My Pub Crawl

My homebrew club went on our annual pub crawl last Saturday. We hit some new (to me) interesting places.

Our first stop was Local Options. They had 25 drafts on their chalkboard, some I had never heard of and others I had never tasted. There was no pricing on the board, which caused some surprises latter.

Since it was our first stop I started with a breakfast beer: Founders Breakfast Stout. I thought this was an excellent brew. My second beer was: Mikkeler Baltic Porter (Sweden, I think). I always like porters. The bartender said he was the only bar in North America to have this on tap. I thought it was VG. However, at $10 for a half a glass I was disappointed. The beer had nice brown foam, but it took up almost half the glass. I let the foam go down and asked to have it topped off, which at that price I thought was reasonable. I was surprised at the attitude I got. He said they use a bigger glass because of the foam.

Our next stop was the Village Tap. They had around 25 taps. Not as unique as Local Options, but very decent selection. I had the Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter. I have had it before, but I really like it. My second brew was an import from Belgium: Triple Karmeliet. This 8% brew was described on the menu as: Abby Triple, golden-bronze w/fruity banana & vanilla notes. Sorry my palette is not that good, so I didn’t taste all that. It was strong and I liked it. Their monthly special was Kostritzer Red for $4. Several of the others on the crawl thought this was excellent.

Third stop was the Bad Apple. This place is about a half block from the Half Acre Brewery. So several of the crawlers went there, where we had some samples and a tour. I was really hungry and given the size (55) of our group I decided to walk a block to Jury’s. I just thought I would get better service there. I had a burger (excellent) with pasta salad. The bartender said it was homemade. I thought it was inedible. I washed it down with a Bell’s Porter. This was a very nice porter. Their tap selection was not very extensive.

The Bad Apple seemed to have a nice tap selection. My group seemed to like the Centennial IPA. I didn’t have a beer here as I needed to catch my wind.

Our last stop was the Chicago Ale House. I think they had about 64 taps, a very nice selection. I decided to split my beers here. I had a ½ of Old Rasputin, an imperial stout, and then ½ of St. Bernardus Abt 12 from Belgium. I seem to remember that I liked both a lot.

My favorite stop was probably the last. I thought their selection was terrific, but what set them apart were their prices. I found them very reasonable. Local Options and Bad Apple were a little high.

Local Option
1102 W. Webster Ave.

Village Tap
2055 West Roscoe Street

Bad Apple
4300 N. Lincoln Ave.

Jury’s
4337 North Lincoln Avenue

Chicago Ale House
2200 W. Lawrence Ave

D.

Looks like a great crawl.

FWIW: Mikkeller is Danish. They make some outstanding, seriously crafted brews. Pretty cool finding them in Chicago (even though you seem to end up paying through the nose for it). I'm not even certain I can find Mikkeller on tap in Stockholm...

(Edited to add that I've even posted about Mikkeller briefly once when I had one of their beers together with some oysters and steak tartare.)

Mikkeller is always tremendously expensive. Pretty much the most expensive beer given the ABV that you can find. In Fine Spirits has a few of their bottles in their store, but it's always at least $5 for a 12 oz. bottle of 5-6% brew which is a bit above what I'm willing to pay usually. I tried one or two of their pale ales made with a single hop variety which is a cool idea, but again the price makes it hard to justify when you can get a bottle of Hopslam for less and a bomber of Southern Tier's IPA or even Dreadnaught for a lower price per ounce.

Re the "high" prices and heady pour at Local Option:

The Local Option uses proper glassware tailored to each beer, and the glass they use for the Mikkeller (which I had last night) is not meant to be filled to the top. Actually, that's true of most beer glasses since most beers are meant to be poured with a head, and without it the taste and body suffer.
So, you got about a 12oz pour into a Belgian style wide mouth stemmed glass that holds 19oz. Asking to have it "topped off" is not at all reasonable and akin to asking to have an oversized Merlot glass topped off with high-end wine.
As for the $10 pricetag, that is beyond reasonable for what that beer costs them and they are making less profit on it than most bars (including Chicago Ale House) are on most of their beers. All Mikkeller beers are pricey, and that one is over $15 for a 750ml bottle at the liquor store (on the slim chance you could find a liquor store that has it). Add to that the fact that Local Option is paying a premium on Mikkeller kegs because they are the only ones serving Mikkeller on draft in the city (and one the only in the country). I know of people who actually came from Oklahoma recently primarily to have Mikkeller on draft there (I agree that is insane but it highlights just how rare it is).
So, my guess is that the $10 price is less than a 100% markup compared to the 300%-500% markup for most beers at most bars.
In addition, the Local Option has almost nothing but higher end, rare, seasonal type beers that you would unlikely find elsewhere. Whereas a place like Chicago Ale House that goes more for quantity than quality has mostly pedestrian beers that are easy to find, relatively low cost, and often mass produced corporate beers (by which I include their imports that almost all Ambev products). They are making 400% profThis it on a $4 pint of miller lite, so they can afford to charge a little less for a pint of New Holland Mad Hatter. But Mad Hatter would represent the cheapest, highest profit margin beer at Local Option, so they can't lower the price and make it up by selling lots of swill.

Of course, if you don't really care about the rare or high gravity brews and more "run of the mill" (but still tasty) beers like Mad Hatter or Bells Amber are what your after, then Chicago Ale House is likely to have them for slightly cheaper. However, even there you are far more likely to get an old, stale, or even spoiled pint of those beers at Chicago Ale House for the same reason that makes it cheaper and because most of the servers there wouldn't be able to tell that a beer has gone bad.

In short, it's a case of you get what you pay for, with the caveat that you are paying for not only just that beer but for what the bar as a whole has to offer.

Griffin, I fully agree with you on the selection and glass ware at Local Option. This is a very excellent bar. And vs. the Chicago Ale House, again I agree there is no comparison.

I am very ignorant of how bars price their beers. So I don’t know about the markups. I guess my point was that I thought there were a lot of some good beer choices at the Chicago Ale house and all seemed reasonably priced. A lot of the other home brewers were also impressed with this stop.

Maybe I was off base when I asked to have my Mikkeller topped off. But if someone who was in charge of having 55 people show up at your bar for 2 hours of free spending on food and beer during a slow Saturday asks for a couple more shots of beer I think he made a big mistake.

Rightly or wrongly I bad mouthed his establishment to the other 54 people on the crawl. As you said maybe I should not have asked for more, but I did it out of ignorance and now I have badmouthed him out of ignorance to my 54 other crawlers. I am not going to write a mea culpa to all of them. He may have been right in giving me grief, but I think he was a little short sighted, for maybe an extra shot of brew.