Triumph Old City threw a press dinner last night, and I didn't want to pass up the chance to hang around with the working press, so once again I made the trek to Chestnut Street (although this time I did have to pay for parking...). There was a brewery tour (which included a look at the grist gun, a thoroughly cool piece of brewing technology I hadn't seen before) with Patrick Jones, a tasting session with Jay Misson (which got rapidly raucous; the working press ain't used to gunning down five quick beers), and then...dinner.
Triumph Old City is all about small plates and sharing, so the food came in sharing-friendly configurations. Three little burgers on a plate, for instance: a burger-burger, a mushroom burger (made of mushrooms, that is: vegetarian) with bacon (brilliant!), and a pork roll burger ("Just to get pork roll on the menu," said Jay). Crisp little traingles of thin crust pizza with mushrooms and truffle oil. Grilled shrimps and scallops.
And then there was dessert, which is the real reason I'm even posting this, because I got the chocolate mint julep gelato, and it was phenomenal. Imagine a really good chocolate gelato, with a clean dose of fresh mint flavor, stuffed with as much Knob Creek as they could fit into it without dropping the freezing point to an unworkable level. It was frickin' awesome.
And yeah, the beers were pretty good too. And Jay took me aside and explained the dunkel I bitched about before, and we talked about Sinamar and dark malts and, well, I hate it when the brewer's right. Just ask O'Reilly.
7 comments:
Care to elaborate on the Sinamar discussion or no? This is clearly not your typical malt extract since it's just for color, correct?
I'm a mite confused over the veggie burger with bacon. Sick joke ?
Sinamar is indeed just for color, and there are many dark beers in Germany that are dark solely by virtue of Sinamar, which is what we talked about. Jay learned lager brewing from a seriously old-school German brewer, and the dunkel he makes...well, think of the diff between "classic" festbier and what they call festbier at the Oktoberfest these days. That's what we're looking at.
Ron,
No...er, maybe. But it's a very popular item, they told me. The mushroom burger itself, I tell ya, if ALL veggie burgers tasted like that, I'd be eating the boogers every week. I love mushrooms and bacon, serve it as a side dish at big dinners, so it's a natural.
"think of the diff between "classic" festbier and what they call festbier at the Oktoberfest these days."
That only makes me sad. :-(
I agree that the mushroom burger is great, unfortunately the other two burgers left a lot to be desired. So did most of the other food, though I did like the pizzas.
Anon,
The pork roll 'burger' didn't do a lot for me, but the other one was okay IMO. Pizza I had was good, but...you maybe didn't have the gelato?
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