Tag: South Street Brewery

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In brief: A booze trail, one new declaration, two new job openings, and more…

City boosters and brewmasters have come together to blaze the Charlottesville Ale Trail, a two-mile stretch they’re calling the premier urban and pedestrian beer trail in Virginia. Click to enlarge.

‘United by beer’

City boosters and brewmasters have come together to blaze the Charlottesville Ale Trail, a two-mile stretch they’re calling the premier urban and pedestrian beer trail in Virginia.

The six stops along the way are Random Row Brewing Co., Brasserie Saison, South Street Brewery, Champion Brewing Company, Three Notch’d Craft Kitchen & Brewery, and Hardywood Pilot Brewery & Taproom.

After downloading a “passport” at charlottesvillealetrail.org, participants are encouraged to visit each stop for a pint or plate, which will earn them a stamp in their passport. Get a stamp from each spot, and you’ll win a prize.

“Cheers,” said Random Row co-owner Bradley Kipp at a September 3 press conference. He says he’s always amazed by the collaborative nature of local brewers, who pitched in with business advice and tips on how to source ingredients when he opened Random Row two years ago. A press release called this phenomenon “united by beer.”

Chris Engel, the city’s director of economic development, said there was only one brewery in town when he moved here in 2005. Then, in 2012, the General Assembly voted to allow breweries to sell full glasses of beer without restaurants on-site, which “lit a fire under microbreweries,” he said.

Tourism has a $600 million impact on the community annually, according to Engel, and he hopes the ale trail will help drive that.

But to drink half a dozen pints and walk the whole trail in a day? Says Engel, “You gotta be committed.”

Great pay, lousy hours

City Council’s clerk and Chief of Staff Paige Rice is leaving her $98K-a-year job September 21 after eight years. Rice’s job was recently retitled “chief of staff” when it was expanded to include supervision of two new staff positions as well as the assistant clerk, an arrangement that Mike Signer describes as a “parallel government to the city manager.”

Nice raise

Rice’s salary as clerk was $72,842 in 2017, and it was bumped $25K—35 percent—when she became chief of staff.

Suicide support

City councilors  honored Suicide Prevention Month (September) with an official declaration at their September 17 meeting. “Let’s take a moment to check on our friends, even the strong ones. Let’s support each other. Let’s love each other,” urged Councilor Wes Bellamy on Instagram.

Jail board vacancy

Bellamy (center) at the September board meeting. Photo: Eze Amos

Bellamy also announced at the council meeting an opening for a Charlottesville representative on the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail board, which has recently been at the center of controversy surrounding voluntary calls to federal immigration agents when undocumented immigrants are released from jail. Interested citizens are urged to apply (though you’ll have to wait till the position gets posted).

Appalachian tuition break

UVA’s Board of Visitors voted to expand tuition discounts for out-of-state students who live in the federally defined Appalachia region and attend UVA’s campus at Wise, the Cav Daily reports.

Back to work

After the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a stop work order to builders of the controversial $6 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline earlier this summer because there was concern that it would interrupt federally protected species near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Dominion Energy spokesperson Aaron Ruby said September 17 that the National Park Service and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service have concluded the project is safe, and work will resume.

Autopsy results

Charlottesville Police have ruled the death of Thomas Charles “Colonel” Franklin, 65, a suicide, as reported by CBS19. Franklin died June 10 when he left the Cedars Healthcare Center and drowned in a nearby creek.

Sisterly love

While some folks in Charlottesville were still hiding from Hurricane Florence on September 17, the delegation visiting its French sister city, Besançon, was celebrating the two towns’ liaison. Mayors Jean-Louis Fousseret and Nikuyah Walker planted a poplar tree to commemorate the dedication of a traffic circle in the French city, named after our town in central Virginia.

Quote of the week:

“Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” —U.S. Senate candidate Corey Stewart, who accused senators of having their own “secret ‘creep list,’” and advocated the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court

Categories
Living

Charlottesville breweries are full of fall beer options

Brasserie Saison is celebrating the season with German beers that eschew the traditional less-than-desirable Oktoberfest offerings from Munich, instead pouring dark, heavy American lagers that taste “far better than the real thing.” Photo by Natalie Jacobsen

What makes for a good fall beer? Extra body? Darker malt? Pumpkin spice? Every brewer and brewery in Charlottesville has their own ideas about this. So I grabbed a friend and visited five local breweries to see what their takes on fall beers are—and whether they shied away from the polarizing pumpkin beer.

At Reason Brewery up Route 29, I ordered a pumpkin beer. “We don’t have one,” responded Mark Fulton, one of Reason’s founders.

Good. I think pumpkin beer is usually terrible. And what Reason is offering for fall is a black lager, with a heft perfect for cooler weather. It’s on tap at the brewery and they intend to begin distributing it by the end of October. Hopped like a pale ale, the malt is dark but the ABV is still only around 5 percent.

“I personally am a dark beer fan,” Fulton said. “I think a lot of people sort of relate a darker beer with the cooler weather.”

Reason Brewery co-founder Mark Fulton says most people relate darker beer with cooler weather. The brewery currently has a black lager on tap that is hopped like a pale ale but has a rich flavor thanks to dark malt. Photo by Natalie Jacobsen

Our next stop was Champion to taste its annual pumpkin beer called Kicking and Screaming—so named because the brewers had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making a pumpkin beer. But this year, they apparently kicked their way out of it, because the pumpkin beer has now been deep-sixed.

Good.

Sean Chandler, our bartender, presented us with three samples of proposed fall beers from Champion.  Biere de Garde, Fruit Casket (a double IPA) and Pacecar Porter.

The Biere de Garde was an instant winner: dark, spicy, richly blanketing the entire palate.

“My war is on pumpkin spice, not on spice or pumpkins,” says Jeff Diehm, whom I once again dragooned (he also helped determine the best grocery store bar in “Store credit: What’s the best grocery store bar in town?, August 2-8, 2017) into tasting beer with me. “I’d call it a very good after-dinner beer. It’s pretty spicy, and I think I would slip into something darker to close my evening.”

Champion’s Fruit Casket was a surprise. A double IPA brewed with agave that comes across neither as an IPA nor as gimmicky as it sounds. Big, full, less hoppy than you’d expect. This is what you want to sit around a bonfire with.

The Pacecar Porter is simultaneously dark and bright tasting. An unusual sharpness to the hops on top of a classic moderate porter.

Moving along to Three Notch’d Brewing’s new location at the IX Art Park, the first thing we noticed was that this place is pretty different from Three Notch’d’s first tasting location on Grady Avenue. The new place has a full-service kitchen, and executive chef Patrick Carroll focuses on local, sustainable ingredients and uses Three Notch’d’s craft beers and sodas in the food whenever possible.

The brewery’s Apple Crumb Amber Ale will be released soon, but it wasn’t available yet for us to taste. One of our bartenders made a face at the mention of pumpkin beer and didn’t even want to discuss it. What was available in an autumn mode was a Blue Toad Harvest Cider. It screamed cinnamon, but in a good way. You could put it on the table for Thanksgiving dinner and pair it with turkey and stuffing. We drank it alongside a shared platter of poutine, which featured fork-tender beef and fried cheese curds with onions and gravy covering a plate of fries. The perfect food to turn to halfway through a five-stop brewery crawl.

At Brasserie Saison, the Belgian restaurant and brewery on the Downtown Mall, a curious map of Europe was suggested by Munich-themed Oktoberfest banners and seasonal German beers offered alongside the classic Belgian offerings of steamed mussels and saison.

Manager Wil Smith served us tastes of the Oktoberfest beer and wouldn’t be baited into talking trash about pumpkin beers (which, fortunately, they aren’t making).

Traditional Oktoberfest beers in Munich are kind of crappy. In fact, that’s the whole point of them. Oktoberfest is a sloppy, drunken, week-long booze fest where a celebration of the palate isn’t exactly the point. American Oktoberfest beers, including Brasserie Saison’s, are often dark, heavy lagers that taste far better than the real thing.

Hardywood Pilot Brewery & Taproom’s Farmhouse Pumpkin Ale is a delightful departure from the pumpkin spice-laden beers typical of the genre. Photo by Natalie Jacobsen

Taking the free trolley up West Main Street, we visited Hardywood’s new-ish outpost near the Corner.

Lora Gess, our bartender, poured us tastes of Hardywood’s Farmhouse Pumpkin Ale. Diehm and I gleefully prepared to hate it as much as we each hate all things pumpkin spice.

“A lot of people have really misconstrued pumpkin-flavored everything because of what it is,” explains Gess in defense of her employer’s pumpkin ale. “It’s a pumpkin-spice-latte-kind-of-society these days. But [this beer is] fresh, it’s mild. You get a pumpkin flavor but not a fake pumpkin flavor.”

And she was right. Somehow, Hardywood made a pumpkin beer that wasn’t awful. In fact, it was great.

It starts life as a traditional farmhouse saison to which Hardywood adds fresh pumpkin—not canned, not frozen—fresh. Instead of an insipid blend of pie-inspired spices, the notes of spice come from the flavor profile of the malts and esters produced by the yeast. Hardywood has brewed a masterful pumpkin beer that took us by surprise and almost made us stop talking trash about pumpkin beer.

Almost.

As the sun went down, we wound up back downtown at South Street Brewery. Finally, we found the holy grail we’d been looking for all day: Twisted Gourd, described by our bartender as a pumpkin chai beer.

“This is a pumpkin spice beer,” Diehm observes with his first sip. “I think if someone was looking for a pumpkin beer, this is where to go get it. It’s South Street, so it’s always a good solid beer. And it’s got pumpkin, so I hate it. But if this is what you are looking for, it’s a solid pumpkin beer. It’s the most honest pumpkin beer I’ve had.”

“This is cloying,” I respond as I taste it. “It’s terrible. But it’s so true to what it is.”

If you like pumpkin spice lattes, you’re gonna love this beer. But if you don’t, South Street has you covered with several other fine autumn beers, including Soft-Serv (tastes like chocolate soft-serve ice cream) and a barrel-aged version of their classic Satan’s Pony.

Categories
Living

Crops are tops: Have your pick of summer’s bounty

The pickin’s ripe for local fruits, including peaches, cherries and blackberries, at area orchards.

We’re halfway through June, which means fruit harvest season has begun, and that means now is the time to do our best impression of the very hungry caterpillar. You know the story: A tiny caterpillar eats through fruit after fruit (and a piece of cake, an ice cream cone, a pickle, etc.) on his journey to becoming a big, beautiful butterfly. But rather than nibble tiny holes in a series of tissue-paper fruit illustrations, we suggest you select your own very real, delicious fruits and berries from one of the many pick-your-own spots in the area. And savor every juicy bite.

Pick-your-own hours often change day to day, depending on the weather and the crop, so always call ahead before you make the drive.

Carter Mountain Orchard

Peachy keen…on yellow-fleshed, white-fleshed and donut peaches (and nectarines, too). 1435 Carters Mountain Trail. 977-1833.

Chiles Peach Orchard

Go for strawberries and peaches in June. Later in the summer, they’ll have apricots, plums and veggies picked and ready for buying. 1351 Greenwood Rd., Crozet. 823-1583.

Critzer Family Farm

Strawberries and cherries are ripe now; blackberries and raspberries will be ready mid-July. They also sell ice cream made with fruit from the farm. 9388 Critzers Shop Rd., Afton. (540) 465-4772.

Henley’s Orchard

Pluck nectarines and more than a dozen varieties of peaches. 2192 Holly Hill Farm, Crozet. 823-7848.

Hill Top Berry Farm and Winery

Blackberries galore—picking starts in July. 2800 Berry Hill Rd., Nellysford. 361-1266.

Market at Grelen

Pick your own blueberries, or buy pre-picked strawberries, cherries and peaches from other local farmers. 15091 Yager Rd., Somerset. (540) 672-7268.

Middle Fork Farm

Strawberry fields forever. 3840 Branch Rd., Scottsville. 589-0810.

Seamans’ Orchard

Strawberries, cherries and blueberries…perfect for pie-making! 415 Dark Hollow Rd., Roseland. 277-8130.

Spring Valley Orchard

Act fast to pick sweet cherries—picking season ends in early July. 3526 Spring Valley Rd., Afton. 960-9443.

We’ll cheers to that

On Monday, June 5, the 2017 Virginia Craft Brewers Guild announced the winners of this year’s Virginia Craft Beer Cup: Among the 356 beers entered for judging in 24 categories, five local breweries earned accolades for their brews. South Street Brewery’s Virginia Lager took first place in the International Lager and Strong European Beer category; its Astrognomer brew took third in the IPA category. Three Notch’d Brewing Company’s Blackwall Porter placed second in the Scottish and Irish Ale category; its No Veto Brown placed third in the Brown British Ale category. Pro Re Nata Brewing Company took third place in the Historical, Alternative and American Wild Ale category with its Go Johnny Gose. Wild Wolf Brewing Company placed third in the Fruit Beer category with its Area 151. And Stable Craft Brewing’s Britchin Brown Ale took second in the Amber and Brown American Beer category.

Categories
Living

Barbie’s Burrito Barn brings CaliMex to C’ville

Barbie Brannock’s love of Southern California-style Mexican cooking comes from her mother. The menu at Barbie’s Burrito Barn includes burritos, tacos, bowls and tortilla strips instead of chips. Photo by Amy Jackson

For more than 20 years, every time Barbie Brannock cooked California-style Mexican food for her friends, they’d ask, “When are you going to open a restaurant?”

They weren’t so much asking as they were insisting, says Brannock, who learned to cook in her mother’s Southern California kitchen, and was a Peace Corps worker, an artist and a preschool art teacher before finally opening her CaliMex takeout joint, Barbie’s Burrito Barn, three weeks ago in a stone cottage under the Belmont Bridge.

“I think it was meant to be in this weird little spot,” Brannock says, adding that she opened her modest eatery to cook and share the food she loves.

Brannock loves the texture of CaliMex food, how melted cheese, chewy tortilla, crisp cabbage, soft cilantro and creamy avocado mix together in a single bite of guacamole tostada. “It really plays with your mouth,” she says.

She wears brightly colored aprons while preparing everything herself, from soaking and cooking the beans to slicing, salting and frying the tortilla strips, all in a tiny kitchen with bright floor tiles.

Everything at Barbie’s Burrito Barn is made to order and wrapped to-go. Customers can stop in and order from Brannock herself, or they can call in their order to pick up later. Brannock’s menu of vegetarian and meat burritos, tacos, tostadas, chopped bowls and strips (her take on chips) with salsa and guac is simple, and with the most expensive item ringing up at around $7, it’s affordable. And it’s healthy to boot: Add-on side dishes include jicama slaw and chili-lime cucumbers.

Customers can eat at one of the small tables inside or out, or many take their burrito barn bounty around the corner to the Champion Brewing Company patio. Barbie’s doesn’t serve alcohol, but it does offer bottled water and soft drinks, including sweet Jarritos.

“It’s like I’m feeding people from my heart, or my mother’s,” Brannock says. “It’s not fancy food, but it’s yummy food.”

Farm to brewery

Woodridge Farm in Lovingston has grown and supplied grain for Virginia breweries such as Blue Mountain, Champion, Devils Backbone and Lickinghole Creek for several years. But now they’re getting into the beer-brewing game themselves, as Wood Ridge Farm Brewery.

This will be the fifth brewery and first farm brewery in Nelson County, which, for the record, still has just one traffic light.

Wood Ridge Farm Brewery is unique in that it grows, malts and roasts 100 percent of the grains—rye, wheat, barley and oat—used in its beers. Clay Hysell, the brewery’s general manger, says they grow their own hops, too, but often have to outsource them because the Virginia climate is not ideal for most varieties.

“It’s a great feeling to drink a beer while overlooking the land it came from,” Hysell says. “To an extent, it’s like terroir with wine” or food. Farm owner Barry Wood tapped Nicholas Payson, formerly of Winnetou Brauerei in Mount Airy, North Carolina, as head brewer. In advance of the brewery’s September 10 opening, Payson has created a kolsch, IPA, pale ale, porter, blonde ale and a shandy.

When pressed to name a favorite, Payson says he’s partial to the porter. “I love this beer because I use no additives to achieve the flavor.” The creamy, mocha coffee notes come from the grain, he says.

But all of this is just to start, says Hysell, noting the farm will continue providing grain to other breweries, as well. “We’ll have even more fun later on.”

They’re all winners

The Olympics wasn’t the only fierce competition going on this summer. While athletes from around the world were winning medals, local food and drink purveyors racked up some major accolades of their own.

Castle Hill Cidery’s port-like 1764 cider won Double Gold and Best of Category-Fortified in the inaugural Drink Outside the Grape competition held in town earlier this month.

At the 2016 Virginia Craft Brewers Guild Virginia Craft Beer Cup Awards last weekend, Scottsville’s James River Brewery took home first place, Best of Show, and first place, British Bitter for its River Runner ESB, a take on a traditional English bitter brewed with pale and crystal malts and British hops. Many other local brews received nods as well, including Pro Re Nata’s Old Trail Pale Ale American pale ale; Starr Hill’s Jomo Vienna lager, The Love German hefeweisen and Sublime Belgian wit; South Street’s My Personal Helles lager and Peanut Butter Cup Barrel-Aged Soft Serve American porter; and Three Notch’d’s No Veto brown ale and Ghost of the 43rd pale ale.

To top off the wins, Hudson Henry Baking Co.’s cashew and coconut granola, made by Hope Lawrence in Palmyra, was a 2016 Sofi finalist in the Breads, Muffins, Granola or Cereal category at the Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City in June.

Send your food news to: eatdrink@c-ville.com