We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.
Fall is here. If the weather hasn’t given you a clue, all the pumpkin beers appearing on store shelves and Oktoberfest celebrations certainly should. This week is full of both. Read on for my picks, but the full list is in the D.C. Beer Events Calendar above. Click on any event for more details.
My pick of the week is a Halloween-themed event this Tuesday at Jack Rose in Adams Morgan. At “Night of the Living Gourd,” co-host Flying Dog will premiere The Fear, the Maryland brewery’s imperial pumpkin ale, on both draft and cask. As a festive bonus, bartenders will be serving beers from the cask in real pumpkins-turned-pint glasses. The party starts at 5 p.m. and the cask will be tapped at 7 p.m. In addition to The Fear, 15 other pumpkin beers will be available on draft. Oh, and you can win a prize for the best beer-themed costume.
Also on Tuesday, ChurchKey is tapping an extremely rare keg of beer, the sought-after Canadian Breakfast Stout. The geniuses at Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, take their Breakfast Stout and age it in Kentucky whiskey barrels that were used to age Michigan maple syrup. Not interesting enough? They put the barrels in the town’s old gypsum mines for a total of eleven months, test each barrel, and then blend the good ones together for kegging and, this year for the first time, bottling. If you’ve never tried CBS, I suggest you claw your way to the bar at ChurchKey before the 6 p.m. tapping to get some. If you have tried it, I don’t need to tell you what to do.
And…also on Tuesday (good luck cloning yourself) the crew from Sixpoint Brewing of Brooklyn is taking Northern Virginia by storm with a pub crawl through Old Town Alexandria. Participating bars include Pizzeria Paradiso, Columbia Firehouse, Bilbo Baggins, Chadwicks, The Light Horse and Virtue Feed and Grain. If you missed the revelry during the Brooklyn producer’s D.C. launch week, this is a good opportunity to chat with Sixpoint reps as well as check out some of Alexandria’s best craft beer spots.
Send submissions for the D.C. Beer Events calendar to thelagerheads@gmail.com.