A Visit To The Dogfish Head Alehouse Of Gaithersburg, Maryland

Last weekend, I assisted my younger brother and his fiancee in the process of moving their belongings into their brand new, Silver Spring, Maryland townhouse. In doing so, I spent time driving through 5 states, and engaged in something I generally find abhorrent and morally repugnant - manual labor. However, there was a prize waiting at the end of the trip for me; as a thank-you for my work, I would be taken to the Dogfish Head Alehouse in nearby Gaithersburg.

I've been a fan of Dogfish Head beers for some time - their 60 Minute IPA and 90 Minute IPA may be my favorites of that particular variety, and I've also enjoyed their seasonal beers (the Festina Peche and Punkin Ales especially) as well as other varietals, including their Raison D'Etre. So, I will freely admit that I was excited to visit this because of the beer alone; the fact that I was hungry and thirsty at the time was, as the coach from "Teen Wolf" is wont to say, "cream cheese."

Even though the Alehouse is located in what looks to be a strip mall, the place looked really nice. The inside was rustic in design, with a good amount of nautical-themed decorations (including a large plaster whale that hung over the stairwell, reminiscent of a combination of a smaller-scale version of New York's Museum of Natural History and a large seaside getaway).

We ran into a couple of difficulties, though. We got a late start to Gaithersburg from Silver Spring, which meant that by the time we got to the Alehouse, it was in full swing and we were told that it would be about an hour to wait before we could sit down and eat. This almost led to a quick ending to this visit; however, it was soon decided that we would wait it out. The second difficulty was in finding out that the Alehouse did not offer growlers to go; this was an utter disappointment, as I'd hoped that I could cap off the evening with a growler of something exotic back at the homestead in Silver Spring. I'm not sure whether this particular snafu can be ascribed to the draconian state of Maryland and their odd liquor and beer laws, or whether Dogfish Head had not secured the proper permits. In any case, it was a bit of a disappointment. The third and final disappointment was my younger brother, a light-beer-quaffing heathen who ordered a Miller Lite - the horror! However, we're used to my brother being a disappointment (although, to be honest, my dad will tell me that I'm the real disappointment to him and my mother).

The food here was decent. The bulk of the menu could be described as a combination between Chesapeake and Louisiana cuisine - lots of crab-based dishes, and a good amount of Cajun-style dishes. Their cream-of-clam soup was excellent, and reasonably priced. I also enjoyed a crab-meat and sausage pizza that was quite good. My dining companions had jambalaya ("too spicy" was the report) and a chicken and ribs platter ("not bad").

The beer, though, was phenomenal. I sampled two drafts. First, I enjoyed a 10-ounce sipping glass of Midas Touch. Nominally a barley wine because of its high alcohol content (9%), this was an extremely light, refreshing drink. The consistency of this beverage was thick - this was a drink made for small sips, not gulping. This is an extremely sweet beer, with hints of grapes and honey on every sip. One hardly tastes the alcohol in this potent drink (until it warms up). This was reminiscent of a wine more than a beer (especially given the presence of the grapes in this brew), and when I thought of this drink in those terms I liked it even more. It's a daring brew, really and truly, and quite enjoyable. The second draft was a restaurant-only brew called "Alehouse 75," which our waitress described as being an equal blend of Dogfish Head's famed 60-Minute and 90-Minute IPAs (for you non math wizards out there, 75 is the average of 60 and 90). This meant that the Alehouse 75 was a cross in style between a traditional IPA and a double IPA. People, let me tell you - this was as close to a perfect IPA as I've come. I like the hoppiness of an IPA very much, but realistically, there's a saturation point where this becomes overwhelming . This beer straddled that line perfectly - a crisp hop bite, but not so overwhelming that it felt like a challenge to drink. If they'd served this in growlers, I would have wanted to take some home. (Alas, that was not an option.)

I think that my only letdowns in coming to the Alehouse were in terms of my expectations - I was hoping for more of an on-site brewery, and that wasn't the case. This was a bar that served pre-kegged Dogfish Head beers - which isn't a bad thing, not at all - and had a decent selection of food. If you're looking for a restaurant with really good food and decent food, this is your place. However, it was not a Dogfish Head brewpub, and that's basically what I was hoping for when we decided to go and visit. I would return if I was in town, but I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to go here - the experience could almost be replicated with a reputable beer seller, a fresh supply of bottled Dogfish Head, and a half-decent recipe at home. Which, ultimately, made the Dogfish Head Alehouse a bit of a disappointment for me.

The Two Minute Guide To: Old Chicago Pasta and Pizza

Old Chicago Pasta and Pizza
111 Wolf Road, Colonie NY [other locations nationwide]
(518) 435-8007
oldchicago.com
Open 7 days a week, 11:00 am – 1:00 am

Tap Selection: While Old Chicago may be a chain restaurant, its beer selection is most assuredly un-chainlike. One of Old Chicago’s features is a beer tour that offers a variety of rewards for consuming any number of different beers that they feature. While this does include a number of macrobrewed beers (Budweiser, Coors Light, and others of their ilk), the tap selection also included some imported craft brews (Hoegaarden), American microbrews (Boulder Brewing was featured, as was Long Trail), as well as some seasonals (Brooklyn’s Post Road Pumpkin Ale). A detailed beer list is available at each table, and a beer menu is available on their website.

Food: Despite the beer tour, this is a restaurant first and foremost. On our most recent visit, we decided to focus on Old Chicago’s self-ascribed specialty – pizza. We split a large Hawaiian deep-dish pizza; while the sauce and toppings were good, the crust was disappointingly un-deep-dish like. It was served in a pan, but it tasted a lot like a premade Domino’s crust, and was not tremendously thick. Disappointing. That being said, the menu itself looks promising, with a great variety of pasta and sandwiches in addition to pizza.

Ambience: The Wolf Road branch of Old Chicago is located in a former gym (“The Fitness Factory”). In what I would assume to be a direct connection to this, this Old Chicago restaurant looks like a chain restaurant that was built inside a gym. The ceiling looks like other area fitness centers, complete with industrial-looking vents and ducts that look like the ones at the heart of the Martin Lawrence movie “Blue Streak.” The rest of the space is standard chain-restaurant stuff – nothing fancy. Of particular note, though, is the game room – almost half of the space here is dedicated to an I-Play game room. We played skee-ball and mini-bowling when we were there – it was fun! That being said, the game room is separate enough from the restaurant that you can avoid spending time there if you so choose.

Vicinity: Old Chicago is located on Wolf Road, which is Albany’s main location for hotels and chain restaurants; this strip includes Outback Steakhouse, Olive Garden, Fuddrucker’s, and other chain eateries as well as a number of hotels, as well as the revamped Colonie Center shopping mall. Quite suburban and extremely family-friendly.

Specials: Old Chicago has two separate happy hours, one during the standard, end-of-the-workday time, and another late-night happy hour (10 pm to midnight)! Happy hours come with drink and food specials, including cheap appetizers (mini-portions of pizza and nachos) and a number of cheap draft beers (although not all are included in this deal, so check with your server).

Extras: We’re fans of the beer tour and the fact that you can – if you so choose – play skee-ball here.

Verdict: Pretty cool, you know, for a chain restaurant.

The Session #8: Beer and Food - Eat Locally, Drink Locally!

(This is our contribution to the October Session: for more information and to read some previous Sessions posts from around the world, please check out the blogroll to the left...)

We here at Beerjanglin' are not, generally speaking, a socially conscious lot. I mean, we like beer. That's what we do. Anything else is - basically - extra. That being said, every now and then, we keep our ears open for social trends.

One of the more intriguing social developments of the past few years has been the growing push for people to “eat locally” – that is, make a conscious effort to purchase and consume goods produced within a certain radius of your home (generally, 100 miles is an acceptable radius). In thinking about this movement, we’ve read a few things in magazines like “Men’s Health” and on the internet, but haven’t really seen a centralized take on this that we’ve found to be particularly clarifying, so we’ll do our best to explain the tenets of this ethos.

Eating locally is the “right” thing to do because when you buy from regional food producers (the more that you buy directly from them, the better), your money stays in the local economy and helps better the towns and neighborhoods in your proximity. Beyond that, the reasons for eating locally are myriad; proponents of doing this cite reasons raising from the standard “it’s better for the environment because the more people who do this means the less energy is spent in transporting food on planes and trucks” to the simpler thought of “local food is generally fresher.”

Here in the Capital Region of New York, there’s a lot going on that makes “eating locally” an intriguing and delicious prospect. If you were to take a compass and map of the region and place the compass’s center point on Albany, and then draw a circle to approximate a 100-mile border, you’d create an area that included a lot of farms (the full four seasons of the area lend themselves nicely to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and even a surprising variety of meat and dairy-related products, including a farm in Rensselaer County that produces fresh buffalo meat). You’d be doing all right at the dining table.

What we’d love to see as part of the “eat locally” movement would be an increased push to “drink locally,” which I will define as making a conscious effort to purchase and consume beers produced within that same 100 mile radius. It falls into that same ethos: better for the local economy, less energy is expended in transporting beer from place to place, and oh, the freshness of local beer!

With that same 100-mile radius around Albany in mind, there’s a lot of phenomenal beer-making going on locally. A quick visit to Beermapping.com reveals a vast number of breweries and beer pubs that makes even the hypothetical proposition of “drinking locally” supremely appetizing.

There are a couple of larger-output breweries in this area which put out a great variety of craft beer. Most prominently, on the western outskirts of this radius sits the FX Matt Brewing Company, which produces a variety of beers, from the unfairly-maligned Utica Club Lager to a wide range of beers under their Saranac brand, as well as doing a great deal of contract brewing for quality brands like Brooklyn. Additionally, to the north, there’s the Olde Saratoga Brewing Company, which produces a great line of beers both under the "Olde Saratoga" name as well as Mendocino beers, while contract brewing quality beverages from companies like He'Brew and Blue Point. If these two were the only breweries in the radius, the area would already be awash in phenomenal beer.

However, there are several brewpubs in the area that satisfy this way of thinking doubly so; by creating a number of fresh beers while cooking and using a variety of locally-produced foods. Some of these even cross their streams, so to speak, creating local beers while using locally-grown produce in the process. Two of these are particularly notable.

C.H. Evans Brewing Company at the Albany Pump Station, which we’ve highlighted earlier in this blog, is located in downtown Albany and offers a menu that includes locally-produced food. One of their recent beer offerings, however, demands special highlighting – the Cherry Brown, a Belgian-style strong Brown Ale brewed with more than 250 pounds of handpicked sour cherries that came from area farms. We were fortunate to sample this recently, and we were pleasantly surprised – the cherry taste was far from extraneous in the beer, serving as an integral part of the taste and making for a remarkably pleasant drinking experience.

Brown’s Brewing Company, located across the mighty Hudson River in Troy, also does a remarkable job of combining a fine menu (that emphasizes the cuisine of Upstate New York nicely, from southwestern New York-style chicken spiedies to Buffalo wings) with a great variety of beers. Of note: the brewers recently released a limited batch of a Wet Hopped Imperial Pale Ale, made with hand-picked hops from the area. This is a tremendously exciting development, to say the least.

In general, Upstate New York is awash in microbreweries and brewpubs that all make a consistent effort to use local ingredients in their brewing process. Whether it's Empire Brewing Company in Syracuse, Rohrbach Brewery in Rochester, Flying Bison in Buffalo, or the phenomenal Davidson Brothers in Glens Falls, there's a lot of wonderful things happening in this fine state of ours.

Some websites advocate having people pledge to eat and drink locally whenever possible; we’re going to shy away from going that far. To be honest, there’s way too much good stuff being made outside our little 100-mile-radius to avoid that altogether. What we would like to advocate, however, is that when you’re at the beer store the next time, wherever you are - whether it's southern California or northern Wisconsin, the mountains of Colorado or the Mississippi valley - stopping to take a look at what’s fresh and local, and maybe trying something new from that group. It’s not much, and it probably won’t save the polar ice caps from melting, but hey, it’s not a bad start.

The 2 Minute Guide To The Midtown Tap And Tea Room

The Midtown Tap and Tea Room
289 New Scotland Avenue, Albany NY
(518) 435-0202
[Closed on Sunday]

Tap Selection: The tap selection, while not particularly outstanding, offers a variety of interesting beers. The weakest pint on the list is Coors Light; others offered include Tetley's, Blue Moon, Pironi, Sierra Nevada, Pilsener Urquell and Hoegaarden. There's nothing on tap that we can't get elsewhere in Albany; however, the selection generally avoids macro-brewed lagers in favor of more upper-crust brews. They offer no microbrews and, since their opening just over two and a half months ago, have not rotated their taps.

Food: This restaurant, as it is somewhat new, will probably become better-known for its food than its beer selection. The offerings range from gourmet sandwiches and salads to an evening tapas menu. We genuinely enjoyed their warm goat-cheese salad, which was served with a rich raspberry vinaigrette dressing. The chorizo platter was also really, really good. We've heard good things about the pan-seared sea bass, too. (We're not kidding. That sounds delicious.)

Ambience: Classy. This bar caters to an adult clientele, and it shows - it is impeccably decorated, with well-buffed hardwood floors, Persian-style rugs, and a grand piano in the center of the floor. A small balcony with limited seating overlooks Ontario Avenue. There are two bars; in all of the times that we've been, we've only seen the back bar truly busy. The front bar looks really nice, and is remiscent of a finer hotel bar.

Vicinity: While we don't know what this "Midtown" neighborhood is, the Tap and Tea Room is located on New Scotland Avenue, just to the south of the major student neighborhood, and is comfortably situated between the two major Albany hospitals (Albany Med and St. Peter's) and a brief walk from the Albany campus of Russell Sage College and Union University's Albany Law School; the neighborhood is a nice mix of graduate students and young professionals. The Tap and Tea Room shares a block with the more-popular sports bar Graney's and the Fountain Restaurant. It's a low-key but happening neighborhood.

Specials: There are no real specials here, per se. All draft beers are available in 12 oz, 16 oz, and 20 oz sizes. For a 20 oz, you'll pay between $3.75 (Coors Light) and $4.50 (Hoegaarden).

Extras: The tapas menu is really what stands out here, more than anything else.

Verdict: Nice for a date, and a good change-of-pace from your normal beer selection. That said, you can do better in terms of getting a better selection of beers in this town.

The 2 Minute Guide To Legends Sports Bar

Legends Sports Bar
288 Lark Street, Albany NY
http://www.legendsonlark.com

Tap Selection: Nothing tremendously impressive, although they did have 2 different Red Hook selections on (I saw the Red Hook Summer and ESB, and the website claims to have a Red Hook IPA available as well). Other beers available: Bud, Bud Light, Coors Light, Michelob Ultra, Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Blue Moon, Harp, Bass, Guinness, Paulaner, Smithwick's, and Newcastle. All beers were fresh (clean lines).

Food: Full menu until 11 (midnight on high-activity evenings). Members of our party had the nachos and hot wings; these were pretty good. The nachos came with a bruschetta-esque salsa that was delicious. They serve ballpark-style hot dogs as well - while we didn't partake of them, they looked phenomenal, and we'll be back for a go at them at another date. Legends is run cooperatively with DeJohn's, which is a full-service restaurant next door with a solid reputation, and we were given free reign over the DeJohn's menu as well if we so chose (we didn't, but that's kind of awesome).

Ambience: It's basically a sports bar in a brownstone building - it's got two floors, each with its own bar. Lots of flat-screen televisions, including one over the urinal in the men's room. Legends is relatively new, and looks impeccably clean. The upstairs room had table seating; the downstairs bar was more wide-open. It was nice to have the choice. Lots of framed sports jersey decorations; while we're not crazy about a place that has Red Sox, Mets, and Yankees jerseys all hanging (pick a team!), they do get bonus points for having the framed #18 Yankees jersey be an autographed Don Larsen jersey instead of, say, Johnny Damon.

Vicinity: Legends is located smack-dab in the middle of the Lark Street neighborhood; this is Albany's hippest area, and the entire neighborhood caters to a youthful, liberal demographic. There are six or so other decent bars within walking distance, as well as a good variety of eateries. The Lark Street neighborhood has a little something for everybody.

Specials: $2 drafts of everything from 11 am to 7 pm daily. Is nice! We were there on a Wednesday, which featured $9 domestic pitchers after 8:30 (a deal that included Sierra Nevada and Red Hook) and $12 import pitchers. Check the website for other special information.

Extras: Trivia nights are Wednesdays! The trivia contest was well-run and pretty laid back and fun - it's highly recommended (even though our team missed winning by a mere one point).

The Verdict: Not bad for a sports bar. You could definitely do worse. We will be back.

Harpoon IPA Cheddar Cheese

Pairing craft beer with food has become almost de rigueur. Some of the foremost advocates of beer are predicting that it will be undergo a revolution similar to the one that transformed wine a few decades ago. No less an authority than Brooklyn brewmaster Garrett Oliver says "beer is a far better accompaniment to cheese," and compares matching beer with cheese to a "hug" while calling wine and cheese pairings a mere "handshake." If you're scoring at home, craft beer (1.) is in the midst of a revolution, (2.) pairs nicely with food, and (3.) may go better with cheese than wine does. But how about a cheese made with beer?


Two fine Vermont companies, Harpoon Brewery (they purchased the former Catamount Brewery in Windsor in 2000, in addition to their original Boston location) and Cabot Creamery, headquartered in Montpelier, have combined forces to help us answer this important question. We've long thought of Cabot in connection with beer (even before it became cool) because there is a Cabot production facility located right next to the Otter Creek brewery in Middlebury, VT. Cabot must feel pretty strongly about combining beer and cheese as well, as their web site has a page dedicated to comparing the similarities of their cheeses share with craft beers and some basic pairing suggestions. They even offer a Beer and Cheddar brochure! We especially enjoyed this bit:

Much like aging a premium cheese, or producing a fine wine, brewing a quality beer with a distinct personality is a craft unto itself. Today, there is no excuse for enduring bland, processed cheese or drinking mass-produced, watered-down beer. From rich dark stouts to refreshing pale ales, from spicy to fruity, smoky to herbal, somewhere out there is a brew for every taste and every occasion. To enhance the experience, Cabot offers a wide selection of tasty, all-natural cheeses to complement the new breed of American ales and lagers.

Amen!

The IPA cheddar acquitted itself nicely as part of a grilled ham and cheese panini (Black Forest ham, cheese, red onion, and our own blend of Whalen's spicy horseradish sauce combined with yellow mustard, on local Mastoriani Bros. multi-grain bread, which gets perfectly crispy on a panini press). Accompanied by a pint from a fresh growler of spicy Mendocino White Hawk IPA from Olde Saratoga brewery, it made for a better-than-decent quick meal.

A plate of sliced IPA cheddar and pretzel crisps paired quite nicely with a Cascazilla "Monstrously Hoppy" Red from Ithaca Beer Co. It's hard to screw up beer and cheese, and maybe it's just a mental thing, but this cheese does seem to go almost perfectly with a well-hopped beer. Harpoon IPA is not something that we typically keep on hand, but at some point we're going to have to try that pairing as well.

Harpoon IPA Cheddar is a bit spicier than the norm, presumably due to the flavouring process. The cheese is cut into blocks and then soaked in Harpoon IPA for 24 hours. It is then drained, packaged, and stored at 45º F for four weeks. In addition to the spiciness, it is quite creamy, and not overly sharp. We don't necessarily detect it, but Lady Bojangles swears it tastes a lot like beer. Overall, it's an excellent cheese, and fairly unique. It also makes one wonder - is this soaking beer in cheese thing something that we could try at home? It does sound fairly foolproof.

Cabot calls this effort their most innovative to date. You can read the press release here.