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Foothills is okay, and they get big props for being the first brewery to open in WS. Their beers tend to lean too far to the hoppy side for me, which seems to be the trendy thing to do for lots of breweries. Not a big fan of IPAs and other hops-laden styles. I can drink them given no better choice, but I much prefer more malty brews like porters, dunkels, English ales, and European wheat beers. No, not the watered-down-for-Americans wheat beers like Blue Moon, but hearty ones like Weihenstephaner, Julius Echter, Hacker-Pschorr, etc. Most local breweries don't go down that road very often.
Yeah one of my pet peeves is the trend towards super hoppy beers and how almost every brewery tries to out do everyone else in that regard.
Full Moon is in Clemmons, not Kernersville. A good call-out though...I didn't think of them. The bar side is very tiny, and mostly serves as a waiting room for people eating at the oyster bar. The few beers I've tried there were okay, not great, but not bad either. Hope it gets better, and it would be nice if they expanded to improve the brewery/bar experience.
I believe they have opened (or will soon open) another brewery attached to their Jamestown location.
D'oh. Yeah, I meant Clemmons. I had Kernersville on the brain because I'd just been looking at the Facebook page for Kernersville Brewing Company.
As for the comments about Foothills and hoppy beers in general, Foothills does have a slightly larger number of hoppy beers on their menu than some breweries, but that has a lot to do with the fact that they do a really good job with them. Jade is a fantastic IPA, and Pilot Mountain Pale Ale, Hoppyum, and Hopjob (session) are all solid examples of their genres. Their monthly IPAs have been very good sometimes, too. I love Wise Man and Fiddlin' Fish (among others), but if I was asked to provide two beers to represent Winston-Salem's beer scene to someone who had never had any beer from here, it could well be Jade IPA and Sexual Chocolate.
And more generally, griping about hoppy beers feels about 5-10 years too late. Nearly every brewery also has other beers, and they're often fantastic. Plus lots more trendy styles--sours, craft lagers, barrel-aged beers, IPAs that are juicier than they are hoppy or bitter, etc--have gained steam in recent years.
I'm looking at the Foothills tasting room tap list right now, and of 19 taps, seven are IPAs, meaning 12 aren't.
At Wise Man right now, there are seven hoppy IPAs on tap, but there's also a stout, a Marzen, a kolsch, a witbier, a cream ale, a gose, a sour Berliner Weisse, a grisette, a saison, and a brett IPA that's more funky than hoppy. Plus two ciders.
IPAs sell. I like them. But there are other beers to be had at most any brewery, and most good breweries put every bit of effort into their lagers, kolsches, stouts, porters, etc. as into their IPAs.
10 years too late?! 10 years ago there were what, 2 breweries in the Triad?
The IPA craze started about 7 or 8 years ago, its still wildly popular and the style is overly represented at most breweries.
Well, I said 5-10, and I'll admit that 10 was overstating it. Craft beer has exploded since then, to be sure. I just remember having these conversations 10 or more years ago because I lived in a city with an active beer scene (for the time) and hops are divisive.
And breweries large and small have responded. Like I said in my other post, pretty much any good small brewery has lots of non-IPAs on offer. IPAs may make up a plurality of the beers on tap, but they're rarely a majority.
There are lots of them because they are popular and lots of people like them. I like them. And there's plenty of variation available with different hops varieties, levels of bitterness, other added flavors, filtered vs unfiltered (New England style), doubles and triples, etc.
And like I said before, lots of styles have trended up in the last few years. Sours are a good example. They're probably more divisive, flavor-wise, than IPAs. I'm not a fan, generally. But the fact that most top-tier breweries are playing with sours and goses doesn't bother me at all.
But if you look at the BeerAdvocate top 250, stouts are as heavily represented in the top echelons as IPAs are. I like stouts okay, but I'd rather have an IPA 9 times out of 10. But I don't gripe about the popularity of some stouts.
I'm not griping about their popularity. If you like them, more power to you. I'm griping about many brewpubs having multiple IPAs and often times nothing I'm interested in drinking. Sue me.
You asked for it. I'll have my attorneys start working on it right away. You'll rue the day you stated an opinion on the internet.
(And I get your point. My response is that even if most craft breweries have more IPAs than anything else, most also have at least 5 other styles as well. To take the Foothills example, wave a magic wand and make those tasty IPAs disappear and you're left with 11 non-IPA options. That's a fairly wide selection. I don't see how the presence of the IPAs--which likely represent a huge chunk of sales and may subsidize less common or less popular styles--has any effect on those who don't like them.)
I’d love to see the old car dealership near church street I g Boro transform into a brewery. Would be awesome if reb oak had a tasting room/tap room in dt Greensboro since that’s where they first had their roots. Also, just about everywhere in Raleigh has Greensboro listed in their menus for red oak
I’d love to see the old car dealership near church street I g Boro transform into a brewery. Would be awesome if reb oak had a tasting room/tap room in dt Greensboro since that’s where they first had their roots. Also, just about everywhere in Raleigh has Greensboro listed in their menus for red oak
I love Red Oak. This is a great thread to try some other Triad spots when I'm over there.
You asked for it. I'll have my attorneys start working on it right away. You'll rue the day you stated an opinion on the internet.
(And I get your point. My response is that even if most craft breweries have more IPAs than anything else, most also have at least 5 other styles as well. To take the Foothills example, wave a magic wand and make those tasty IPAs disappear and you're left with 11 non-IPA options. That's a fairly wide selection. I don't see how the presence of the IPAs--which likely represent a huge chunk of sales and may subsidize less common or less popular styles--has any effect on those who don't like them.)
The point is, I am often disappointed by the fact that so many breweries are very experimental in the IPA realm, but they don't show the same willingness to offer other styles outside of the usual. And I get the fact that many people like IPAs. But you also have to admit that most beer drinkers learn to like whatever is put in front of them. I don't think anyone actually liked beer the first time they tasted it. You have to acquire the taste. Just my opinion of course, but I think many IPA lovers jumped on that trendy train because it was (or is) "the thing", but they could just as easily learn to enjoy one or more of the many other possible beer styles. All I'm asking for is a bit more adventurousness in the non-IPA range.
Edit to add: Agreed, I love Red Oak as well. It is a great beer--Reinheitsgebot is an awesome thing. :-)
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