Action Packed Weekend: St. Louis (Part 2 of 2)

With one full day of exploration behind us, we decided it might be best to start our second day in St. Louis at the brewery with the earliest opening hours. Luckily 4 Hands Brewery had recently begun a Saturday brunch program, so in addition to our beginning beers - the excellent Contact High summer wheat - we were served a ham steak with basil pesto and hearty swiss frittata that provided a foundation for the day ahead.

In addition to the excellent beers made by Will Johnston and Martin Toft, 4 Hands owner Kevin Lemp (the other 3 hands in 4 hands are his wife and two children) has put together an excellent space, with large windows to display the inner brewery workings, a large and comfortable bar, and a centerpiece table made from a recovered warehouse door. The vibe lies somewhere between Three Floyds and the Tomlinson Tap Room, with a lot more light let in.

When you're drinking beer, the next best thing is another beer. We headed south and continued our adventure at Perennial Artisan Ales, another recently opened St. Louis brewery. Perennial's focus is on local, seasonal, and organic ingredients - not an unusual path in better beer. But where Perennial succeeds is in using these ingredients not so much as a compliment, but in many cases, as a highlight.

While my favorite of the Perennial lineup is the excellent Saison de Lis - a beer made with chamomile flowers - what caught my eye this time was the Chocolate Ale - a slightly unusual take on chocolate beer that features an amber base (instead of the usual porter or stout) with cocoa nibs added to bring the chocolate favors forward.

Like many breweries, Perennial is housed in converted warehouse space. The tasting room is not unlike a combination of the space that houses Bearcats in Indianapolis' Stutz building, with the copper bars and tables from Brugge Brasserie. The interior is bright, refined, and inviting - a suitable compliment to the beer.

At this point in our day we had an empty space to fill, and after a short conversation I thought it might be best to show our guests the other side of St. Louis beer - with an Anheuser-Busch brewery tour.

The AB tour starts in a large lobby, filled with televisions displaying ads from the Ab lineup in addition to multiple display cases filled with ephemera from throughout the company's history. The early introduction makes a point of noting the free samples after the tour - in fact, you can make one stop on the tour and immediately return to the tasting room to collect your samples.

Despite the 100+ degree temperatures, we took the entire indoor/outdoor tour. A highlight was the fermentation room - a space stacked with 64 tanks producing 3600 barrels of beer every 21 -30 days. To compare volume to a successful local brewery - Flat12: This means that in just one month AB produces 57.6 times as much beer as Flat12 produced in total in 2011 - in just one room in a massive complex that is echoed by additional plants throughout the world.

After our tour we did take advantage of those free samples - Shock Top Wheat IPA and Lemon Shandy, Stella Artois (now an AB/Inbev beer), and something else forgettable made their way to our hands. None were particularly satisfying, but it's hard to argue with free.

Next up was a stop to 33, a wine bar in the Lafayette Square neighborhood. Though most folks might think of 33 as place for wine - a full cellar and extensive list are definitely defining elements of the menu - 33 also features features a great beer list, with well thought out and humorous descriptions and explanations of each beer. 33 is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it space - preferring to build a word-of-mouth business, the owners decided against any sort of outside signage. If you find yourself in a long white room with bubbles hanging from the ceiling, you're probably in the right place.

After dinner at the excellent (but non-noted) Pi, we finished our day at the City Museum. Opened in October 1997 by St. Louis artist Bob Cassilly, the museum isn't really a museum at all.

"(The City Museum is) an eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel made out of unique, found objects."

The end result is a complex housing anything and everything weird, a skatepark, a log cabin, a rooftop Ferris wheel, a giant praying mantis, and ten stories of tunnels/caverns that have the magical ability to trick full-grown adults into crawling around on their hands and knees in search of a ten-story slide.

The museum seems dangerous - it's an at-your-own-risk space - its "Enchanted Caves" have the ability to separate children from adults as the spaces get narrower and more difficult to navigate. It's the ultimate fix for the overbearing helicopter parent - every surface potentially dangerous, metal and wire and concert working together to provide endless entertainment. Visiting as we did - late on a Saturday night - the lights are turned low, the air was hot, and we sweated and crawled our way through the first five stories before jumping on a series of spiral slides in "the shoe shaft" area (click here for a panorama and imagine the entire area shrouded in darkness) in an effort to find our way back out.

It's a magic space, one that echoes what's happening in St. Louis these days - things that are surprising, fun, and grown up all at once. It was a perfect finish to our weekend - one we hope to repeat with more friends in the future.



Click here to read Part 1 of this 2 part series

Beer Diary #22 - Mike - Triton, Barley Island, Perennial, and The Civil Life

The world of better beer is one in which nothing stands still. New breweries and new releases fill the calendar, making it impossible to keep things under our thumbs. Nevertheless, we soldier on, knowing that it's the journey, not the finish, that keeps us coming back.

Well it sounds noble, anyway.


18 September 11
Location: Triton Brewing Company, 5764 Wheeler Road, Indianapolis

Triton began operations a couple weeks ago, and have been bringing on their new offerings in quick succession even since. We stopped in on a Sunday afternoon to sample their Fieldhouse Wheat, which was the only house beer available at the time. (They've since added their Magnificent Amber, Four Barrel Brown, and Deadeye Stout to the lineup.)


Triton'S Fieldhouse Wheat is an Amarillo-hopped wheat beer, balanced, with medium body and a citrus hop flavor. It's bigger than your standard wheat beer, but not quite gumballhead either. Oftentimes, the first beer out of a new brewery shows flaws - not the case here. A really nice introduction to Triton.

And the space looks awesome.


18 September 11
Location: Barley Island, Noblesville

We had to return a used HBG5 keg to Barley Island, so a trip up north made sense. What we found inside was Barley Island's Barrel Fermented Rust Belt Porter on cask. A beautiful bourbon nose, brown sugar and molasses, flat cask front, then vanilla - not a lot of wood comes through, just balanced bourbon flavor. Very nice.


Part of the fun of HBG is taking photos of people who don't want their picture taken.
20 September 11
Location: Tomlinson Tap Room, Indianapolis City Market

As part of their first anniversary, local coffeehouse Bjava Coffee and Tea has worked with a number of brewers around the city to put together a series of coffee-flavored beers. An excellent idea!


Flat12 Bjava Blond - This is a straight up coffee flavored coffee beer, almost just a cold cup of coffee. Really nice coffee with cream nose - strong on the coffee, golden lemony color, cloudy body. Roasty from the coffee, not from the beer, leans more towards the blacker side of coffee.

If you really dig coffee, this might be the beer for you.


20 September 11
Location: La Revolucion, Fountain Square

I was in need of tacos. Rumor had it that Revolucion's veggie tacos were excellent. I decided to investigate.

Tacos need beer. Rogue Dead Guy - the first hbg review? No, the tenth. Nevertheless, there's something about a Dead Guy in Fountain Square.

This one is domestic light lager colored, sweet malty nose, surprisingly deep in flavor - expected less from the nose. Earthy on front, then an explosion of sweetness in the finish. Grassy earthy. The quicker you drink it, the less fruity comes through though, so it seems like maybe the palate needs time to reset in there, somewhere.


16 September 11
Location: Perennial Artisan Ales, 8125 South Michigan, St. Louis, MO

As one of the benefits of running a slightly successful beer blog, we've met many folks, amongst them the large crew that regularly associates with STLHops.com's Mike Sweeney. Some of them, like former Itap/Lohr Distributing manager Cory King, even help run breweries.


Perennial is a recently opened example. Situated in a warehouse turned apartment and brewery space, the brewery plans to focus on "production of farmhouse ales, seasonal styles, and cellaring varieties that are intended to improve with age."

We're always up for a different approach, so we stopped in to check it out.


Southside blonde - straight-ahead belgian blonde, reminiscent of barley island's sheetmetal blonde.

Strawberry Rhubarb Tart - big strawberry out front on the nose - smells like strawberry chapstick. Sippin' in, definitely bringing out the rhubarb. Interesting.

Hommel Bier - star of the show, hints of citrus, chewy, the hops really shine through - super drinkable.

Each of these beers are very early in their lifecycle - I'm excited by the approach, and will be back to Perennial in the future.


17 September 11
Location: The Civil Life Brewing Company, 3714 Holt Ave, St. Louis, Mo 63116
Website Highly Recommended. Like this page.

This was a brewery opening. An anxious crowd gathered about a mile from the brewery location, where we we treated to a re-purposed beer-influenced Gettysburg Address before the parade started.

Yep, a parade.


We walked a block and were given a beer. The crowd continued to grow. We continued to walk. We were given another beer. We turned a corner - now just a block away from the brewery - and were greeted by a band of bagpipers. They lead us down the street to the brewery, where a pirate climbed onto the roof and raised a pirate flag.

BREWERY OPEN!


This is Carl on the second story balcony/seating area.
The Civil Life aims to be a neighborhood brewery in a neighborhood in need of one. Brewing sessionable beers, I expect them to do very well. The space was beautiful. The beer was tasty. We left happy.