PHILOSOPHY
Call it Low Country craft with a side of southern ease. Karlos and his brothers had been home brewing batches for crawfish boils and gumbos for years when the idea took hold to step things up and invest in a pilot brewery. “We thought it would be best to brew beers to complement our low country style of cuisine, and with some hoppier flavors, too, to go with all the pork fat we use,” Knott recalls.
KEY BEER
LA 31 Bière Pâle, their Belgian-inflected pale ale named for the state highway, was intended to be the flagship, but Passionné, a wheat beer brewed with passion fruit juice (another local wild fruit) quickly overtook it. The most unique is Boucanée (“smoked”), a lightly smoked wheat beer. As the story goes, there’s a local species of wild cherry tree, and when the Knotts were kids, their grandparents would cut one tree down per year. The women would make a liqueur called “cherry bounce” and the men would cut up the branches for smoking andouille and tasso and sausage. This beer is their homage to that tradition. Is your mouth watering yet?
CAFÉ DU MONDE • 800 Decatur St. • New Orleans, LA 70116 • (504) 587-0831
CENTRAL GROCERY • 923 Decatur St. • New Orleans, LA 70116 • (504) 523-1620
STEIN’S DELI • 2207 Magazine St. • New Orleans, LA 70130 • (504) 527-0771 • steinsdeli.net
Unless you have superhuman powers of self-control, exploring the beer bars and eateries of the French Quarter in New Orleans will lead to foggy mornings, your brain, body, and soul crying out for sugar, caffeine, and fatty Italian meats on bread. First, proceed to the wonderfully decayed Café du Monde, a traditional coffee stand open since 1862 (and open every day except Christmas). One order of beignet per person (say “behn-yay”) means three puffy, warm dough fritters gloriously dusted with powdered sugar. The joe is strong and not too terrible, though the chicory version is an acquired taste, a blend of coffee and dried endive plant root that was favored during the Civil War.
Just down the block is Central Grocery, an Italian market opened in 1906 and home of the muffaletta, the signature New Orleans sandwich. The concept is simple: It’s a circular loaf of soft Italian bread sliced horizontally, layered with top-quality sliced ham, salami, and provolone cheese. That perfect trio is then capped with a layer of olive salad—chopped green and black olives minced with anchovies and garlic. A half feeds two adults handily, and if there’s room in the back, you can sit at a little lunch counter and tuck in, or wend your way back outside and try for a bench in front of St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square. With the perfect sandwich, the riverboats, and the former home of Jax Brewery (now a shopping area) in view, you’re suddenly, completely whole again.
Lastly, make a visit to Stein’s Deli, a Jewish-Italian deli opened in the Lower Garden District in 2006. Dan Stein’s place is all about life-saving breakfast sandwiches—sandwich sandwiches (muffaletta/pastrami/reuben/BLT/New York bagels). The shelves are packed with cured meats, salamis, and a huge selection of domestic and international craft beers, the best of which hidden out of sight in the back (so ask Dan). This is a killer place to refuel and stock up on bottled local specialties if you’re staying locally for a while.
ABITA BREWING CO.
21084 Hwy. 36 • Abita Springs, LA 70433 (985) 893-3143 • abita.com • Established: 1986
ABITA BREW PUB
72011 Holly St. • Abita Springs, LA 70420 (985) 892-5837 • Established: 1994
THE ABITA TAP ROOM
166 Barbee Rd. • Covington, LA 70433
(985) 893-3143 • Established: 2015
SCENE & STORY
Abita was the first southeastern craft brewery to emerge and today, with both a modern brewery and the original brewpub (plus a new taproom in Covington, opened in 2015), has an epochal feel, like a shiny new stadium in a town with the old bleachers down the road. To get to the new 49,000-square-foot brewery from New Orleans you drive the straight 30-mile shot across Lake Pontchartrain toward St. Tammany Parrish and Covington and veer right toward Abita Springs. The brewery owners settled on their location due to the presence of the five-million-year-old aquifer of soft artesian water, a celebrated font that happens to have a perfect pH for brewing and requires no spendy chemical adjustment. The local Chocktaw Indians used this water for medicinal purposes, and turn-of-the-century tourists traveled there to recover from yellow fever. You can—and should!—drink it from water fountains inside the brewery on the tour.
Visitors to the brewery itself (minor hordes actually, with some 20,000 clocked per year at present) convene in a large, porticoed taproom with a wide mahogany bar and watch a surprisingly thorough video before taking a tour amid the brewery’s enormous 400bbl tanks the size of school buses. It’s a sociable place, and it seems hardly surprising one of the main tour guides is an affable brewer by the name of Sonny Day II, a well-respected veteran of Dixie Brewing Company now helping run the show.
The original brewery location just down the road has, since 1994, housed a100-seat brewpub where you can sample a few house beers Abita doesn’t bottle, like a recent Black IPA. Behind its white picket fence and cypress window frames, it’s a nice enough place to spend some time after the tour. Expect above average southeastern pub fare, though the kitchen hasn’t done much cooking with Abita beer.
PHILOSOPHY
Abita has grown like a beanstalk since the day it opened in 1986 with a capacity for 1,500bbl, and modernized operations considerably, including the installment of a unique brewing kettle device called the Merlin, a massive steel heating agent more common in Europe and prized for efficiency. Along the way the company has headed north of 130,000 barrels produced annually, but managed to keep a somewhat soulful image. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Abita launched a beer they dubbed Fleur de Lis Restoration Pale Ale and raised over half a million dollars for hurricane relief, having been spared themselves from major physical damages, and in 2010 released SOS Pilsner to raise funds for the BP Gulf Oil recovery efforts. The brewery is run by David Blossman, a longtime craft beer enthusiast and original shareholder.
“People say there’s no beer culture [here], and I just have to disagree,” says Blossman. He ties craft beer’s success in the Crescent City to the incredible food scene, with its ambitious chefs and a panoply of influences. “We owe a lot of our success to the chefs who took us under their wings,” he explains, echoing a point often made in the city’s taprooms: The beer scene is intertwined with dining, a central facet of life. Ambitious chefs working from farmers’ markets have helped open the city palate wider, expanding on the already wide spectrum of Cajun, Creole, French, North American, and African American traditions. And of course, it’s the Big Easy: People like to drink here. “It’s a different lifestyle. People like to slow down. We’re very social,” Blossman adds.
KEY BEER
Abita is best known for its caramel-colored and light-bodied amber (4.5% ABV), but the company has six other year-round beers in all, in addition to five seasonals plus occasional one-offs for the pub brewed on Sonny Day’s one-barrel pilot system. The best for daytime drinking is Restoration Ale, a deep gold, lightly dry-hopped ale with Cascade hops, or Purple Haze, a light and cloudy American-style wheat ale (4.2% ABV) blended with raspberry puree postfiltration, giving it a fruity zing.
BEST of the REST: LOUISIANA
COLUMBIA STREET TAP ROOM AND GRILL
434 N. Columbia St. • Covington, LA 70433 • (985) 898-0899 • columbiastreettaproom
Sleepy Covington (population: 9,000) comes alive on occasion, especially when the frequent live bands fire up at “the taproom,” as this craft beer bar opened in 1996 is commonly called. It’s got classic old-bar appointments, with exposed brick walls and high ceilings, old Dixie Beer signs, and a wide, handsome antique bar. Built in 1906 by the Seilers, a prominent family in town, the building operated for years as a tavern-inn with lodgings on the second floor. Of the thirty taps, about half are Louisiana brews from the likes of Abita, Great Raft, and Bayou Teche, with some great i
mports such as Blanche de Bruxelles thrown in. The draught lineup is complemented by a smallish but solid bottle list, as well as a selection of burgers and soul food.
THE BARLEY OAK
2101 Lakeshore Dr. • Mandeville, LA 70448 • (985) 727-7420 • thebarleyoak.com
Located at the end of a residential road on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, the Barley Oak (established in 2009) is a new British- and German-themed pub with a patio-equipped upstairs bar drawing from a selection of 47 taps and 120 bottles. The service is warm and friendly; the view from the patio on a clear day, looking south toward New Orleans over a Spanish moss–draped live oak and miles of blue water, is unbeatable. Beer prices run high on rarer brews; still, there could be no better place to catch a sunset and an inexpensive bite before heading back into NoLa for the evening. The draught list represents locals with pride, and among the mostly conventional bottle list are some goodies from Blaugies, Brooklyn, Jolly Pumpkin, and Mikkeller.
GREAT RAFT BREWING
1251 Dalzell St. • Shreveport, LA 71104 • (318) 734-9881 • greatraftbrewing.com
Don’t rule out a road trip up to Shreveport from NoLa (325 miles). In the fall of 2015, a large panel of reputable local beer experts picked Great Raft, out in Shreveport, as the state’s top brewery with the best, most consistent beers—remarkable for a company barely three years old at the time. Opened in 2012, their flagship is Commotion, an American-style pale ale with waves of grapefruit and citrus aromas. Best place to drink it? The air-conditioned taproom on site in the huge brewery, naturally, but the beers are finding wider and wider distribution throughout the state.
PARISH BREWING COMPANY
229 Jared Dr. • Broussard, LA 70518 • (337) 330-8601 • parishbeer.com
Every state seems to have a Double IPA game-changing beer that propelled a newish brewery to stardom (i.e., the Alchemist’s Heady Topper). Opened in 2009, Parish is that brewery for Louisiana. Located in sleepy Broussard, south of Lafayette, 165 miles West of NoLa, Parish is the birthplace of Ghost in the Machine, an 8.5% ABV, dank, herbalicious double IPA, a cult beer if there ever was one.
NORTH CAROLINA
Asheville
WHAT MAKES A GREAT BEER CITY COME OF AGE? IT SEEMS THAT WHEN TOWNS OF A SOCIABLE size (say, 50,000 to about 500,000) gain a certain preponderance of outdoorsy young and college folk, a jamming-good music and craft beer scene cannot be far behind. Along with Boulder, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; and San Diego, California, leafy Asheville, North Carolina (and the surrounding area), has become a hotbed of brewing over the past few years—especially since the state legislature raised the limit for beer’s alcohol content from 6 percent to 15 percent in 2005 after a campaign led by brewer Sean Lilly Wilson, who went on to found Fullsteam Brewing Company in Durham. The city (nor the craft movement) shows little sign of slowing down, with over 150 breweries in the state—triple the number there were when this book was published (it wasn’t easy to narrow down, trust me).
Even the crown of “Beer City, USA” (bestowed by the Brewers Association) has gone to Asheville in multiple years, recently (2009–2012). Then there’s the famous southern food and hospitality, which, of course, is wonderful. But it’s not just dozens of little guys jumping in the pond: over the last few years, three major U.S. craft breweries picked the area to build their (massive) second, East Coast outposts: Sierra Nevada, Oskar Blues, and New Belgium. Where to begin? Better carve out some time.
ITINERARIES
1-DAY Wicked Weed Funkatorium, Highland Brewing, Burial
3-DAY One-day itinerary plus Wedge Brewing, Bruisin’ Ales, and The Thirsty Monk in Asheville
7-DAY Three-day itinerary and The Bier Garden in Asheville; Duck-Rabbit in Farmville; The Raleigh Times Bar (Raleigh); Fullsteam in Durham
HIGHLAND BREWING
12 Old Charlotte Hwy., Ste. H Asheville, NC 28803 • (828) 299-3370 • highlandbrewing.com • Established: 1986
SCENE & STORY
Asheville’s original craft brewery launched under the watchful (and patient) eyes of brewer John Lyda and Oscar Wong, a retired engineer, using retrofitted dairy equipment. Located today in a converted warehouse atop a hill just a short drive from the center of town, it’s one of Asheville’s top craft beer draws and brews some 20,000bbls a year, making it a good-size operation. In the taproom (open Monday through Saturday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.), revelers gather for tours amid converted container ship units that serve as offices, a music stage, plenty of seats and tables, and a draft bar with year round-releases and seasonals. The tours and samples are free, but donations of food and cash are accepted for local charities, a nice touch. Visitors gather in the taproom for $3.50 pints afterward and during the blues, bluegrass, and other Americana-inspired shows. In 2012, they built a bigger stage, and added an outdoor bar (in a repurposed shipping container, to match the offices), improvements which have helped their massively popular BaconFest get bigger every year, too, with 2,500 tickets sold in 2015. Food trucks on Fridays and Saturdays keep the weekend crowds well fed.
PHILOSOPHY
Highland’s beers broke early ground, but could be maddeningly uneven at first. After some years of trial and error, the outfit began to turn the corner with a lineup of assertive beers. It’s a pretty conventional lineup, from light wheat on up to stouts, porters, and other strong ales, but recent brews have shown a more experimental side, with amped up dry-hopping regimes, oak barrel aging, fruit additions, and Belgian styles entering the mix.
KEY BEER
The amber-hued Gaelic Ale (5.8% ABV) with its graham cracker sweetness and kiss of Cascade and Willamette hops is something of a flagship, but it’s the roasty, mocha-tinged Highland Oatmeal Porter (also 5.8% ABV) that shows off Highland’s brewing chops most consistently.
WICKED WEED BREWING
91 Biltmore Ave. • Asheville, NC 28801 (828) 575-9599 • wickedweedbrewing.com
WICKED WEED FUNKATORIUM
147 Coxe Ave. • Asheville, NC 2880 (828) 552-3203 • wickedweedbrewing.com
SCENE & STORY
One of the biggest stories in American craft beer is barely four years old as of 2016. Brothers Luke and Walt Dickinson launched this downtown brewery in late 2012 with full restaurant, downstairs beer bar, bottle shop, and their original brewery. The focus: bold, hoppy beers, rustic farmhouse ales, and some left hook experiments, all coming out of a 15bbl brewery for a local market. Fast-forward to 2016 and they’ve got a new taproom focused on all wild and sour beers (Funkatorium), a hit beer 100% fermented with Brettanomyces (wild yeast), or “brett,” (Serenity), a new 50(!)-barrel brewhouse, medal recognition (for Pernicious, an American-style IPA, beating 334 other entries in 2015 in the most competitive category of the GABF), and 18-wheelers full of buzz, it’s an exciting time for the brewery named after a phrase King Henry VIII used to describe hops.
PHILOSOPHY
Artfully ambitious. Catching up over beers one night at the Falling Rock Tap-house during the 2015 GABF, Walt Dickinson, Wicked Weed’s “Head Blender and Keeper of the Funk” wore the hunted look of a man in the midst of battle. He was having a good time, sure, but things are moving at a breakneck speed. The lines at his booth had been among the longest in the entire hall. Expansions, collaborations, and blueprints were swirling around him like houses in a cartoon twister. “It’s pretty crazy right now,” he said, going on to declare his love of food pairing with beer, and speak of a deep ambition to continue making his mark in the barrel room. “We want Wicked Weed to be part of the conversation on sour beer worldwide,” he told me. I’d say they are already there.
KEY BEER
Serenity, a tart, 100-percent Brettanomyces beer that is barrel-aged for three to five months, has become a touchstone for beer geeks in the region, and increasingly, beyond. The Funkatorium is a separate barrel facility dedicated to wild beers with twelve rotating taps and an upcoming vintage bottle menu. It’s open seven days a week, with small plates, sandwiches, and flatbreads meant for pairing with t
hese palate-expanding beers.
BURIAL BEER CO.
40 Collier Ave. • Asheville, NC 28801 (828) 475-2739 • burialbeer.com • Established: 2013
SCENE & STORY
Burial isn’t a brewery about death metal or funerals or other such rites. More like: burying seeds and watching them grow . . . and grow. After an inspirational trip to Belgium in 2010, the three founders Tim Gromley and Doug and Jess Reiser moved from Seattle to Asheville around 2012, and, in their first year and a half—working in a drafty, repurposed 1930s warehouse—brewed over 200 batches on a one-barrel system, working out kinks, experimenting, meeting the locals, getting constant feedback. “For the first year . . . we didn’t have any employees,” Jess told me. “We built basically everything in the taproom, worked the bar, brewed, did it all. It was an amazing experience.”
What they ended up with was a raft of solid recipes and a massive local following. The shed-like interior of the barn is a real vision of down-home, with antique farm tools for tap handles, mason jar lights, hanging flags and weathered wood walls (and a velvet Tom Selleck portrait, for good measure). It’s a seed, to be sure, of the farmhouse brewery they dream of building someday outside town. For now, they have a terrific little urban getaway with picnic tables on the South Slope, the brewery dotted neighborhood that is home to Wicked Weed’s Funkatorium, Hi-Wire Brewing, and Twin Leaf brewing, as well as a great bottle shop called Tasty, among others. In December 2014, Burial expanded to a ten-barrel system and a staff of thirteen, and by 2015, started canning, with expansion plans coming together with each and every new experimental batch.
The Great American Ale Trail (Revised Edition) Page 41