Beer Tour: Lunar, Lodge and Lombard Rock Bottom

Yesterday we took a short beer tour of Villa Park, Lisle and Lombard, visiting 3 better beer bars with impressive selections.

LUNAR BREWING IN VILLA PARK
Our first stop was Lunar Brewing in Villa Park. It looks like a nice corner bar (and watch carefully for it as soon as you see the Jewel sign coming up across the street cause its easy to miss). It is a friendly and down-to-earth place, complete with regular folks who seem to own their own bar stools. But despite its borderline dive bar feel (and I mean that in a good way), it is a corner bar with great beer brewed on premises. The selections yesterday included NEIL ARMSTRONG, a belgian style strong golden ale/tripel which was really in top form. Nice belgian yeast and spicing -- started sweet, ended dry. 9% ABV

Also on tap is their Kosmonaut which is a Russian Imperial Stout. It was sweet and dark, a little thin with a touch of roasty bitterness. 10.5% was well hidden. It didn't really taste that strong! Other house beers on tap included an Amber Rye which was a nice Rye IPA and a Raspberry Cream ale.

The guest tap selection also showed great range and quality including Kalamazoo Royal Amber (i.e. brewed by Bells), Lindemanns Frambose, Goose Imperial IPA (both 2006 and 2007 vintages so you could do a vertical tasting!), Lagunitas Brown Shugga, Lefthand Blackjack Porter, and Ommegang Ommageddon Saison.

Lunar Brewing
54 East. St. Charles Road
Villa Park, IL
A new web site (new to me) seems to have relatively recent tap listings
http://www.myspace.com/lunarbrewingco

Nearby destinations include Sal's Beverage World -- which often has beers that have sold out quickly in Chicago and a few brands we don't see at Sam's and Binny's. We also picked up some blue cheese stuffed olives at Mike's Meat Market for a snack while we were tasting our beers at Lunar (since they don't serve food).

Sal's Beverage World
695 W Saint Charles Rd
Elmhurst, IL 60126
(630) 833-9800
(often mapped incorrectly -- this is West of Rt 83 and only about 3 blocks from Lunar)

Mike's Market
32 S. Villa Ave. (in strip mall at intersection of St. Charles Rd and Villa)
Villa Park, IL 60181
630-832-1760
http://www.caseysmarketonline.com/Mikes.html

BAVARIAN LODGE IN LISLE
On our way to the Lodge in Lisle, we stopped by Bende Foods in Glen Ellyn to supplement our already copious collection of smoked meats that we currently have in our fridge. The Bende store is immaculate and exceedingly well organized. It was also nice to see all the Bende meat products in once place. The meat selection also included a small array of germanic sausages and liver dumplings.

Bende Meats
444 Roosevelt Rd
Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-5642
http://www.bende.com/index.html

The actual destination for the whole outing was to sample Surly Smoke at the Lodge in Lisle. Surly http://www.surlybrewing.com/index.php is an up-and-coming brewery in Minnesota. They have been having beer releases of their kegged beers for the past month or so in most of the better beer places around the Chicago area (other releases included Darkness and Furious). Everything I have had by them has been quality, and I got to try a number of their beers at the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers this Fall.

The new release last night was a smoked baltic porter, called Smoke. As far as smoked beers go, this one was more roasty than smoky. Sweet and dark as you might expect from a baltic porter, but it actually did not taste its 9.5% ABV. This was a perfectly fine beer. For me it didn't have enough of the smoke profile to really make me love it. On the other extreme, there are the Schenklera (bacon in a glass) Rauchbiers, and those have a bit too MUCH smoke for me. I prefer more intermediately smoked beers, and among those a new favorite is the recent seasonal from Left Hand -- Gooseinator Dopplebock.

We also had food at the Lodge and found it to be a good value/quality German cuisine. We had almond crusted duck breast (served with pan dripping gravy) to start. The duck pieces were well fried, but you couldn't really tell it wasn't dark chicken. The dumplings in the liver dumpling soup were nice and a subtle mix of pork and liver (i.e. not overwhelmingly liver-y). On the down side, the broth seemed to be a thin boullion base that didn't really do the dumpling justice. The Lodge does not offer veal schnitzel, so I got the Pork Hunter's schnitzel. The schnitzels were large and impeccably fried -- nicely crispy. The mushroom sauce was fine if not inspiring (I prefer the rahm sauce at Resi's which tends to have more body and flavor). The spaetzles were simply boiled, and I prefer the Lachette's prep -- pan fried with nutmeg. So these went straight to the to-go box so we could re-prep them at home! The creamed spinach was excellent -- mostly spinach (and not overly creamy) with bits of bacon. I again missed the nutmeg, but the bacon was a nice addition that took the spinach in a different and very nice direction! Griffin got the meatloaf which was the star of the evening -- a combination of 4 meats including bacon and smoked thuringer. The meatloaf sandwich looked great as well.

In all, I can see why locals think of this as their go-to destination in the area! And a really nice beer selection that makes it a worthy beer destination as well. It was great to sample some Ettaler Curator, a German doppelbock that I have not had on tap before. The Curator was toffeey, malty and sweet, without some of the over-the-top roast that you can get from Optimator. Their beer selection is updated online http://www.bavarian-lodge.com/beerlist.html
(and I note that all the beer geeks coming in for the Surly Smoke ran them out of a lot of good beers last night!)

Bavarian Lodge
1800 Ogden Ave
Lisle, IL 60532
(630) 241-4701
www.bavarian-lodge.com/
(this has been reviewed several times before on LTH as the Bavarian Lodge but also as Chef Paul's)

ROCK BOTTOM Yorktown in Lombard
A final stop was at the Rock Bottom in Lombard. Its worth repeating that although Rock Bottom is a chain -- the Chicago location, and now the Yorktown/Lombard location, have great brewmasters who are doing excellent things with their seasonals. As of last night, RB Lombard had 6 seasonals on tap and another on CASK. The Rye Porter was on both tap and cask. The use of rye accenuates the hoppy quality in the porter. The Winter Wit was a cloudly very belgian wit with lemon and eggy qualities. Two of the seasonals are barrel aged: the Creme Dreme, a cream stout aged for a year in bourbon barrels, and the Night Vision, an IPA aged for 5 months. The latter was a solid IPA with oaky wood overtones. The Creme Stout really picked up the vanilla from the cask and seemed to pick up some bourbon heat as well. The Old Thumper Barley Wine was 9.5%, and if you like grapefruit hops and strong alcohol - this is the beer for you. The final seasonal offering was 3rd Eye Imperial Stout which was a fine stout -- didn't really taste imperial, but had good body and nice dark flavors. In addition to the kick-ass seasonal line up, you can get most beers to go in growlers for 6.99 (downtown location has similar deal, does not include barrel-aged or barley wine -- but did include the wit and rye porter), making this the best growler value in the Chicago area. In sum, don't dismiss RB because of its chain-ness. Local brewers are doing some good things there too.

Rock Bottom Yorktown
94 Yorktown Center
Lombard, Illinois, 60148
(sadly no online listing of seasonal beers at corporate website)

First off...welcome to my Villa Park-ish neighborhood! I don't get to say that often on this forum, unlike all you lucky city dwellers

Thanks for the nice round up of local brews and for some great ideas of things to try. Lunar is one of my favorite places but I am really looking forward to January 1st and the smoking ban. I can't sit inside Lunar for more than 20 minutes if smokers are there. It will be a joy to quaff some ale and breathe at the same time.