Double Barrel Brewery is everything you could hope for in a local brewery– good beer, nice folks, and a great atmosphere.  The brewery is a bit hard to find as it is located in a storage/warehouse area and not well labeled. However, with a GPS and keeping track of street numbers, you should be able to find it.  We visited on a Sunday afternoon and the tasting bar was filled with friends of the brewer.  The customers were friendly and loved to talk about the history of the beer and how they liked to drink it.   The tasting room is sparse in terms of furniture but full of character.  The brewery equipment is clearly visible behind a series of windows and glass doors.  The loading area is right behind the bar.  I love places like this because they make me feel like the beer is being made for the love of beer– not the commercialization of the industry or desire to make lots of capital.

The beers are all good.  However, none of them tasted as I would have expected them to based on the names and style of beer.  The Old Abe American Ale is the strongest beer with an alcohol content of close to 10%.  I am not usually a lover of high alcohol beers as they often taste like someone poured some type of spirit into the beer. This Old Abe American Ale was very smooth and did not have that heavy alcohol taste. I was very impressed by this beer.  The Applehead IPA didn’t have that hoppy IPA taste that I generally love but had a more sweet finish that hinted at almonds.  Although I wouldn’t get this beer if I wanted a great IPA, I found it very drinkable.  The Belgium Ale had a very grapefruit taste not the more lemony taste of a traditional Belgium.  If you like grapefruit, it might be a great beer for you.   The signature beer is the Bad Tom Ale–a good beer and a good solid ale.  The greatest thing about this beer though is the accompanying story that explains the name.  Bad Tom was a local outlaw, hung for his past transgressions that he blamed on women and drink.  Actually all the beers are accompanied by interesting stories explaining their origins.  To me, this signals great thought and creativity in naming and creating the beers.  If you’ve been reading my blogs, I always give points for creativity!

 

Another stop on my trip to Cincinnati found me at Christian Moerlein ,a brew pub located downtown across the street from the Reds stadium.  I really thought that this brew pub was an almost exact copy of a Gordon Biersch.  The atmosphere was similar, as was the menu.  Gordon Biersch has great garlic fries so I happened to notice that these were prominently placed on the menu here also.  We ordered the pretzel and beer cheese appetizer that was quite good, but how can you go wrong with beer and cheese? The cheese did not seem to be homemade or fresh– we joked that it was probably melted from a cheese like product.  I ordered the mussel appetizer as my meal. My first order had about 6 mussels that were missing so I was given a second order. The second order only had 4 missing mussels. I do appreciate that they tried to make it right by providing a second order, but this should not have been the case.  My friend got the spicy macaroni and cheese appetizer as her meal.  This was good but the spice overpowered the cheese; I would have named it spice with cheese and macaroni.

I really hoped that the beers would make up for the lack of creativity in the atmosphere and problems menu.  They did not.  The only beer that I enjoyed was the hefeweizen.  The other beers were lacking in flavor and not as full bodied as I hope from a craft beer. The Octoberfest was offered at the Brew Ha Ha and I found that to be a decent beer– too bad it wasn’t yet offered at the brew pub.

My advice– Gordon Biersch was first and has better beers, so just stick with them!