We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.
Where in Town: D’vines, 3103 14th St. NW
Price: $9.99/six-pack
Summer Beer for Winter People
In the warmer months, I usually reach for easy-drinking beers: refreshing saisons, mouth-puckering sour ales, hoppy IPAs, or whatever light lager is on hand at a buddy’s barbecue. For something different, I recently turned to North Carolina’s Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery, which has specialized in dark beers for almost a decade. Its summer offering, first introduced last year, is a creamy, 7.3 percent alcohol American black ale called Hoppy Bunny. Beers of this style, a.k.a. Black IPA or Cascadian Dark Ale, taste like an iced espresso with a shot of grapefruit juice. Granted, this might not be your thing. But for those of us who need a break from the sunshine once in awhile, a beer like Hoppy Bunny works nicely in the summer rotation.
Seeing Double
Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery, founded by a former philosophy professor, borrows as its logo the duck/rabbit figure famously used by Ludwig Wittgenstein to demonstrate the interpretive nature of human perception. The brewery’s latest release is suitably ambiguous: Its roasted malts impart the black appearance, dark chocolate and coffee flavors, and intensely bitter finish of a porter, while eight hop additions produce the strong pine and citrus characteristics of an IPA (with a hint of spearmint, thanks to a New Zealand variety called Motueka). In one moment, Hoppy Bunny is the duck; in another it resembles the rabbit. Unlike the image, though, the beer can be perceived as both things simultaneously.
Read more Food stories
Photo by Tammy Tuck
This isn't a paywall.
We don't have one. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. If you think that it's important to have high quality local reporting we hope you'll support our work with a monthly contribution.