DC Brau Brewery

This weekend, a couple of friends, The Cookie Girl, and I headed over to DC’s own craft brewery, DC Brau Brewing Company.  Every Saturday is growler day when, from 1-4pm, visitors can get a tour and have their growlers filled with 64 ounces of liquid awesome.  There’s also free tastings and a cookout, the proceeds of which benefit the Burn Foundation.  Despite being pretty inconveniently located in a not-so-great and not-s0-accessible area of DC, as soon as we stepped in the door, I was glad we had come. Unfortunately, I was having camera issues but I was lucky enough to be able to borrow some shots for this post.

All around me were fellow beer lovers, sitting, chatting, and drinking free craft beer. After showing our ID’s to the doorman, we were each given 4 tickets for beer samples and immediately headed to the small bar located in the main office of the the brewery.  DC Brau is essentially located in a giant garage on the back side of a run down storefront.  There are really only a couple of rooms: the office/bar area; the brewing/canning/beer storage area, and the experimental brewing/barrel aging room.  There’s not much to it and it’s a pretty intimate setting which I liked; if I were to start a brewery, it would probably pretty closely resemble DC Brau.

After sampling DC Brau’s seasonal Penn Quarter Porter (a wonderful beer), we each grabbed ourselves a second glass of beer and prepared for a quick tour of the brewery.

The Touring Test

I really appreciated how laid back and friendly the DC Brau staff were.  The owner (who happens to have a spectacular mustache) hung out at the bar, greeted visitors, and was seen checking on brewing equipment when not twirling his waxed stache and grinning at the kingdom he had created (I may or may not be embellishing a bit here). Our tour guide was equally amiable though his mustache was clearly still being born.  He explained the basics of the brewing process to us, showed us the various pieces of equipment, and even allowed us to see some fermentation in action. We also got to take a look at some of DC Brau’s experiments in brewing that included aging beer in Rye whiskey barrels, custom casks with additions of unique hop varieties and other special ingredients, as well as some small batch sour beers aged in wine barrels which I hope to get my hands on when they decide to start selling it.

After a full tour of the brew room, we were taking over to see how a small brewery like DC Brau puts its beer into containers for distribution.  Currently, they only distribute their beer to bars and restaurants in the form of kegs, casks, and cans.  We were shown the equipment by which the small staff hand fills kegs as well as the machine used to fill and seal each and every can  5 at a time.  Like I said, this is not a large operation and DC Brau actually utilized volunteers for the canning process, paying them in beer and t-shirts which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Finally, we headed back to the front room where we consumed a couple more samples and got our growlers filled.  I came hoping to get a growler of the Penn Quarter Porter but since they only sold that in pre-filled growlers and I had brought my own empty growler, I settled for the Corruption IPA which did not disappoint.

Corruption IPA

We popped the growler open pretty quickly after getting home (shortly after a quick detour to Hogs on the Hill for some sweet and spicy pit barbecue).  The Corruption IPA poured a beautiful reddish orange with a nice amount of lacy head.  A beer like this is meant to be consumed fresh and its freshness was perceivable immediately after pouring.  I didn’t even have to bring my nose to the glass to get a whiff of its strong hop aroma.  It smelled great with a real hops in your face, floral aroma.  The flavor was equally hoppy.  I truly know what my fellow beer snobs have been talking about when describing a hoppy beer as “piney and resinous” as this beer was exactly that. It has character to spare and is almost too much at first as the hops overwhelm your senses.  It is, however, quite light and smooth for an IPA though the hops at times impart an almost oily/soapy feel that could probably stand to be balanced out a bit.  Still, this is a solid and unique IPA and we had no trouble finishing the growler off quickly.

Beer Meter Rating

 

 

Enjoy the gallery of DC Brau Photos, courtesy of the Cookie Girl:

Filed Under: Beer Reviews

Tags: beer, brewery tour, burn foundation, canned beer, Cookie Girl, cookout, Corruption IPA, craft beer, DC beer, DC Brau, DC Brau brewing company, DC brews, Featured, fermentation, fermentation without representation, growler, hogs on the hill, Penn Quarter Porter, washington dc