The place is very cool inside, has a nice ambiance (including a Logan’s Run DVD playing on the television), a solid beer list (though not as impressive as The Porter or The Brick Store Pub), and an awesome food menu (maybe even better than The Porter’s, though shorter).

Also, they have a sort of happy hour between 5pm and 6:30pm on weekdays where they offer numerous appetizers for only $3 and a few entrées for only $10. We had the smoked trout mac & cheese appetizer (awesome! and only three bucks!) and the hanger steak (even more awesome!! and only ten bucks!!). We had a great time.

Last week (starting 5/11) was my first week back at day-job work after being off for three weeks. Because the office is closer to it Brickworks than my home, a friend of mine and I dropped by during lunchtime last Wednesday. We didn’t eat or drink, but took a quick look at the Five Seasons Brewpub location there (their third). It is open and serving food, but won’t be pouring brewed-on-premise beers until this week or next I think. Our main objective was actually to check out the beer, wine, and homebrew-supply shop next door: Hop City. The folks there were really friendly, and they had some great brews to choose from.

Particularly good picks that I haven’t tried yet but was excited to nab include these:

• Struise Black Albert (expensive little sucker)
• Three different versions of Mikkeller Single Hop IPA:
  • Cascade
  • Warrior
  • Simcoe
• Nøgne Ø Dobbel IPA
• Smuttynose Maibock
• Sam Adams Long Shot 2009 (a sixer with two each of three different brews)

I haven’t gotten into any of these great finds – in fact, I still have a fridge full of older selections (some still hanging around from my trip to LA last October). Next time I have beer geek friends over, I’ll have to crack some of these (if they’re not all gone by then…)

Our other recent adventures have been all about homebrews.

The English IPA, Hump’s Punjabi Pale Ale, was the first to make it into a keg. This beer turned out great. It is a little bold, hoppy, and bitter for an English IPA, but the distinctly English hop varieties and yeast keep the flavor profile in style. This is frighteningly drinkable – almost session-beer like for a hop-head like me – for a strong brew (6.5%abv).

Next into a keg was our fine Belgian strong ale: Hump’s “La Brabançonne” Grand Cru. This one is still a little green. It finished quite dry and thus very strong: 9.0%abv. It is still a bit warming with alcohol and the flavor of ethanol is a little too conspicuous. A few more months of aging and it will be nice. A year or two and it will likely be un-freaking-believable.

The final brew, sitting patiently for weeks on the counter-top, was a big American Amber – perhaps India Amber Ale: Hump’s Red Bedlam. This is everything that it promised to be. It’s big hop aroma and flavor from Columbus and Simcoe hops are simply bliss. The malt profile is bready, rich, and slightly sweet – which stands up well to the very bitter finish and warming strength (7.4%abv). This one might be my favorite on tap right now, but it’s a close call between it and the IPA.

My fridge is once again full of crazy, hoppy goodness – a welcome sight after several months of low-hop brews (which were all good – don’t get me wrong – but were unable to tickle my hop-funnybone, if you know what I mean).

I bought ingredients for the next batch a few weeks ago, but haven’t gotten a chance to brew yet. I hope to brew this weekend (perhaps on Memorial Day). I’ll be cooking up Hump’s “Welcome to the World!” Wit. This crazy, refreshing beer – brewed to celebrate the birth of our newest son – will be the offspring of a ménage à trois involving a Belgian Witbier, a Belgian Saison, and a piña colada. If anything, it promises to be wild. With luck, it will also be delicious (a restrained hand when adding the pineapple and coconut will hopefully insure its drinkability).

The Porter has been nice to us. We went there the week after Christmas, the day before New Year’s Eve. We sampled their burger (awesome) and their mac & cheese (also awesome – but slightly less awesome than the way we make it at home). And then just last weekend, we took my sister and brother-in-law to eat there. We enjoyed their hush puppies and their mac & cheese yet again. This time we also tried their calamari which was terrific. It was served with fried julienned jalapeños, fried onion petals, fried lemon curls, and a lemon aeoli – delicious through and through.

Also while my sister and brother-in-law were in town (here on a week-long whirlwind tour of the east coast), we finished off my last bottle of Hump’s Dancing Monk Ale. This was a strong Belgian-style ale that I made over two years ago. The final product was close to 11% abv. It was a mellow, warming, smooth, malty, complex ale and much better than I remember – no doubt with help from 2+ years of aging. Its more intense fruity and licorice flavors – which stood out in not-so-perfect ways – had subsided. The beast had been calmed. Did I mention it was smooth? It was quite drinkable for 10.6% abv. I was pleased.

I’ll try to get photos of the “cellar” in my next post. I’ve collected some amazing beers over the past few months and don’t have a drinking partner to help sample the goods (my usual co-conspirator, my wife, is in her third trimester carrying our unborn son). So the fridge has turned into a stock pile – which I gleefully raid when we have company.

My wife had a photo-shoot, so my son and I hung out around the house. After laying on the couch for a little bit, hoping the discomfort would pass, it finally faded to a point where I could get up and brew. I brewed, heroically dismissing the torturous pain, because I knew that I would not get another such day to brew until after Christmas – probably not until 2009.

Unlike my past several batches, nothing went wrong. Everything seemed to go almost perfectly. There was one bummer for the day: my digital thermometer got screwed up again. This has happened to two digital thermometers before. The moisture gets into places in the digital probe that aren’t adequately sealed and short something. The result is that the thermometer reads about 10-20 degrees high. Unfortunately, I am not 100% certain when this happened. Judging from the efficiency I got (typical – ~70%) and from the vigor of fermentation, I am guessing that everything went well and that the thermometer didn’t start acting up until after the critical temperature reads for the mash saccharification rest. So, assuming that the awry digital thermometer didn’t completely ruin the mash, everything went smoothly. We should have a delicious English Special Bitter on our hands any day now (there was still a big floating yeast cake on the beer last time I looked – which was a couple of days ago). It isn’t as easy to check on regularly because it is in an opaque plastic bucket instead of in a glass carboy. Unfortunately, both of my six-gallon carboys were in use when it came time to pitch the yeast for this latest batch.

One of the carboys was full of wine – a red wine made from 2007 Australian Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. I bottled the wine last Monday (12/22), so I have a case of wine in the basement, waiting for my wife to no longer be pregnant (since she is the main consumer of vino in this household – at least when she’s not preggers).

So the batch went okay. My stomach cramps didn’t completely disappear but did lessen in intensitiy. The next day I felt much better, so the whole family went up into the city (i.e. Atlanta) to take our son Will to see Santa Claus, to do some last minute Christmas shopping (at the Georgia Tech bookstore/gift shop of course), and to try out a new restaurant/bar: The Porter Beer Bar in Little Five.

I had read about the Porter in a mailing list (Ale Atlanta). I had heard it was a nice place that combined favorable elements of some of the best beer destinations in Atlanta: Five Seasons Brewing and The Brick Store Pub.

I more recently saw an article that discussed new “gastro-pubs” in Atlanta. The most notable two until recently were TAP in midtown and Holeman & Finch Public House in Buckhead. We now have three relatively new ones to add to Atlanta’s repertoire: The Porter Beer Bar of course, The Bookhouse Pub, and The Bureau.

As it turns out, the owners/operators of The Porter have served me and my wife before. One was the sous chef and the other our server at Seeger’s on an anniversary dinner in 2005. Seeger’s was a fancy-schmancy restaurant whose head chef, Gunther Seeger, first earned The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead its five-star rating. By all accounts, Gunther is an asshole, and his restaurant was closed after some shady dealings – tax evasion I think… One year later, Malin and I celebrated our anniversary at Quinones – the nicest and best damn restaurant in all of Atlanta. Again, the sous chef and our server were coincidentally the same couple as at Seeger’s. So when I read in that article about The Porter that the operators used to work at Seeger’s, I went to my Quinones menu from 2006 (yes, I still have a copy – it was that good). Sure enough, the sous chef’s name on the menu matched that of the chef at The Porter: Nicholas Rutherford.

So we chose The Porter as the first of these three new places to visit. The three of us split a couple of appetizers (brandade, hushpuppies) and a single entree (shrimp and grits). The food was good. The brandade was a bit too salty I think, but the hushpuppies were to die for, and the shrimp and grits were excellent as well. They also had Sweetwater’s first “dank tank” creation on draft: Creeper – a highly hopped and bitter Belgian Tripel. Unfortunately, I didn’t eat a whole lot because my stomach started to act up again, and I lost my appetite. But I did try everything, and remember everything being tasty. We didn’t actually see Molly – I doubt she would remember us from Quinones or Seeger’s. And we wouldn’t know what Nick looks like since he was in the kitchen during those two evenings on which we ate his food.

Our next stop of the three will probably be The Bureau. The chef there used to work at Babbo in New York (one of Mario Batali’s restaurants). Malin and I ate there during a trip to New York over two years ago, and it was absolutely amazing. That is one menu that I really wish I had saved but unfortunately did not. So we’re interested to see what sort of chops Chef Clark learned at Babbo and how they translate into gastropub fare.