Cigar City & Swamp Head@ The Black Squirrel

[BlackSquirrel]

FLORIDA BREWS: Cigar City & Swamp Head Breweries
A rare chance to enjoy beer from two breweries not yet available in our market.
WEDNESDAY, June 6.  Tapping at 5:00 pm.

Q & A for homebrewers and beer lovers in the tap room starting at 6:30 pm with the Cigar City and Swamp Head brewers and crew.

Two floors and 20 tap lines of rare Florida beer, including the much sought-after Cigar City/Swamp Head collaboration, Churchill barleywine. Plus, we’re making Cuban sandwiches: Que Vola!

Posted by The Black Squirrel located at 2427 18th Street NW Washington, DC 20009 (In Adams Morgan)  202-232-1011  www.BlackSquirrelDC.com

[mpilchuk]

I'm there. Sounds like a good evening of beer fun.

[webnmar]

Me too, Mitch needs a supervisor.

[mpilchuk]

Webster and I went to this 'Beer Event' last night. Savor week has well, since Savor started, a week of pretty cool activities concerning beer. With the Brickskeller gone, we no longer have the great panel of brewers chatting about their beers. I guess RFD has had something, but I haven't made it down to any.

So last night we drove on down to Adams Morgan to visit the Black Squirrel and check out the beers. When we got there, we went up to the third floor and quickly realized that there wasn't any even happening there. We went down to the second floor and found a slightly crowded bar area which we attempted to navigate our way into. A waitress came up and said just grab a table and I'll be right over to take your order. We looked over the beer list and sure enough there were a bunch of beers from Cigar City and Swamp Head breweries. It was nice that this place offered 4 oz glasses of beer, This showed me that they were into the game of micro brews. We ordered up 4 beers each from the Cigar/Swamp list and both ordered the Cuban Sandwich.

Here are the beers

Cigar City

Florida Cracker white beer (their website says it's a Belgium wit beer). You know me and coriander, It was a pretty good beer if you don't like coriander, and I don't So I liked it. The second beer was the

Jai Alai IPA, this is a very solid IPA.
 
Ligero Black lager- I think this was good, but Webster had offered me a taste of the Russian Imperal Stout with Coca Nibs and Coffee beans before I tasted this one so all bets were off. We should have tasted the Russian Imperial last.

Tocobaga Red Ale - Good beer again the Russian ran away with my mouth


Swamp Head beers

Catherine's Passion Russian Imperial Stout with Coca Nibs and Coffee beans. What a beer. The damn stuff starts off with a bang and the aftertaste has some Very interesting twists and turns to it. I'd buy a 750 of it to share with a group.

Bogs of Islay a Strong Scottish Ale or wee heavy. This was listed as a Scotch beer on the menu if I remember correctly. I will say that was an easy mistake to make because it tasted like Scotch. A very solid good example of this style of beer.

The Sandwich was Amazing.

The Waitress was above and beyond the call of duty. She knew her beer. She knew what we were going to taste when we drank the beer. The last beer Webster got was Cigar's Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Brown ale. Don't know how they did it, but It was right on the money for its' name. Webster told the waitress that it might go good with some ice cream and a bit later she shows up with a small cup of ice cream and the funny thing was that it was Coffee Ice cream which he had mentioned to me and not the waitress that Coffee Ice cream would go great with this beer.

The bar experience was real nice, good beers (20 taps, good selections), Good atmosphere, Great waitress.

But...

The chat with the brewers part sucked. We asked about the brewers when we first got there and our waitress said that they were here and left but were coming back. Great experience but this part sucked. I would have loved to talked with the Cigar City brewer about their Xenu beer. Would have loved to hear the back story on the naming of that one. 

This was all from memory. I'll let webster fill in what he observed.