Campus Craft Beer Crawl: Fourth Street Bar & Grill

This is a guest post by George Adams. Current Student at The Ohio State University. From the great state of North Carolina. George enjoys a good craft beer and homebrewing. Great Minds Drink Alike.

Only a short walk from High Street is a bar unlike any other in the campus area. Our next stop on the Campus Craft Beer Crawl brings us to the corner of 16th Avenue and 4th Street, where you’ll find Fourth Street Bar & Grill. Fourth Street offers an experience that is hard to find in Columbus. Where else can you drink craft beer and take home beer at retail prices?

Opened August 2010, Fourth Street is poised to become one of the leading craft beer bars in The Ohio State University District. One of the best things about Fourth Street is the seven-days-a-week happy hour. Happy hour runs from 3pm to 9pm during the week and from 2pm to 7pm on the weekend. During happy hour, ALL drinks and appetizers are half-off, including all drafts, bottles, wells, top-shelf and wines. (There are a handful of exclusions due to the popularity and limited availability for certain beers such as Troegs Nugget Nectar.) There are additional specials throughout the week: beer buckets on Mondays, all-night half-off drinks Tuesdays, all-night appetizer deals on Wednesdays, $1 tacos on Thursdays and Bloody Mary specials on Sundays. And to PBR fans out there, tall boy cans are just $2 all day, every day.

The opportunity of trying new beers or drinks is a reason the happy hour exists. The craft beer scene is continuously growing among the legal aged drinkers. However, money is still the deciding factor for many students, and craft beer has a bad reputation for being expensive compared to the behemoths Budweiser, Miller, and Coors. Fourth Street’s happy hour is a great opportunity for the bar to offer craft beer at a price competitive with the big breweries.

The bar at Fourth Street showcases over 30 taps and a cooler of bottles. If you are looking for something more than beer, the bar has liquor options ranging from wells up to expensive top shelf vodka and bourbons. To my surprise, they offer over 15 types of Three Olives Vodka, Woodford Reserve Bourbon, Johnnie Walker Red and Black, and a few wines. However, craft beer is the highlight of this bar. They have drafts that are unavailable at any other bar in Columbus, sometimes in the entire Midwest.

If you decide to enter the “House of Brews” side, you’ll be greeted by a craft beer store that will impress. One of the rarities I spotted was Founder’s Kentucky Breakfast Stout, which is usually sold out within hours at most beer stores. Quality over quantity, Fourth Street Bar & Grill Beer Store offers over 150 different beers and over 40 different wines. The store clerks can provide recommendations for whatever you crave, including locally brewed and high alcohol content options. Most of the drafts at the bar are available to purchase at the store, so you may be able to try a draft of the beer you’re considering buying in a 6-pack. Breweries you can find represented include Great Lakes, Columbus Brewing Company, Founders, Troegs, Thirsty Dog, and Dogfish Head.

As if that’s not enough, Fourth Street Bar & Grill offers a selection of appetizers, wings, and more on their menu. They have a fully serviced patio that will soon have a outside bar pouring beer throughout patio season. Now that it’s warm, it’s a great time to stop by the Fourth Street Bar & Grill Patio and enjoy drinks on their patio.

Next stop on the crawl: The Little Bar
Previous Stop: Mad Mex