The Great American Ale Trail - Christian DeBenedetti [44]
BLUE PALMS BREWHOUSE
6124 Hollywood Blvd. • Los Angeles, CA 90028 • (323) 464-2337 bluepalmsbrewhouse.com • Established: 2008
SCENE & STORY
While Hollywood these days is full of reality show losers, tourists, and plastic surgeons, it’s not all bad. Eight blocks from the Walk of Fame and adjacent to the historic Henry Fonda Theater is one of the city’s best beer bars, with a strong, constantly rotating, and California-focused tap list of twenty-four (plus ninety bottles and a cask), a tradition for brewmaster appearances and beer dinners, and a good and none-too-pricey food menu. It’s got Prohibitionera terrazzo floors, high ceilings in ruddy red, wide wooden beams, oversize mirrors, and some living palms, giving it a nice touch of Old Hollywood ambiance.
PHILOSOPHY
Retro look, today’s beer.
KEY BEER
Sudwerk Lager, a German helles-style beer from Davis, California, is a classic choice—light, grassy, grainy, and bright on the tongue but not without a malty backbone (4.9% ABV).
EAGLE ROCK BREWERY
3065 Roswell St. • Los Angeles, CA 90065 • (323) 257-7866 eaglerockbrewery.com • Established: 2009
SCENE & STORY
Jeremy Raub, a former film music editor, and his father, Steve, an ex-Navy man and dedicated home brewer who taught his son to brew, overcame a mountain of red tape delays in order to get their 15 bbl brew house open in 2009, making it the first brewery in Los Angeles proper in some sixty years. Its ultraclean, organized taproom has been busy ever since, giving tours (Sundays only, 12 to 6 p.m.). As at Verdugo, food trucks are often on hand to provide the sustenance.
PHILOSOPHY
“Beer for the People” is the slogan, and the Raubs play with a neo-revolutionary theme in beer names like Manifesto and Solidarity. The beers are technically vegan (in avoiding fining, or clarifying, agents from animal products), and run the gamut of styles, from English mild to American wild, with some experimental ingredients (rose petals).
KEY BEER
Solidarity Dark Mild (3.8% ABV) is a light, chocolaty, grainy-tasting British session beer, meaning it’s low in alcohol and meant for sustained periods of beer drinking without intoxication.
THE BRUERY
715 Dunn Way • Placentia, CA 92870 • (714) 996-6258 bruery.com • Established: 2008
THE BRUERY PROVISIONS
143 N. Glassell • Orange, CA 92866 • (714) 997-2337 brueryprovisions.com • Established: 2010
SCENE & STORY
A few years ago, Patrick Rue was reluctantly headed for a law career, but the trouble was, beer brewing was the only thing that held his attention. With his nose buried in a home brewing book his wife bought from a 99-cent bookstore, Rue was soon blowing off homework to craft dozens, even hundreds of batches. “I’d brew almost every weekend and during the week when I was ‘studying,’” Rue recalls. In other words, he was preparing for a different kind of bar.
After taking a massive leap of faith with family and personal investments, one of the more successful American breweries of the last decade was born. Rue and head brewer Tyler King hew mainly to Belgian brewing traditions, which, generally speaking, tend to produce beers that are spicier, more intensely flavored, and higher in alcohol content than their American counterparts, and often bear the tannins and acids from wood barrels and wild yeasts. They’re wild, but often delicious and food friendly. The hype surrounding the beers has been surprisingly loud, cranking up even higher after a dominant showing in the 2010 World Beer Cup in two hotly contested categories with sixty-eight runners up in all.
Visitors to the brewery in Placentia encounter a bland exterior (with a taco truck if you’re lucky), but inside, there’s a brighter space, with yellow and sage walls and a small tasting bar area next to fermenters and stacks of oak barrels. This is also the site of beer release parties, like one in October 2009 he might prefer to forget. The plan was to release 2,400 bottles of an onyx-black, 19.5% ABV, bourbon-barrel-aged stout called Black Tuesday, and seven hundred