Appears Thursdays
In the 1980s we published a four-page monthly newsletter with this title whose basic purpose was to publicize the Brickskeller Tasting Series, but contained information about all sorts of beers and breweries. We continue that tradition with these blog posts, with an emphasis on highlighting some of the best of the thousand or so beers we taste each year.
We’ve taken a winter hiatus to work on our next book. The book is a guide to beer travel in the Mid Atlantic. It features breweries where you can walk back to a comfortable room to spend the night after visiting the brewery. We feature B&Bs, Inns, and iconic Hotels along with some of the most interesting beer destinations in the region.
Watch this space for some of the gems we’ve found in researching this project. And look for a new Beer of the Day starting the second week of June.
If you’ve come here from time to time this summer you’ll have noticed we’re gone. That’s because we were gone. We spent almost seven weeks researching our next book — a guide to great beer near popular tourist destinations– and just didn’t have the time to keep up with the blog. But we’re on our way back and creating a series of posts that should allow us to make regular additions even when we’re busy with our “regular lives.”
Watch for the first of the new posts LATER TODAY, September 1 (or maybe tomorrow morning). Posting a “Beer of the Day” seems almost like shooting fish in a barrel in these times, but we’ll post comments on beers that we think are special and overlooked. We’ll also post previews of the new book with insights into Athens, Pompei, and Innsbruck and many more. We’ll still give a tip of the hat to many of the American towns that offer fine beer to the locals and a welcoming experience to the beer voyager. We focus on our native Mid-Atlantic, but we’ve posted comments on places such as Pittsburg and even as far west as salt Lake City. Looking for fun beer destinations? We’ll have ’em.
Please email us with questions, suggestions and critiques.
Cheers!
Bob and Ellie Tupper
Mikkel Borg Bjergsø checks out one of his barrel aged beers. Photo by Thomas Steen Sorenson. *
I have a great deal of respect for Mikkel Borg Bjergsø. He and I have both spent a great deal of our time in classrooms teaching school. We both really like beer. We both established award-winning contract brewing companies and set new standards for brewing. There’s a huge difference between us, though. I took the safer path—and also the more family compatible—and, when a choice became necessary, took the classroom over the brew house.
Mikkel went all in for the beer, moving beyond his early base at De Proef in Lochristi, Belgium, he’s brewed hundreds and hundreds of different beers at other people’s breweries all over the world. His several beer bars in Copenhagen are among the best in an excellent beer city and he’s opened more all over the world.
His several beer bars in Copenhagen are among the best in an excellent beer city and he’s opened more all over the world.
Mikkeller’s bar and tap room in San Francisco*
But Mikkel (no one ever seems to refer to him by his last name), has gone far beyond his original Danish roots. He’s opened up Mikkeller bars not only in Europe (Berlin, Stockholm, and Barcelona), but Asia (Seul, Bankok, and Taipei) and, at last, a major push into the United States. In 1913 he opened Mikkeller SF, a taphouse and bar in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
Fromer Alesmith brewery now devoted to brewing a range of Mikkeller beers
A couple of years later he partnered with Alesmith to open his first physical brewery. Alesmith one of the great early West Coast pioneers, was moving to a facility capable of brewing ten times as much beer as the original 25,000 bbl. brewery. That original Alesmith brewery is now Mikkeller Brewery, San Diego, pouring out a wide range of regular and one-off beers. Mikkel is still traveling and producing contract beers all over the world, but he spends enough time in SD to welcome many of his brewer friends to collaborate on his home turf.
Warpigs serves house brewed beer and American BBQ in a typical Mikkeller “lets get to know each other” atmosphere.
Any beer tourist who hasn’t visited at least a couple of his bars and taprooms isn’t trying. Mikkel doesn’t run all the good beer spots in Copenhagen, but he’s now the largest part of the exciting beer scene there. His original bar is at Viktoriagade 5, an easy walk from the main train station. Mikkeller and Friends is in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen, an easy bus ride from the center and then a few blocks walk down Stefansgade to number 4. (More details about these places are in our book.) 
On your way, pay a visit to the Nørrebro brewhouse, one of Copenhagen’s brewing pioneers and still one of the best places to find local dishes and good fresh beer. (Bring money, and if you’re really on a budget you should be in Barcelona, not here.) An easy walk from the original bar can take you to Warpigs, a joint venture of Mikkeller and Three Floyds of Indiana. An American chef turns out authentic BBQ which you can wash down with close to two dozen different beers. Most are brewed on premise, but there are a few Mikkeller guests.
Mikkeller’s Barrel Room sits on the water across from the Little Mermaid.
View from Mikkeller’s Barrel Room beer bar and education center in Copenhagen.
Last June in Copenhagen, he opened the Mikkeller Barrel Room on the water on Refshaleøen, an annexation to Amager that used to be a stand-alone island with industries that included a shipyard that included a shipyard employing 8,000 Danes. The Barrel Room not only serves barrel-aged beers, but serves as a small museum, educating visitors in the nuances of barrel aging. It’s not central, but the 9A bus from Tivoli gets you within a 10 minute walk in fifteen minutes. Note that it’s normally open only on weekends in the summer.
We visited the Mikkeller bar in Barcelona last summer as part of the research for our second book, which will show travelers how to find very good beer in tourist destinations where they don’t expect it. Barcelona has a dramatically vibrant craft beer scene. We sacrificed seeing most of the tourist sights to try to make it to all the important beer sites. We fell short despite allotting several days to the task. Mikkeller is easy to visit, however, and a stone’s throw from many of the towns best bars and breweries.
Mikkeller’s bar in Barcelona is an unmistakable Scandinavian immigrant to Spain’s most vibrant brewing area.
For a giant international presence, the Mikkeller bar was somewhat understated. When Mikkel designed the Mikkeller and Friends, he consciously tried to create spaces where couples and groups could meet and talk, but that also facilitated conversations with the group next to you. That theme has carried over in his other outlets. ** Barce Communal tables and lots of open spaces make it easy to strike up a conversation with someone next to you. We were there on a weekend and it was a good deal less crowded than we expected. The light crowd allowed us to have a good conversation with the bartender — who was as knowledgeable and interested in beers and the brewing scene as one would expect. Mikkeller seems to be a bit of an odd man out in Barcelona, where the main beer focus is intensely and loyally local, but the Mikkeller bar is testament to the vibrancy of the city and adds some nice breadth to a beer crawl there. We had a chance to try our first beers from Warpig there—look for a review of one brewed with a “mash pit” of 93 different yeast cultures. Amazingly, it worked out well.
We’re waiting for Mikkel to find the East Coast of the US. His beers are easily available here, though often pricy and not always as fresh, though sometimes that really doesn’t matter. In the meantime, “Just Go” find some Mikkeller beers from a part of his growing empire. It isn’t hard.
Overview: I have a great deal of respect for Mikkel Borg Bjergsø. We are both school teachers who love beer. He, however, has yielded the classroom for full time campaign to bring really interesting beers to all parts of the world. We’ve visited many of his bars, but he’s opening them faster than we can travel.
SEE OUR “BEER OF THE DAY” THIS WEEK FOR SOME REASONS TO GO TO ITALY THIS SUMMER!
Winchester was another of our “throw a dart, find a brewery” weekends this year. The Beer Mapping Project helps enormously in finding what’s near the spot where the dart lands. When we last visited Winchester only five years ago the only brewery was an extract fermenting brewpub that, well, did the best it could at the time. Our return found a thriving craft beer culture and a nicely representative range of 21st century breweries.
A good Winchester crawl will leave you unable to drive even if you can find your car. Our two recommendations are to stay a few miles out of town and Uber in and out or splurge for a room at the Grand Hyat-ized George Washington Hotel smack in the center of town, where with a good pair of shoes and a break in the weather you can walk to all three of the town’s breweries.
Alesation’s brewhouse is modest in size, but produces very good dark ales.
We started our crawl at Alesation, the newest of the trio, located very centrally on N. Loudoun’s pedestrian mall section. The brew kit is less sophisticated than most on the market today – the centerpiece is a pair of 3 barrel soup pot looking heavy stainless steel vats. We’ve had good beer from this system, or systems very much like it. Braddock’s Brew Gentlemen’s brew house looks almost identical. Alesation is doing well with some of their beers and seems to be having some temperature issues that gave some of the beers an edge, though we tasted no indication of infection. The dark beers are the best.
The brewery and tasting room is upstairs from a pizza restaurant, and you can have food delivered from downstairs. It’s good predictable Italian pizza-centered cuisine. They’re not going to win a Michelin star for the food or a GABF gold medal for the beer, but that’s not the point. The staff is wonderfully friendly and everyone seemed to be having a great time. Of our three stops, this was the one where we had the hardest time finding a seat, though within minutes, a group at a picnic-style table squeezed together to make room for us. A couple of minutes more and we had our new best friend for the weekend. He recommended the BlueWhistle for breakfast and we wound up meeting him there too.
Winchester Brew Worksr’s Brew House gleams behind the bar.
An easy walk away from the center of town brought us to Winchester Brew Works. Founded and still run by a pair of engaging and enterprising women, it features a sparkling stainless steel brew house and plenty of room for events in the tasting area. If you’re lucky the owners will be there pouring beers – they’re knowledgeable and passionate about their craft. We were surprised there weren’t more people there on a Friday night, but were assured that they nearly filled for some of their promotions. Eat elsewhere, they have no kitchen.
Winchester Brew Works’s spacious taproom
The brewer’s background in science pretty much assured what our friend and founder of Old Dominion used to call “biologically stable beer.” Beyond that they varied. It was interesting though that of the first few beers we tried Ellie liked some and I liked others, but it wasn’t until we got to the bigger beers – in hops, booze or both—that we agreed. A juicy session was very approachable. The star of the night was the double dry hopped Morgan Run Black Ale – more details on that are forthcoming in a beer of the day.
Our final stop was Escutcheon Brew Works. We had had their beers at festivals in Northern Virginia, so we weren’t surprised to see a pretty sophisticated operation there. 
The tasting room can accommodate a few busloads of boozers, but the bar is a comfortable place to drink and the people are Winchester-friendly.
The most unusual feature was a concrete fermenting vessel that they affectionately referred to as their “egg.” They couldn’t tell us exactly what the egg was supposed to do, but there’s no doubt that the one beer we tasted that had been egged had a distinctive range of flavors. The APA was sweet and sugary with plenty of diacetyl that reminded us distantly of Samuel Smith’s Yorkshire slate beers. We assume there’s something going on inside that egg to make it happen.
Escutcheon Brewing’s distinctive big blue egg.
They told us there were several wineries in the US using it, but no more than a half dozen breweries. We’d never seen anything quite like it.
Escutcheon features the largest brew house in town.
Beyond the egg, the beers were approachable if a bit sweet. Their brewer isn’t the usual brewing hop head and has only recently bumped up their flagship Plimsol IPA to a higher IBU. It’s not the first time they’ve played with the Plimsoll – we’ve had several versions that were flowered or spiced. A version dry hopped with Hull Melon was quite good. Their current “redux”, though, does show the hops more than most of the others.
Before you leave town, be sure to pay a visit to Murphy’s Beer and Wine back on the main pedestrian street up a few blocks from Alesatian. We’ve known owner Charlie Fish since she used to sell our Hop Pocket Ale, and she’s played a significant role in helping Winchester edge into the 21st century of beer.
She’s always been supportive of craft and local brewing and though the selection isn’t as massive as a Total, the carefully chosen selection of beers are in good shape; you’re almost certain to find something interesting you haven’t tried before. (Hopping Around Post #0032)
See our “Beer of the Day” – March 18-25 for comments on beers from these Winchester Breweries.
Data used by permission from Beer Mapping Project. Map powered by Google.
If you’ve found you way to this page, it’s pretty likely you are fairly familiar with the term “barleywine,”but as with most things brewful, it means different things to different people.
Troegs Dark Barleywine from their Scratch series
We trust Garrett Oliver’s explanation – the brewer for Brooklyn Brewery has studied himself into one of the premier beer historians of the world. Oliver says that barley wines were created by British brewers in the 18th century when wars between England and France made the supply of French Claret unreliable. The nobility wanted a drink they could depend on and the resulting barley wines fit the bill. We find the account believable, especially considering that the Claret wines at the time are described as at least as golden as red. It wouldn’t have been hard to brew a beer of near-wine strength that brought a similar look to the table.
We first encountered barleywines in England in the early 1980s. They were about as strong as what we’d expect today, but lighter in color. Hop rates were comparatively modest and the alcohol tended to be pretty raw. They were, understandably, not very popular, especially in a country where beer was taxed on its potential alcoholic strength.
They were common enough for Fritz Maytag to encounter them on a trip to England and the style was perfect match for Maytag’s quest to brew styles unfamiliar to Americans. Old Foghorn debuted in 1975. Sierra Nevada followed with Bigfoot a few years later but it took until the 90s for the style to become a staple of small breweries from the Orkney Islands to the suburbs of Washington, DC.
The first wave of craft brewers popularized the style from coast to coast. These were “big hammer” beers – you didn’t need to match a flavor profile if you used a big enough alcoholic “hammer.”
In the 90s, though, strong beer still meant raw and metallic malt liquors to most people, and the huge hop rate provided character and balance that was novel. Very few of the first fifty barleywines we tasted received anything lower than an “average” rating—they were without doubt the Lake Woebegone of beers.
Mad Fox Brewpub in Falls Church, Virginai, hosts the Mid Atlantic’s top barley wine festival.
Looking back over our notes, we noticed that while a few of the breweries producing relatively early and exceptionally good barleywines—Brimstone, British Brewing (Oxford), and Bardo Rodeo among them– passed into commercial heaven in the ensuing years, most of the early pioneers are still brewing good beers today. The range of strong beers has vastly expanded (Stone, could you please celebrate something with less than 8.9%?!?), but the gold standard is still the backbone of the backbreakers.
We’ll be tipping the hat to several barley wines of recent vintage in the days to come. A great way to taste a bunch of them is to plan on attending the Mad Fox Barely Wine annual festival in February. Bill Madden corrals nearly 40 different examples—several of them aged at Mad Fox so that you can try vertical samples. Three bucks gets you four ounces of very rare beer. If you take your time, eat some food, and maybe share a little, you can sample between a half dozen and a dozen beers that would cost you four or five times a much to procure on your own—if you could procure them on your own.
