Some new stuff.

(I know what you are thinking... "Troy sure is a posting machine.")

I am in the great northeast this weekend. Landenberg to be exact. This is home to me. Though I never slept in a room full of dolls when I was growing up. (Really, I didn't.)

So I came up here to visit my sister who is heading to S. Korea in a couple of weeks to spend a year teaching English to Korean kids. I wanted to spend some time with her. So I flew in late Friday night, and true to form, we visited two breweries and a brewpub on my first day in town.

The first place we stopped was a small farmhouse brewery in Greenville DE called Twin Lakes Brewery. I had never heard of it until that morning while doing a google search. So we decided to stop by and see what the place was about. We pulled in to see a large house and then a barn. The signs for the brewery pointed to the barn. It is no longer a dirty barn with farm animals or implements, but instead has been finished into a brewery and taproom complete with cold storage and big fermentation tanks. We wandered in and found some good beer and food themed conversation with other patrons, we found a guy who had gone to the same high school as us (which is more rare than you might think.. i graduated with 38 other people), and several pretty good samples. I chatted with the owner/brewmaster for a little bit about homebrewing and he gave me a couple tips to handle specific situations I have had some trouble with. It is cool to go to breweries and meet people because they are almost always cool and good to talk to and just as excited (geeky) about beer as me.

The next place Tori and I made our way to was the Dogfish Head main production brewery in Milton, DE. Milton is down in southern DE, near the beaches. Getting there turned out to be a fiasco. First, we got stuck in crawling traffic on the interstate. This was just to get to the highway that would take us all the way south. We never did see the cause of the 25 minutes of stop and go traffic on a Saturday afternoon. So we were running a little behind by this time, but not too badly. So things picked up and we made good time, until we got confused and headed into Milford DE (instead of Milton) to find the brewery. We drove around the town of Milford, which has more churches than any other type of building and more empty storefronts than open, for about 45 minutes utterly confused that the street names didn't match up until we finally gave up. At that point, I googled the brewery and discovered it was, in fact, in Milton..... not Milford. So we made our way to Milton and finally found the brewery. We arrived about an hour after the tour was to start, and when we walked in, the tour was over and the tour partakers were enjoying their free beer samples and buying merchendise. So we found our way over to the free sample counter and got some beer and then I purchased a couple of things. When I told the girl at the checkout what had happened, she offered to show us around if we could wait a few minutes. So she found someone to take her post and then proceeded to give Tori and me a private tour of the brewing facilities. Very cool.

One of the coolest things to see at Dogfish Head were the specially made wooden fermentation towers. Two of them were oak and one was a new one made out of a specialty wood, Paraguayan Palo Santo wood. These huge tanks were amazing to see. If you have come (read) this far, you should go further and read more about these tanks on their site. They also have an amazing farm of stainless fermentation tanks at the facility. This was a very cool tour and Dogfish Head is a very cool brewery. The beers are top-notch, too.

After eating dinner with an old friend down in Ocean City, MD and spending about 5 minutes on the beach and sticking our feet in the water, my sis and I headed into the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, DE. This is a pretty small brewpub, but we were lucky enough to get seats at the bar. At this location, Dogfish head brews small batches of experimental beers as well as operating a distillery on location where they distill rum, jin (gin), and vodka. We actually were the recipients of a flight of 4 of their distilled spirits,which were all very smooth, but our main reason d'etre (the dogfish fans will "get" that pun) was to try beer we can't get everywhere or hadn't had before. Since another goal of mine was to drive the 90 minute drive back home safely, it was not to be a marathon night of tasting different beers. Tori started with a flight of 5 tasters of their beer. I am not a huge fan of tasters usually because I feel like getting a good feel of a beer requires drinking the entire pint. I had also already had a few of the beers on the flight, anyway. So I opted to get an Indian Brown. I am pretty sure it is available elsewhere, but I had never tried it and decided the source was a great place to jump in. It was a great beer. Hoppier than most brown ales, it wasn't too sweet and was very enjoyable all the way through. After that beer, knowing the next would need to be my final of the night, I decided to go with one of the specialty beers. I went with the Palo Santo Marron (fermented in the big wooden fermenters I mentioned), which was another brown ale, but at 12% abv, it was quite different than my first brew. Also because of the higher alc content, I asked that the beer, which was served in a snifter, be split between Tori and myself. The bar tender played along, but instead of splitting it in half, he essentially gave us each a full glass minus maybe 3-4 sips-worth. So I milked that beer for almost an hour, and the beer got better as I drank it (funny how that works); it went from amazing to super-amazing. So with the new wood fermenter, this beer is to become a normal production beer. I look forward to seeing it in Nashville. Very good beers and, again, good conversations with other patrons. Breweries don't really ever disappoint.

Today was a quieter day on the beer front, but not altogether silent. I met a good friend and her husband in Kennett Square, PA for a couple of beers. The place we intended to go was not open, so we walked a little ways down the strip to another place where we could sit outside and enjoy a beverage. I had a single beer, but it was a great one. Victory brewery is a craft brewery in Exton PA, not far from here, that I hadn't heard of until the beer conversations I had this weekend. And the beer I had was one that had come highly reccomended. It was called Hop Devil IPA and if tasted and drank like an Imperial IPA, a little stronger than most. It was a very enjoyable beer with a lot of hops, but by no means overpowering. Keep an eye out for Victory Brewing. I have only had one beer, but it was good enough to be willing to try anything from that brewery.

Cheers.