Meet Me at the Weirdo Micropub
A Green City preview and a brewery visit 234 years in the making
Well, last weekend did not go according to plans. As a result of high winds, Beak Brewery’s These Hills Festivals was canceled. The winds caused quite a stir, and the venue — tents in an open field — didn’t help the situation. But I rolled with the punches, as I tend to do, taking one of the best tours of a brewery I’ve ever had with a guy who’s brewed at said brewery longer than I’ve been alive (more on that shortly), connecting with old friends who were also shut out of the festival, and managing to attend a local (and indoor) CAMRA festival on the same day, keeping my streak of going to a beer fest every Saturday in June alive.
Later in the trip, I ventured to other parts of England, and wandered into a Weirdo Micropub on Monday afternoon as I waited for a ferry. Weirdo Micropubs are my term for a phenomenon that seems limited to that part of the world, and it’s hard to describe them. I tried my hardest back in 2022 when I visited a memorable one in Hartlepool, but they’re all varying degrees of weird. The one I visited on Monday seemed to check every box: a gruff, disinterested proprietor? Check. Mismatched furniture that seemed to be salvaged from an estate sale? Check. Odd decor with seemingly no particular theme? Check. Possibly dodgy patrons? Definitely check. The only music coming from a radio station played on one speaker? Oh, absolutely. And yet, I had a fantastic pint of beer off an impressive list of options, despite it feeling more like I was crashing someone’s basement party than visiting a place of business.
The West Coast breweries you’ll get to know at Green City
Other Half’s annual Green City festival is happening this Saturday at their Gowanus taproom. If you’re going — and sorry, procrastinators, the fest is sold out — there are a few new faces that haven’t appeared at Green City before. And the ones I’ll mention here are breweries I have first-hand knowledge about, simply because I’ve visited them in the past year.
everywhere. is a relative newcomer to Orange, California that I stumbled upon by accident last New Year’s Eve. The brewery itself may be new, but its founders are hardly new to beer, cutting their teeth at The Bruery over the years before setting up shop at this whimsically-designed brewery and taproom in 2022 and quickly gaining acclaim for their lagers and IPAs.
Living Häus Beer Co. has some big shoes to fill in Portland, Oregon. The space was home to two other breweries before the current tenants took over in the summer of 2022 and this time around, I’m really hoping this one sticks. That’s because they’re just making all-around good beer, from Milds to Lagers to Pale Ales and Hazies.
GOAL. Brewing holds the title of being the 100th brewery I visited in San Diego County, California when I visited back in March. Brewer Derek Gallanosa makes incredible beers (he brewed at California cult favorite Moksa) that can be straightforward lagers and IPAs or incredibly inventive sours and stouts, often leaning on his Filipino roots with ingredients like ube, pandan, coconut, and passion fruit.
Superflux was the first brewery I visited after dropping my bags at my hotel in Vancouver, BC last November, on account of every person I knew or had recently visited hyping it up. It lives up to the hype. It’s another brewery taking advantage of cutting-edge technology in hops and experimental hops, much in the mold of Green City’s host brewery. It’s no wonder they’re here, but it’s great nonetheless.
Brewery Tracker
Total brewery count:Â 3,443
Total breweries visited in 2024:Â 159
Total breweries visited in the United Kingdom: 205
Brewery Visit of the Week
Brewery #3438, Harvey’s Brewery, Lewes, England (Visited 15-Jun-2024)
I’m still utterly speechless by the tour I took at Harvey’s last Saturday. A lot of my UK beer friends romanticize this place, and I understand why. It’s an historic brewery with a long history, founded in 1790 and operating at its current location since the early-to-mid-19th century. Even the recent history is storied; Miles Jenner, our tour guide and head brewer, has been making beer at Harvey’s for longer than I’ve been alive, guiding it through a fire and a devastating flood, and keeping the brewery’s traditions in tact even as the brewery innovates — they’ve got an upcoming collaboration with nearby Burning Sky and Belgium’s Brasserie de la Senne on the horizon. Sussex Best Bitter, their flagship beer, is practically the gold standard for the style, and I took in every inch of the history of this place as I walked through the same halls and staircases where generations of John Harvey’s decendants and even Queen Elizabeth II (“my favorite assistant brewer, if just for a day, Jenner said on the tour) roamed.
This was something special, and it couldn’t have been a more fitting setting for my 200th brewery in the U.K.
The Doom and Gloom Tracker
At least 3 breweries I’ve visited closed or announced their closure this week:
Brewery #145, Cascade Brewing Company, Portland, Oregon (Visited 2-Nov-2013)
Brewery #172, Eagle Rock Brewery, Los Angeles, California (Visited 26-Jan-2014)
Brewery #1716, Peace Tree Brewing Co. - Des Moines Branch, Des Moines, Iowa (Visited 12-Oct-2019)
The Weekly Reader
The long, winding story of a Boston-area beer behemoth [Andy Crouch, All About Beer]
The past, present, and future of lager yeast [Mark Dredge, Good Beer Hunting]
Beer has a sex problem [Katie Mather, The Gulp]
I refuse to believe this article about growlers was written in 2024 [Johnny Motley, CNN]
One Last Thing
Happy first day of Summer, and damn, did summer arrive with a vengeance. It didn’t help that it barely topped 68°F (20°C) the entire time I was over in England. Stay cool out there, and if you’re going, see you at Green City this weekend!
Cheers,
Chris