With names like Steelworker’s Oatmeal Stout, Pawnshop Porter and Blueberry Belch, Allentown Brew Works seems to have a penchant for run down, post-industrial small town imagery. But that’s not to say their beer is no good. In fact, the ones I’ve tried are pretty tasty. The brewery was also the first to snag the name “Hop’solutely” for their triple IPA. With most hop-related puns already trademarked, that is quite an accomplishment. I’m still holding on to “Sheer Hoppenstance” for when I start my own brewery. Don’t steal it!

Allentown Brew Works is actually run by a venture called Fegley’s Brew Works, which owns a handful of family-run restaurants and breweries in the Lehigh Valley. In case you’re interested, Fegley’s is prominently featured in a few local events as part of Philly Beer Week, which wraps up June 8. I recently saw their Insidious Bourbon barrel-aged Imperial Stout on the shelf at Rybrew, so I decided to give it a shot.

First of all, what is a Bourbon barrel? Or what is Bourbon whiskey for that matter? Well, I’ll tell you. Bourbon whiskey is, by law, a distilled beverage made from at least 51 percent corn and aged in new, charred oak barrels. Once the distilleries get done with these barrels, they legally can’t reuse them for Bourbon so they sell them to distillers of other spirits and also (fortunately for us) breweries. These used barrels still contain some Bourbon and plenty of oak, which lends some distinct flavors to the beer that later occupies them.

The label of Insidious is littered with dark, foreboding imagery, and even claims that it will be my “portal to the dark side,” whatever that means. The last time someone offered to be my portal to the dark side, it didn’t turn out well. So, I proceeded with caution.

I let the beer warm up a bit before opening, to get the most out of the multitude of flavors. The stout pours an opaque dark, with a somewhat bubbly, brown foam stand. Right off the bat, lots of alcohol is apparent in the aroma, with raisin, wood and chocolate notes present as well. The alcohol is perhaps a bit aggressive in the aroma, but it hides nicely after taking a sip. The texture of this beer is great — it’s velvety, perhaps syrupy, and it goes down smooth. The finish is dry and leaves you with a nice touch of roasted malts, which invites another sip. Delicious. At 9 percent ABV this beer is certainly no joke, but the alcohol disguises itself well among the other tasty flavors and superb mouthfeel. Overall, this is an excellent imperial stout and a smooth sipper.

I must end this week’s column by saying that, regretfully, this will be my last beer review for The Triangle. The newspaper finally found out that I actually work for the NSA, and have been sent to secretly exploit the beer column’s massive reach to spew subliminal propaganda in the form of inane musings about brewed beverages. Just kidding — I’m graduating. I must say it’s been a pleasure to write this column, and at the very least I hope it has inspired an interest in exploring the wonderful world of beer.

What I love most about beer is that it is an entirely natural product, which has been brewed and enjoyed by civilizations for millennia. I firmly believe that beer brings people together, makes people happy and makes the world a better place. Enjoying and discussing a delicious and well-crafted beer with someone is a special experience, and we are lucky to live in a time when craft beer is as plentiful as it is exceptional. So I encourage you to drink beer, love beer and maybe even make beer (it’s really not that hard!). I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this column as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and if we happen to meet at a bar one day, pull up a chair and have a beer on me. Cheers!

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At one time, New York’s Brooklyn borough was a prominent brewing center in the United States. In 1900, it boasted 48 breweries and produced a large chunk of the country’s beer. But by the late 1970s, every single one of these breweries had shut its doors, succumbing to Prohibition followed by post-war poverty and the crippling decline of industry in the borough. The 1980s saw a slow revival of Brooklyn, with affluent newcomers and a resulting gentrification of many neighborhoods. However, the borough still lacked a brewery to call its own.

Acutely aware of this void, neighbors Steve Hindy and Tom Potter founded Brooklyn Brewery in 1984, and opened it four years later. Originally brewing all of its beer by contract with Matt Brewing Co. in Utica, N.Y., the pair acquired a former factory in the Williamsburg neighborhood and began brewing there. Although they still brewed most of their beers under contract in Utica, they began expanding the Brooklyn location in 2011 and have since quintupled capacity.

Hindy and Potter faced many obstacles in opening the brewery, including a struggle to acquire funding from wary investors. On October 19, 1987, just two weeks after they finally acquired their start-up capital of $300,000, the stock market crashed and investors lost interest in financing a risky brewing startup. Had they not reached their goal before the crash, there would likely be no Brooklyn Brewery today. Since then, beer has made resurgence in Brooklyn, with breweries like Sixpoint and Greenpoint Beer Works also setting up shop in the borough.

Current brewmaster Garrett Oliver originally studied filmmaking at Boston University before travelling throughout Europe. During his extensive travels, he garnered a taste for good beer and began home brewing upon his return to the U.S. Since joining Brooklyn in 1994, he has had a great influence on the company and is responsible for many of its award-winning brews. During that time, he become a prominent beer author and also happens to be an awesome chef, having written and spoken extensively on beer and food pairings.

Brooklyn Brewery has a beer commemorating the Brooklyn Dodgers 1955 World Series win against the Yankees. Since I also enjoy relishing a Yankees loss, I decided to give this beer a shot. Brewed in the English Pale Ale style, I expected a slightly malty and mildly hoppy flavor profile. The beer pours a bright, clear copper color with a thin white head. Crisp malt aromas are evident on the nose, as is a soft, pleasant sweetness. Grain and biscuit flavors pervade and are backed up by mellow, floral hop notes. A smooth and buttery mouthfeel and lingering maltiness on the palate make this beer a pleasure to sip.

Overall, this is a somewhat surprisingly malt-forward brew displaying a nice depth of malt flavors not typical of a pale ale. It is a probably as close to an authentic English ale as can be found here, and its mellow character is warm and pleasant. If you are like me and enjoy grainy malt flavors in an ale, this one will certainly satisfy. Cheers!

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This week I grabbed a bottle of Uinta Brewing Co.’s Detour Double IPA. Uinta beers are usually quite easy to pick out due to their eye-catching labels and unique compass bottle. This particular label depicts an old truck towing one of those space-age rounded camping trailers. The truck and trailer are approaching a fork in the road and evidently have opted to drive toward the great outdoors in lieu of the hustle and bustle of the city.

Uinta Brewing Co. is located in Utah, which is known for its puritanical laws restricting beer sold in-state at many establishments to 4 percent ABV. This restriction is due in large part to traditional Mormon beliefs about alcohol and the fact that the majority of Utahans are Mormons. I bet you didn’t know that people from Utah are called Utahans (which I like to think rhymes with “croutons”). Uinta Brewery is named after the Uinta Mountains of northern Utah, which form the only east-west mountain range in the continental United States. Bet you didn’t know that either.

Uinta recently found itself in a trademark dispute with a brewery whose name I won’t mention (lest they receive undeserved attention) over the name of its flagship IPA “Hop Notch.” The small contract brewery in Massachusetts apparently owns the trademark on the word “notch” as it relates to brewing and beer, and Uinta was forced to change the name to “Hop Nosh.” As my personal nonviolent act of civil disobedience against our unnecessarily litigious society, I will continue to pronounce Uinta’s delicious IPA “hop notch.” If you drink a few and look at the bottle it starts to read like that anyway. Now on to the review of the Detour Double IPA!

Poured into a goblet, the beer appears to have a slightly hazy copper color with a thick white head and excellent lacing. As the beer warmed, the haze dissipated, indicating what’s known as a “chill haze.” This effect occurs when cold temperatures cause suspended proteins to bond with chemicals from hops, causing an unsightly (but flavor neutral) haze. Taking a sniff, there are great aromatics noticeable, with floral and grassy hop notes rounding out the crisp aroma. Flavor-wise, resinous hop notes dominate and a mild bitterness is present but does not detract from the beer’s character. This is certainly a veritable hop bomb. There are some malt flavors in the background, but hops way in the forefront here.

Overall, Detour is a solid double IPA. It’s thick, resinous and lingers on the palate the way a double IPA should. It’s hard to really stand out in this crowded class of craft beers, but this is a good example of the style and notable for its great hop aromas and crispness. Really hop-notch stuff. Cheers!

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In an increasingly bubbling craft beer market where a new brewery seems to be popping up in the United States just about every day, Yuengling Brewery is perhaps unique in its slow and cautious expansion. Even the “big three” breweries (Budweiser, Miller and Coors) have attempted to cash in on the burgeoning craft beer frenzy. But in a competitive and rapidly evolving beer industry, Yuengling has always done its own thing and hasn’t strayed much from its steady course.

The evidence would suggest that their cautious strategy has served them well — after all, they are the nation’s oldest brewery. Despite their lack of flashy marketing campaigns and 24-syllable beer names, Yuengling has consistently held a sizable and growing chunk of the beer market. In fact, it is the largest brewery that is both American-owned and produces all its beer in the U.S. (Anhueser-Busch and MillerCoors are both owned by foreign companies, and Pabst outsources much of its brewing.) Yuengling, a private company, is also narrowly ahead of the publicly held Boston Beer Co., makers of the Sam Adams line.

So when I heard that Yuengling would be releasing a new seasonal beer this year, I knew it was a well-calculated and certainly not a hastily made decision by the brewery. It’s no surprise that Yuengling values tradition, and so it is with their take on summer wheat ale, aptly named Yuengling Summer Wheat. It is brewed in the traditional German Weizen beer style, which encompasses a grain bill of mostly wheat and unique spicy flavors from the special yeast strains used.

I grabbed a bottle of the Summer Wheat from the Craft Beer Outlet, and it was styled similarly to the usual Yuengling Lager bottle. I’ve always liked the eagle depicted on Yuengling bottles, and this time he appears to have landed on a pile of wheat and hops and is exuberantly cawing to his brethren of this most glorious discovery.

From the bottle, the beer pours a very cloudy golden yellow with a lasting white foam stand. The color is slightly darker than a typical Weizen. On the nose, there abound wonderful phenolic banana and clove aromatics and grainy, sweet malt notes.

The flavor is dominated by bubblegum notes backed up by grainy, sweet malts and complex yeast flavors, making for a well-rounded brew. The beer goes down very smoothly and is notably easy drinking for a style not typically so.

Yuengling Summer Wheat is less aggressive than some examples of the Weizen style and perhaps leans more toward mellow rather than intense. Overall, this is a simple, traditional Weizen beer that is refreshing and notably smooth. I could drink several of these easily and enjoy each one, which is harder to say for some of the more canonical examples of this style.

There’s really not much bad to say about this beer, and it’s a great first Weizen if you haven’t yet had the pleasure of sampling this great style. I should also mention the price of this beer. At roughly $7 for a six pack, it’s priced far below other craft hefeweizens such as Troegs Dreamweaver and imports such as Franziskaner. When compared to the rest of the available Weizens of similar quality, there’s no doubt this beer is a steal at this price, and it tastes delicious. Cheers!

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Washington, D.C., is a wonderful beer town. If you’ve ever visited a bar in the district, you’ve likely encountered a large, well-chosen draft beer list and plenty of people talking about craft beer. But despite a burgeoning beer scene, Washington had lacked its own production brewery for decades. Aptly aware of this void, D.C. natives Brandon Skall and Jeff Hancock used their years of experience in the beverage, food service and brewing industries to open DC Brau Brewing Co.

Located in the northeast corner of Washington, the brewery offers a handful of year-round brews along with a few seasonal and limited releases. They are small but growing, and judging by their website’s photos, the majority of their brewers are bearded, which is always a positive sign for a brewery. I haven’t yet seen their brews on tap in the Philadelphia area, but I suspect that will change quite soon.

While perusing the beer fridge at Rybrew, I opted to grab a can of DC Brau’s staple beer, The Public. This is their take on the classic American pale ale and is their most popular brew. Fittingly, the label is dominated by a large red silhouette of the Capitol building adorned with barley grains and hop flowers. On the opposite side of the can, there’s a factoid ostensibly endorsing the D.C. statehood movement. It seems clear that Skall and Hancock are in favor of statehood for Washington, and the brewery’s website even has a section devoted to the issue. Mixing beer and political commentary has never worked out well for me personally, but it seems somehow fitting for a craft brewery located in our nation’s capital.

I popped open the 12-ounce can of The Public and was immediately greeted with a powerful bouquet of fresh American hops. This beer smells fabulous. Five out of five stars. From the can into a pint glass, the beer pours a slightly hazy copper-amber with a frothy white foam stand. Part of the haze can be attributed to what I believe are lots of tiny hop particles swirling around in the beer, which is a pretty cool sight. Taking a sip, I was first surprised by the substantial malt presence, which nicely balances the aromatic hop flavors. Slightly astringent flavors creep in toward the end, and the beer finishes on a bitter note.

This beer’s bouquet of hops is splendid, and the upfront hop flavors are wonderful. I just wish it didn’t finish with such caustic flavors. It is, however, nice to taste a heavily hopped pale ale with such a strong malt presence. In any case, I’m excited to try more from this rapidly expanding brewery. Cheers!

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Last week, I took a trip to the Craft Beer Outlet in Northeast Philly to peruse their extensive selection and take advantage of their Tuesday half-price growler promotion. I opted for a local brew on tap and filled up my growler with the County Line IPA from Neshaminy Creek Brewing. I’d seen more and more beers from Neshaminy Creek on taps around Philly, but I realized I knew very little about this expanding brewery.

It turns out Neshaminy Creek was co-founded in 2011 by former Craft Beer Outlet employee Jeremy Myers, who is now the head brewer. The Pennsylvania State University grad spent two years at River Horse Brewing in Lambertville, N.J., and attended brewing classes at the famed Siebel Institute in Chicago. No stranger to the amount of work it takes to get a small brewery project off the ground, Myers succeeded in securing permits for Bucks County’s first production brewery in 2011. Since then, they’ve been gradually expanding brewing operations and now run a tasting room adjacent their brewery, which is open five days a week.

The brewery purportedly uses real Neshaminy Creek water in their beer, but they’re only able to make this tenuous claim because their water comes from the Philadelphia Water Department, which sources mainly from the Delaware River (of which Neshaminy Creek is a tributary). Technically they’re right, though I find the claim to be a bit of a stretch — the Delaware carries over 50 times the amount of water that Neshaminy Creek does where the two meet. By the same logic, the brewery could also claim that it uses real deer urine in its beer.

Regardless of my petty gripe about their water source, I like Neshaminy Creek Brewing, and I’m always excited to see a new brewery in the Philly area. This brewery has a penchant for German styles, such as Trauger Pilsner and Tribute Tripel. The County Line IPA is named after nearby County Line Road, which serves as a divider between Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties.

The beer pours a slightly hazy bright copper with a resiny, piney hop bouquet immediately evident. Crisp malt and citrus notes round out the aroma. Hop flavors rightly dominate the palate, but a pleasant, biscuity malt sweetness also makes its presence known. This is a well-balanced IPA with intense hop flavors and aromas, but a welcome lack of excessive hop bitterness toward the finish. I would almost describe this as a West Coast style IPA, more similar to something like Stone IPA than Dogfish Head 60 Minute.

It’s easy for a beer like this to get lost in the ever-growing crowd of other hoppy IPAs out there, but this brew’s delicious and well-selected melange of hops pushes it toward the front of the pack, if only slightly. It’s always nice to see a successful production brewery popping up in our region, and I’m looking forward to seeing more from them as they grow. Cheers!

Appearance: 3.5/5

Aroma: 4.5/5

Taste: 4/5

Mouthfeel: 4/5

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