, but you can’t find.   Our specific beer descriptions can tell you what sorts of beers the brewery does well; if you don’t find the exact beer on tap, you’ll probably find something similar.

Dulles Airport Take-Off Tasting Tour:  Sterling, Ashburn and more: Twinpanzee Aud3o, an NE IPA with IBUs from Sterling, Va.

Date:  April  18, 2019

The Story—  Twinpanzee is one of a nest of breweries in the Sterling area.   None are very walkable to a night’s rest (other than your car in the parking lot), but they’re so close that an UberCrawl won’t make you sell the ranch.

Twinpanzee has one of the cutest logos and one of the smallest brew systems of any in the group.   They don’t hit a home run with every batch, but the surprise, honestly, is that they turn out as many beers as they do that compare well with breweries with more sophisticated systems.

The NEIPA style exploded from a smoldering idea in Vermont’s Alchemist brewery not long ago.  Versions vary wildly.   The idea of the NEIPA was to brew a beer with a softer bitter profile than the West Coast IPAs that dominated the market.   Alchemist’s Heady Topper became a cult favorite overnight as the small brewery didn’t have a chance of keeping up with demand.   Copykettle versions of it sprung up all over New England and, seemingly almost instantly other American and European breweries as well.

But the copiers didn’t have the tightly held recipe and focused on different elements of the “style” to replicate.  Today NEIPA tends to imply a beer that is cloudy to murky, low in IBUs, and with big fruity hop flavors and aromas.  But Heady had a bitter touch that kept things in balance.   And, though Heady asked you to keep her in the can while you drank her, if you poured it into a glass (did you also cut the tag off your mattress?) you had a beer that was definitely hazy but far short of impenetrably murky.   A distinct metallic taste seemed to be from hops and we think drinking it from the can may have increased the bitter that was there.

So some critics would rule out today’s featured beer as too bitter for the style.   We don’t.  The 63 IBUs are nicely appropriate for a 6.7% IPA and they’re partly kept in check by a firm malt and some chalkiness.  We think heady would smile on this cover.

We’ll grant that IPAs are easier to brew than low alcohol and light beers, so it’s no surprise that Twinpanzee’s best efforts are with the IPAs, but a small brewer can screw up any style and these guys turn out a range of IPAs that differ in taste but not in quality.  Definitely worth a stop if you’re in the area.

The Beer—  63 IBUs are big for a NEIPA but they mostly hide well until a very late citrus bitter.  It tends to chalky and fruity and even slightly creamy until the bitter end.

Value — Fair.  These guys don’t brew much and don’t give it away.   Prices exceed other nearby breweries.

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.

For the next several weeks we’ll feature fun places to explore beer — and much more–a different destination each week.   Our beers of the day will feature beers from this wonderfully wet destinations.  This week we’re featuring beers in the Dulles-Sterling are of Northern Virginia.    A caveat as always: the vast majorities of craft breweries may have a few beers that are usually available, but their most interesting beers are usual season or one-off brews that we may rave about, but you can’t find.   Our specific beer descriptions can tell you what sorts of beers the brewery does well; if you don’t find the exact beer on tap, you’ll probably find something similar.

Dulles Airport Take-Off Tasting Tour:  Sterling, Ashburn and more: Solace The Fig Lebowski, Fruited Imperial Stout, Dulles, Virginia

Date:  April  17, 2019

The Story—  We’ve learned slowly to at least try some of the beers that sound like disappointments because even in styles we normally don’t enjoy, a good brewer can surprise us.   We’re skeptical of non-traditional fruit beer in general, but an Imperial Stout can handle a great deal of abuse without showing bruises.

The Dulles Airport area hosts a number of breweries that do almost everything well –Solace is one of them and hits beyond well often enough to ensure that they’ll be back for another beer of the day later in the year.

The Beer—Big rich and sweet from the outset.  Full bodied dep roast and lots of fruit by the finish.  It all comes together at the end to quite credibly create a Fig Newton beer that’s still beer.

Value —

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.

For the next several weeks we’ll feature fun places to explore beer — and much more–a different destination each week.   Our beers of the day will feature beers from this wonderfully wet destinations.  This week we’re featuring beers in the Dulles-Sterling are of Northern Virginia.    A caveat as always: the vast majorities of craft breweries may have a few beers that are usually available, but their most interesting beers are usual season or one-off brews that we may rave about, but you can’t find.   Our specific beer descriptions can tell you what sorts of beers the brewery does well; if you don’t find the exact beer on tap, you’ll probably find something similar.

Dulles Airport Take-Off Tasting Tour:  Sterling, Ashburn and more: Quattro Goomba’s Goombafest, Aldie, Va.

Date:  April  16, 2019

The Story—  We’ve featured Quatro Goomba’s before.  An improbable name in an unlikely location, you’d have given them si months when they opened.  But they’ve brewed good beer and provided beer fans a reason to come with their winos to visit this rural wonderland.

They brewed well for years, but more recently somehow managed to attract one of the East Coast’s finest brewers to their oh-so-not-central location.   Chris Jacques (pronounced “Jakes” if — and we hope you do — meet him) has brewed from New England to central Virginia and has surpassed expectations in every stop along the way.

Fest beers are at one time not so hard since every town in Germany defines its own style and a blind brew of above average strength lager probably isn’t that far from Feathersdorf’s Festmaerzen.  On the other hadnd the FF isn’t really all that good.   To top it takes some skill.

Chris has that skill.   The brewery, we think, knows how lucky they are.  You’ll be lucky too if you can find a designated driver to let you frolic in Virginia and include a trip to this versatile brewery.

The Beer— Malt and lots of it.  Clean and just short of bready.  Sweet but with late and effective balancing hops that make this drink-it-in-a-beertent brutally moreish.   It was one of our best beers of 2018.   Go and taste what he has on tap; trust him, it’s good.

Value —very good.  Much cheaper than a flight to Germany — and you won’t find many fest beers there that are better.

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.

For the next several weeks we’ll feature fun places to explore beer — and much more–a different destination each week.   Our beers of the day will feature beers from this wonderfully wet destinations.  This week we’re featuring beers in the Dulles-Sterling are of Northern Virginia.    A caveat as always: the vast majorities of craft breweries may have a few beers that are usually available, but their most interesting beers are usual season or one-off brews that we may rave about, but you can’t find.   Our specific beer descriptions can tell you what sorts of beers the brewery does well; if you don’t find the exact beer on tap, you’ll probably find something similar.

Dulles Airport Take-Off Tasting Tour:  Sterling, Ashburn and more:  Craft of Brewing (TCOB) Hyp-O-Crat,

Date:  April  15, 2019

The Story—  We discovered TCOB (The Craft of Brewing) almost by accident as we sought out the relatively new Dynasty Brewing Company, whose brewer had crafted a plethora of superb beers at several breweries — including and exceptional Mother Tupper’s Imperial Rye Pale Ale.   And Dynasty is wonderful and we’ll end this series with a very hard-to-brew triumph of theirs.   B

But there — in the same strip mall– was a brewery that hadn’t shown up on our brewery maps (yet), but seemed to actually brew.   We went back the next day to find a Brew on Premise that did its own Brewing on Premise to present a fine selection of beers from a very small brew kit.   The house brewed beers are served from pour-your-own taps at one end of the facility and the other holds the rows of tiny brewing vessels for the POB operations.

Other than the fact that the glassware was really basic, we were impressed with the place.   We had a hard time deciding which one of their beers we would feature in this lower Loudoun tour.  We settled on a beer than may not show how they avoid errors, which they do, but how the interpret styles, which they do well.

The definitive Irish Dry Stout is, of course, Guinness, which we can sample even more directly than ever from the St. James Gate Brewery at their American Guinness, Halethorpe, Baltimore, Brewery.   But the Guinness that we know and love is probably a gentler beer than the original “stout”.  “Stout” was once a term for a “stout porter” – a dark beer of above average strength an intensity.

Most, though not all, American brewers produce a “robust porter” when they want to evoke the earlier strength of the beer, but some continue to call these 6% to 7% dark beers dry stouts.   Sometimes it’s best to just ignore the labels and taste the beer for what it is.  So here, from an unlikely brewer brewing an unlikely interpreation of a style, is our first beer of the lower Loudoun area, a very nice big easy-drinking dark –maybe Irish-ish-  stout.

The Beer— Creamy and roasty.  Very dark malts and a gentle blanket of of the notrogen.  Some almost acrid black bitter late actually helps.    Ellie noted that even though it doesn’t have oats it tastes like it does.  A great example of how you don’t have to have $5 million bucks to open a brewery that can produce good beer.

Value —  Very good — made all the better by the fact that you can pour exactly as much as you want and go back if need be.

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.

For the next several weeks we’ll feature fun places to explore beer — and much more–a different destination each week.   Our beers of the day will feature beers from this wonderfully wet destinations.  This week we’re featuring beers in the Dulles-Sterling are of Northern Virginia.    A caveat as always: the vast majorities of craft breweries may have a few beers that are usually available, but their most interesting beers are usual season or one-off brews that we may rave about, but you can’t find.   Our specific beer descriptions can tell you what sorts of beers the brewery does well; if you don’t find the exact beer on tap, you’ll probably find something similar.