Philly Beer Week’s winding down, but I’m just winding up! I’ve got
four events in the next three days, and they’re big ones, and they’re all Pay As You Go, cuz we know you like that.
Tonight: I’m teaming up with the folks from Gretz Beer for a
Doylestown pub crawl, and it’s a beauty. Get all the details
here, but I can tell you: it
says 7-9, but things will start around 6:30, and I doubt it’s going to stop
just because the clock says so. I’ll be at
Penn Taproom* (80 W. State St.) with my buddy
Mike Hiller from
Bavarian Barbarian from 6:30 to about 7:15, then hustle over to
Knight House (96 W. State) to hang with the good folks from Victory, and then wind up the night from about 8:30 on at
Stephanie’s (29 S. Main) with a
first-in-Pennsylvania debut of
Urban Chestnut Brewing, a St. Louis micro started by
Florian Kuplent, a very talented microbrewer who'd gone to work for Anheuser-Busch...then bolted when the Belgo-Brazilians came to town. Very much looking forward to that! I’ll be signing copies of
Pennsylvania Breweries at all stops, too. Come on out!
Tomorrow: Bust out of work early and join me at
City Tap House for a Pennsylvania/session beer celebration from
11 to 2! We’ll have Pennsy beers pouring, Pennsylvania-local foods on offer (and they do great things with it over there), and I’ll talk your ear off about the great beers and brewers we have here in Pennsylvania. This one’s going to be fun; play hooky with me and show your disdain for all those
neo-dry noseys who say we can’t have beer with lunch!
Friday night is a great little event I’ve got going at
Old Eagle Tavern from 8-midnight:
Bourbon, Beer, and Lew Bryson. I’m not just a beer writer,
I’m a whiskey writer too, so we’re going to pump things up with a series of bourbon-barrel beers
and bourbons. We’ll be pouring
Baker's (a big overproof favorite), Eagle Rare (at Old Eagle? We had to!), George Dickel No. 12 Tennessee Whiskey (cuz
if you don’t know Dickel, you don’t know jack), Elijah Craig 12 Year Old (a great unknown), and Makers Mark (gotta have something smooth). The bourbon-barrel beers? Oh,
just a few kinda okay things, like Weyerbacher Insanity, Yards barrel-aged George Washington Porter, a
2009 Central Waters barrel-aged Barleywine, Allagash Curieux, and
Port Brewing Older Viscosity. Interested now? I'll have plenty of free copies of
Malt Advocate magazine, the world's best whisky magazine, too.
Saturday: It’s
Big Wood with Lew Bryson at
Devil’s Den from 8 to midnight to wrap up my Philly Beer Week events, and it’s gonna be great. We’ll have some
serious wood-aged beers in the house, done with a variety of wood-aging techniques I’ll be happy to discuss with you. Check out this list: Weyerbacher Heresy, Rodenbach Grand Cru 2008,
Russian River Consecration, Dogfish Head Palo Santo, Firestone Walker Walker's Reserve,
Great Divide 17th Anniversary, Boulder Planet Porter with dates aged in bourbon barrels, Lost Abbey Angel's Share, and
Hill Farmstead Phenomenology of Spirit (a dark saison, brewed with friends at
Tired Hands, McKenzie, and Hill Farmstead’s sister brewery, Grassroots in Denmark, primary fermented in french oak wine casks along with multiple strains of brettanomyces and resident microflora. Because we know you like things like that.) You also
might get picked up by cameras working on a new project I'm involved with; so spruce up a bit.
And that...will about do it. Whew.
*and remember: 1-star Yelp reviews usually mean "and my ex-girlfriend works there" and 5-star reviews often mean "and I'm sleeping with the bar manager."
