Town Hall Brewery

In the most recent Beer Advocate, I was surprised to find two Minnesota breweries listed in the top 25 for Best American Brewers. Number 1 was Surly and number 11, was Town Hall Brewery in Minneapolis. For a budding beer culture, the Twin Cities lacks two things in abundance, breweries and brewpubs. We have 3 breweries in the city (only a couple more in the state), and while we have a lot of bars with great beer selections, we have very few brewpubs . Town Hall is always a brewpub I was aware of, but never knew much about it and had never visited it.

So, on Saturday I ventured out into the bitter 2 degree air to meet up with Jeff and Brian at Town Hall Brewery for lunch and some beer. We walked away very impressed.
First of all, the bar itself has a great atmosphere (sorry, my camera's batteries died so no interior pics). There's a great old tin tiled ceiling and a beautiful huge oak bar. Their selection of "guest" taps was impressive, including several hard to find beers. But we were here for Town Hall's brews. Onto the beer:

We all had a couple of pints and split the sampler. Jeff and I started with the West Bank, which is their British pub ale. This beer was excellent, very mild with a creamy two finger off-white head. It pours a nice copper color and has a great hop/malt balance. A great session beer!
Brian started with the Hope and King Scotch Ale. This beer poured a dark mahogany with a thin white head. This beer was also outstanding, it had a very malty sweetness to it with virtually no hop presence. Brian ended up taking home a growler of this. Another excellent beer.
Onto the sampler:
The current seasonal is a Belgian Abbey Triple, called Triple Vision. This beer was a scary 9% abv. Scary because it was candy sweet and extremely easy to drink. It poured a light golden color with a thin white head. Sweet with some fruity esters, this beer was really good.
The least impressive beer for us was the Bright Spot Golden Ale. This beer was much closer to a lager in our opinions, it had that "lager finish", as Jeff put it. It was a nice drinking beer, very crsip with a light body. It poured a golden color with a thin white head.. There was nothing wrong with this beer, it just wasn't as impressive as the rest of the beers we had.
Also in the sampler were the Masala Mama IPA and the Cask-Conditioned Masala Mama. The IPA was a very good IPA. It was a copper color with an off-white head. It was definitely hoppy, but also had a nice caramel presence in the body. I haven't had many cask-conditioned beers before, but we all thought the regular was better. The Malsa Mama was a good IPA, not the best I've had, but very good.
The last of the sampler was the Black H20 Oatmeal Stout. Both this and the Hope and King Scotch Ale have won various awards. Onto the stout. This might be the stout that changes my opinion about stouts! I'm not normally a stout drinker, but this was excellent. It pours a black color with a thick two finger tan head. It had a great malty and roasty presence to it, with caramel elements in there as well. Great beer, I ended up getting a pint of this as well.

So, now that I know what a gem lies a short distance from my house, I'm going to have to be making it over to pick up some growlers. We were really impressed with the beer and the atmosphere of the bar. I can understand why they ranked so high on the list.





Cheers!
-The Bearded Brewer