Three Notch’d Brewing – C-VILLE Weekly

Thanks, Virginia: Go local at your holiday table this year

If you are looking for the perfect beverage to accompany your Thanksgiving meal, area producers have many options, ranging from beer to wine to cider. Here are some recommendations to help you drink well while also drinking local.

Amber and brown ales are obvious options for pairing with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and gravy. The seasonally offered Apple Crumb Apple Ale from Three Notch’d Brewing adds an extra dimension by incorporating apples and cinnamon into the brew. These notes combined with malty, bready, and caramel flavors will remind you of freshly baked apple pie.

A sour or funky farmhouse ale, or even a full-on sour beer, can bring a bit of acid to the table. The sourness cuts through the fattiness of roasted meats, while side dishes with fruit flavors or sweetness bring out similar fruit notes in the beer. Starr Hill’s Carole Cran-Raspberry Gose, only available through December, delivers autumn berry flavors and a nice balance of sweet and sour fruit.

The vanilla, caramel, and chocolate notes found in porter are a great match for dessert. Strange Currencies, from Reason Beer, was originally brewed as a birthday present from the head brewer to his wife. It’s currently available in four-packs of 16-ounce cans direct from the brewery. It’s full and satisfying enough that it could be served on its own instead of dessert, but who is going to pass on that slice of pie?

Two wines deserve a second recommendation in these pages because they are perfect for Thanksgiving: The 2017 petit manseng from Michael Shaps Wineworks and 2017 pinot noir from Ankida Ridge Vineyards. Shaps’ petit manseng is a dry, white wine with weight and texture that brings flavors of honey, tropical fruit, and nutmeg spice at the finish. As a white wine, it can pair with lighter fare, and with roast chicken or turkey. Pinot noir is the classic red wine to pair with Thanksgiving turkey, and the pinot noir from Ankida Ridge Vineyards is the best example of the varietal in Virginia, full of flavors of cherry, cranberry, plum, and cola. Its long, fruit-filled finish will have your mouth watering and anticipating the next bite or sip.

The 2017 Small Batch Series Viognier from King Family Vineyards should also be on your radar. Winemaker Matthieu Finot ferments these white grapes on their skins, more like a red wine would be produced, thus adding aromatics on the nose, and creating a fullness on the palate, and texture in the mouth that will stand up well to the dishes of the season. Similar to the petit manseng mentioned above, this white wine holds up well throughout the meal.

When it comes to Virginia red wine, we can’t forget cabernet franc, which has the perfect weight and flavors for stewed, roasted, grilled, and smoked meats. The 2019 Madison County cabernet franc from Early Mountain Vineyards is a wonderful example of what this grape can be when grown on a good site and in an excellent vintage year. It’s full of ripe red and black fruits with undertones of green herbs and a full finish highlighted by soft, fine tannins.

For many, cider evokes visions of dry falling leaves, pumpkin patches, and hayrides on the farm. Our local industry continues to push forward with creativity and passion, and cider-lovers are benefiting from interesting small-batch, craft products.

The Cranberry Orange Blossom Cider from Potter’s Craft Cider is a limited and seasonal release. With subtle hints of sweet and sour flavors and a pleasant acidity, it will cut through heavier, fattier dishes and can serve a similar role as the sour beers mentioned above. Intentionally produced at only 5.5 percent alcohol by volume, it’s bright and easy drinking that won’t weigh you down before your celebration is over.

Another intriguing option is the just-released 2019 Bricolage Sparkling Cider from Patois Cider. Featuring wild, unsprayed local apples and a minimal intervention fermentation process, this cider develops fine bubbles in the bottle that are sure to please. The palate shows textural weight expresses a depth of caramelized fruit flavors without being too sweet. Delicious on its own, it will also complement a wide range of dishes. This versatility means you can drink this through the entire day of feasting, or at least until the turkey and football games lull you to sleep.

Charlottesville breweries are full of fall beer options

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.