Almost-local Brewery Spotlight - The Bruery

Even though The Bruery is only 4 years old, this felt like a long overdue visit.  Reed and I, along with some friends, made the drive up to Orange County to check out both the tasting room and Provisions, a fancy bottle shop and cafe run by the same people. The two locations could hardly be more different, and I loved them both.
Our first stop was Provisions in "old town" Orange, a street packed with cutesy shops and boutiques. The storefront reminded me a lot of the bottle shop / restaurant combinations we loved in Australia and I had never really seen closer to home (though 3rd Corner is a delightful wine-only exception). Reed's first impression was that the place was "pretentious" which I noted but dismissed. Calling anyone pretentious is rich coming from someone who works at Stone and totally buys into their "you're not worthy" mantra. My first impression was that I loved everything about it except the 90 minute drive from my house.  

A familiar sight - Reed wearing a beer shirt sampling a flight.

On offer are flights and pours of Bruery beers of course, but also a small but excellent selection of wine and cheese plates. One of my frequent complaints about places with extensive alcohol menus is their lack of helpful descriptions. This place is a welcome exception, with the beer menu organized by flavors, much like many wine menus. I found this very helpful in deciding what to order, and it turned out to be necessary here as the people behind the counter seemed uninterested or unable to help us make decisions about what to try. This poor service also carried over to the attached market, where we did some bottle shopping before leaving. The beers are organized by type (again like with wine), which I'd never seen before. I wonder which came first, the customer-empowering organization of the menu and bottle shop - or the poor customer service.

Enough negativity - we really did all enjoy ourselves immensely. Some notes on the beers themselves:
Otiose: a sour brown ale fermented with guava, this reminded me a lot of one of my favorite beers, the Duchesse.
Sans Pagaie: a sour blonde ale barrel aged with cherries, I found this beer to taste like a complete cherry pie with just the right amount of sweet and tart fruit along with a yeasty "crust" flavor even - delicious!
Smoking Wood: an imperial smoked porter aged in whiskey barrels, it is very smoky! The online description lists cherrywood, beachwood and rye malts as ingredients, so now I want to try some other beers with these as I so enjoy the smoky beer trend.
Fruet: brewed for their 4th anniversary celebration, this is really more of an after dinner drink. At 15.5% ABV, it would not feel out of place to don a smoking jacket and drink this from a snifter.

For lunch we walked up the street to Bruxie, a busy place that serves sandwiches on crisp waffles instead of bread, along with sweet waffle sandwiches for dessert. So good! This fantastic find will definitely be a part of every visit to the Bruery from now on.

Strawberry creme brulee for dessert.

Fried chicken for lunch.

A 10 minute drive away is the actually brewery and tasting room, located in an industrial section of Placentia. We arrived right as they opened for the afternoon and within 20 minutes every seat was taken and there was a line out the door.

Brewery and tasting room.

Different beers are on tap here, all more wacky combinations of ingredients like a smoked porter with Vermont maple syrup or a pumpkin milk stout. For what it's worth, the Burly Gourd is the first time Reed has approved of a pumpkin beer, I think it was the stout base (most are just pale ales); this beer tasted like spicy pumpkin pie with whipped cream on it, just like I make for the holidays.

Reed tried every single thing on the board at the brewery and we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves amidst the usual crowd of bros, hipsters and hockey enthusiasts. A food truck parked outside, enticing us to stay as long as we pleased. After a full day, we drove (well, I drove while some dozed) south down the 5 and Reed summed up his feelings on what the Bruery has to offer - it is the Ben and Jerry's of craft beer, he said. They have decadent combinations of ingredients and clearly aren't afraid to try out new flavors. They are specialty almost to the point of gimmicky. But sometimes you just want a really good vanilla.

Not-so-local Hangout: Lion's Pride

Note: This is a long overdue post! This visit took place in October.

Spoiler alert - Reed and I both loved this place. It made me declare myself a fellow beer snob (for a night at least) and he still says it's his favorite bar, even though it's 3,000 miles away from where we live. And we're not the only ones, it has a 100 point rating on Beer Advocate. Pretty much the only thing we could complain about was the weather, which decided to deliver the first storm of the season shortly after we arrived and didn't let up until well after we were tucked away in bed, dreaming of creme brulee - but I'll get to that. 

We spent the whole day out-running the storm by driving north (which seems illogical, I know - but for the most part it worked). We'd left Massachusetts before noon and the friend we were staying with there said it started snowing 2 hours later and didn't stop until 22 inches had fallen and their power was out. Yikes! We drove through much of New Hampshire, enjoying peak fall foliage and watching the sky get darker and darker. Lion's Pride is a non-descript building on a non-descript road lined with the types of businesses you'd expect along a highway. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Lion's Pride used to be a Denny's or, more likely, a Dunkin' Donuts. 

Inside it was warm and cozy and we settled in at the bar to wait for the rest of the group. It took us 15 minutes to decide what to order first.
35 beers on tap and the menu tended more towards the poetic rather than focusing on the style of beer. A lot of places with extensive beer lists seem to do this and it bothers me, I'd much prefer a sentence or two about each offering. Stone is an obvious local example - there's simply too much on the menu to expect your server to be able to give you a description and tasting notes so I'm often left Google-ing so I don't end up with a $10 beer I don't like. But at Lion's Pride it hardly mattered because the guy behind the bar, Ryan, was a knowledgeable and friendly resource at our disposal. He knew everything, and he wanted to share it with us so that our experience was a fantastic adventure - the very definition of exemplary customer service.

And this is just what's on tap...

As more people joined our group I actually got less social as I focused on what to order next. I made a list in my notebook and wanted to make sure I got through it all. It began to snow outside. A lot. We went out to take pictures, it's such a novelty for us SoCal people. And I began to worry about the inevitable drive to my friend's house. In most beer bar situations I'm happy to be the designated driver, but this place was different...I was only part way through my list! Unfortunately, I was the only one authorized to drive the rental car so there was no haggling to be done. So as a compromise (if you can call it that, Reed was in a win-win situation) we stayed for 6 hours so I could get through that list and be sober to drive across the fjords of Maine in a blizzard. 

Here's a rundown of the highlights: 

Schlenkerla Krausen: Campfire in a glass! This was actually one of Reed's selections and I found it very strange that beer could smell and taste so smoky. I'd like to try it again now and compare it with Ballast Point's Smoked Lager. I've never paired a smoky beer like this with some BBQ, but I assume it would be fantastic. Perhaps at our next beer pairing dinner...

Nuova Mattina: What a saison! Brewed in Italy with ginger and chamomile (amongst other ingredients) this beer is downright delicious. It tastes like a combination of beer and tea and, now that I know more, I would like to try it again - at room temperature.

Pannepot Wild: A 10% ABV powerhouse that smacks of cognac and sherry, this Belgian quad is almost more of an after dinner drink than a beer. I am a fan of brettanomyces yeast (the "wild" in the name) in general and, if money were no object, I would buy 5 bottles of this beer and open one each year to see what's changed. Perhaps it's the biologist in me (or the wine lover), but I like the thought of something being alive in my beer, eating away at the sugars and changing the flavors.

B. Nektar Vanilla Cinnamon Mead: I know, I know - mead ≠ beer but this was the perfect nightcap. #36 on the tap list of 35 offerings (see menu above), it was liquid creme brulee. I am still thinking about this mead (they don't distribute to California). Sitting in such a cozy environment, high on my new-found appreciation of what beer could do, while watching snow fall out the window and sipping a glass of this to end the evening - well, it was just perfect. 

Sadly, it sounds as though our amazing server Ryan no longer works at Lion's Pride and there's rumors that it's gone downhill a bit. At least Reed and I will always have that one visit, a night to remember if ever there was one.

My new favorite picture of us.