Lagers and Quads (and IPAs) in Atlanta
On November 2nd, the people of Atlanta stayed up late to watch their baseball team win the World Series. I happened to be in the city that evening, though I was watching from a room on the upper floors of a downtown hotel and didn’t witness any of the subsequent rapture surely breaking out below.
I can report that the city’s breweries were open that day, because I went to four of them. They were curated by my local guide, Bob Townsend, who writes about beer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Combined with my stop the night before at New Realm, the gorgeous newish brewery co-founded by pioneering brewer Mitch Steele, and I got a great snapshot of what Atlanta has to offer. It speaks of a city with a mature but sophisticate palate, able to support showcase destination brewpubs along with production breweries and quirky, niche operations. Cool stuff is happening in Atlanta!
I’ve grown to hate the question about “best” beer towns and the squabbling it inspires, but certainly a good one must have a market for breweries making idiosyncratic beers, and it should have a few making truly exceptional ones. By those standards, Atlanta passes in flying colors. New Realm, of course, is a larger and growing brewery with serious commercial aspirations. It leans into hops, with a very IPA-centric lineup. The beers, unsurprisingly, are extremely well-made and well-conceived. But then there’s Bold Monk, a 5,000-barrel brewery with a a flagship Belgian quadrupel. Monday Night Brewing is fully modern, with wood-aged lagers and a lot of IPA, but they also have a winemaker/brewer who loves wild ales. In the most surprising stop on the tour, Belgian-born Joran Van Ginderachter is making crazy good lagers (I’ll unpack the surprises below) and no IPAs, and Elsewhere Brewing also does great lagers and pub-strength beer. I couldn’t imagine a better quintet to demonstrate a city’s range.
Co-founder and brewmaster Mitch Steele has been making beer professionally since the late 1980s. One of the rare homebrewers of the era to get a degree on his way (UC-Davis), he’s seen everything the beer world has to offer: brewpubs in the early days, a stint at Anheuser-Busch in the ‘90s when A-B was trying to figure out what to do with craft, and finally taking over at Stone during the height of that brewery’s growth and evolution. A Californian who literally wrote the book on IPA, he has not just witnessed the transformation in American craft breeding, but helped engineer it.
I’ve talked a lot about what veteran brewers know, and New Realm’s beers are a perfect example. As with any craft, the longer you do a thing, the better you get at it. Folks new to a craft love drama and ostentation, and often shoot for bold, flashy creations. Mature craftspeople have a knack for elegance, stripping their work down to what is essential and then refining it. New Realm’s beers have that consistently elegant quality. I’ll confess I drank more of the lagers, but the IPAs were a joy because they found balance and drinkability amid the lush flavors and aromas.
During the talk, we tried a pub-only beer made solely with Citramosaic—amazingly the first they’ve ever made—that really drove home the lesson. The brewery had selected hops to feature the softer, brighter notes that produced sun-washed beer with almost no dank, savory, or catty flavors. I would have happily had a couple pints.
The lagers were great, too. Euphonia Pilsner is a fairly traditional German pils, but the hops, though classic lager varieties, were used late in the boil and in the whirlpool—definitely not traditional. It suggests how Americans might one day find their voice in lagers as they did in ales, moving away from strict adherence to foreign traditions. It creates a less bitter, more floral and flavorful hop profile.
I failed to take pictures after Mitch and I got talking, but here are a couple.
Twenty-three years ago, John “JR” Roberts founded the oldest brewpub in Atlanta, Max Lagers. Bold Monk is also a brewpub, but that’s about as far as the similarities go. The giant facility is nestled next to a forested ridge (Atlanta’s a very green city), and it was built to create a quiet, monastic feel. JR created distinct spaces in the building to suit different moods. The main seating area looks like a traditional pub, but upstairs he designed a barrel-vaulted sanctuary to grab a quiet beer—or coffee—and a book. It has its own bar but also a bookstore and reading area, and definitely evokes a mood of contemplation. One end looks at the brewhouse, the other out to another seating area, a leafy beer garden. Tucked elsewhere is a seating area of secluded booths under a box beam ceiling—more of a German vibe there—and next to it the barrel room, which has a long table for private events.
JR hoped to feature Belgian ales when he started the business, but didn’t really expect them to sell well. Remarkably, they have, and he’s brewing several thousand barrels a year, with a flagship quad (!) leading the way. His tripel is also a big hit. They have four foeders as well, and do some wild beers in them.
A day later I would touch down in Charlotte for an event at Sugar Creek Brewing, where co-founder Joe Vogelbacher had a similar vision. Yet in that town, people didn’t go for the Belgians and he’s selling a lot more hoppy ales. At Bold Monk, people can find an IPA or two, but they are a decided secondary focus. So Atlanta clearly has room for a decent-sized brewery selling quads. That’s something!
In what seems like a very Southern twist, Monday Night started as a Bible study. It eventually morphed into a homebrew group (they brewed on Monday nights) and ultimately into one of the city’s best-regarded breweries. I met with Peter Kiley, originally educated in winemaking, who started us off with a helles and a foeder-conditioned version of a similar beer. The contrast highlighted the degree to which wood aging changes a beer—and wow, does it ever. There was acidity in the nose, strange because there wasn’t any on the palate, though woody notes and a deeper lager-y snap were.
Monday Night has a familiarly modern focus: tons of hoppy beers, including a specialty IPA line that feeds a stream of new four packs available at the brewery, dessert and barrel-aged stouts, and assorted fun experiments like the foeder-aged lager. I tried a couple of the IPAs as a matter of QA (good!). But they also do wild ales, and they were the ones that spoke to me.
Peter pulled out a bottle of their first gueuze-style blend, Imaginary Grace. A fully-spontaneous blend of 1-, 2-, and 3-year old vintages, it seemed dear to Peter’s heart because it combined his wine and beer approaches. I loved it because the terroir of the yeast and bacteria were so distinctive. It has a huge peach/stone fruit nose that carries into the palate. The stone becomes a bigger part of the picture as the beer warms. It has a distinct noyaux flavor—the nutty edible bit inside a peach pit. It tastes something like almond, but with a dry, medicinal/herbal aftertaste.
It’s clearly not a big part of their program, but for someone coming from Oregon who’s tasted an IPA or million, it offers a unique taste of region. Again, anemic selection of photos—sorry!
Halfway Crooks (With an Elsewhere Chaser)
Bob took me to one more stop before he had to depart. (A Braves fan, he needed prep time for what would become his celebratory evening.) It was one of the most interesting breweries I encountered, not just in Atlanta, but my entire tour.
If you know your twitchy, edgy 90s NYC hip hop, you might recognize the brewery’s name as a reference from Mobb Deep’s classic Shook Ones (“Scared to death, scared to look, they shook/‘Cause ain't no such things as halfway crooks”). Knowing that Atlanta has been one of the central fonts of great rap for more than a decade, you might therefore draw certain conclusions about Halfway Crooks.
You would be wrong. The brewery has one of the most distinctive cultural vibes, but the influence comes from the northeast—the very distant northeast. The project of American Shawn Bainbridge and Belgian Joran Van Ginderachter, it effervesces with the quirky personality of Brussels, from the absurdist captions on the front of the building (“free air inside,” “goed bier hier”) to the clean, bight cafe interior, to the curiously twee dot-matrix branding. Indeed, the only mention of the name omits anything about a shook kid, instead rambling about something incredibly obscure having to do with sheep. When I saw it, I exclaimed, “Smeirlap!”
Joran Van Ginderachter
The fascinating twist is that Halfway Crooks, while making some elegant farmhouse ales roughly in the Belgian tradition, has quickly become known for their lagers, and one in particular really lit my imagination: a Belgian pils. No, not that Belgian lager (the one in the chalice), but a pils like they make in the countryside. Breweries like Dupont and Verhaeghe started brewing them after World War II mainly for the cafes around their villages as people turned to lagers. Dupont’s Redor Pils, for example, kept the lights on and allowed the brewery to keep making Saison. These are not like usual pilsners. They’re often a bit cloudy, usually feature really interesting yeasts (because Belgium), and often have malts with flavors you don’t find elsewhere.
I instantly ordered Pintje, HC’s version. It was exactly as I recalled, and I remembered one I’d had in 2019 at a little cafe near Vichte right before touring Verzet. Made by Verhaeghe, it was a wonderful pint. A few minutes later, Joran sat down and I complemented him on the beer and relayed this story and with perfect Flemish reserve, he said, “I was one of the three founders of Verzet.” I recalled that when I was there in 2019, Alex Lippens mentioned a third brewer who had co-founded the brewery, but he’d unexpectedly left for the US. I mostly forgot about that third figure until that moment. He sent off a text to Alex in Belgium mentioning the coincidence. The whole encounter added a bit more surreality to the quirky experience.
The beer is fantastic, from the Czech výčepní and tmavý to a smoked helles to the German pils. The Belgian pils was the biggest highlight. It had that same rustic quality, with unusually expressive yeast, soft, lightly sweet malt, and a bright mineral finish. These beers are common in Belgium but they fly under the radar, and I was transported instantly back. I would never have expected to find such a brewery anywhere, let alone Atlanta.
If you don’t get your lager fix at Halfway Crooks, you can take a short 1.5 mile jaunt to Elsewhere Brewing. The evening I visited, half the beers were lagers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to push it higher—behind the restaurant is a cellar lined with horizontal lagering tanks. I would love to tell you more about the beer, which I admired, but after all the quads and gueuzes and pilsners, my recall is a bit dim. Suffice it to say it was yet another great Atlanta brewery committed to doing something distinctive and well.
It’s a small sample size, but based on the day I would have to elevate Atlanta to one of the better beer cities I’ve seen in the US. If you live in the South, plan a trip.