Coming from Louisiana, I swoon whenever I see Bell’s Two Hearted, so even the grocery story selection in Columbus blew me away when I first started hanging out in Central Ohio. My sister and her family have lived in the area for almost 15 years and my parents moved there last year in their retirement. So while I’ve been visiting on an off for a while, it’s been the past year or so that I’ve really been spending serious time in Columbus.
About the same time my parents moved to Ohio is when I became a full-time beer writer in New Orleans. Since now every day is a beer working day, during my visits I delved deeper into the growing Central Ohio craft beer scene which has been exploding over the past year or so as well.
After Great Lakes (which is out of Cleveland, I know), the Columbus Brewing Company has been around in grocery stores and on draft for the longest amount of time, as I can recall with the memories of my visits. However, it wasn’t until recently that I figured out lucky Central Ohioans were to have access to CBC’s Bodhi. I’m not a huge DIPA fan – drinking hop bombs can be wearying on my palate – but Bodhi is so well balanced and dank with hoppy goodness that it’s earned a spot in my exceptions to my DIPA semi-aversion along with Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and The Alchemist’s Heady Topper.
On one of my visits last summer, I was at The Crest — a fantastic place to get great local beer and food — and met one of the folks who runs the Ohio Taproom in Grandview. That ensured that the first stop my husband and I made when we arrived in Columbus for Christmas was to the Taproom, where we bought several growlers: Rhinegeist Brewing’s Dad, Rivertown Brewing Company’s Imperial Oatmeal Christmas Cookie Stout, Buckeye Lake Brewery’s ESB and Trailhead Pale Ale by Fat Head’s Brewery. We returned a couple days later to fill up with Hoof Hearted’s Jun Horde, Fat Head’s Alpenglow and French Ridge IPA from Millersburg Brewing Company. We were like kids in a candy store.
When I came back this summer to help my family out during my mother’s spinal surgery, I decided that I would try to get out to enjoy a couple Columbus breweries, many of which seemed to have sprang up while I wasn’t looking. My mother’s hospital was close by to Zauber Brewing, so my sister and I went to visit after lunch one day. I inquired about why there was only one Zauber tap, and found out that they were just about to upgrade from a nanobrewing system to a 20 bbl system. It looks like they’ve started brewing on the system this month, so I’m excited to get back and try their beer again.
While at Zauber, we found out about the World Cup themed event they were going to be throwing in the parking lot next door called “Taste of the World” which had beer from Zauber, Zaftig, Seventh Son and Homestead Brewing. Awesome opportunity to sample local beer and talk to brewers, all in one place. Also food trucks, which seems to be Zauber’s thing anyway – they have food trucks at the brewery every day.
Food trucks and startup breweries seem to go hand in hand, as I found out in my trip to Four String Brewery, right down the street from Zauber. I’d had their Brass Knuckle pale ale at Zauber before, but when I went to Four String, I tried their version on cask which was conditioned on French Oak and dryhopped with Palisade, Mandarin and Bavarian hops. They also do special infused kegs, and the day I was there it was their Solo Series Rye Farmhouse ale (really good on its own) infused with peach. Four String is small and cozy, with its tap room kind of carved out of the industrial space that houses its brewery. It was well attended by all sorts of different customers, though – neighborhood folks, people who were on the Columbus beer tour, World Cup fans, beer geeks and beer newbies.
At North High, I was greeted enthusiastically by co-owner Gavin Meyers, who cheerfully showed me around and told me all about the brewery which also houses a very successful brew-your-own program. Meyers says that they typically get between 8 and 18 groups every Saturday, but that number is growing. I was impressed by the local architectural and design touches in the tap room, as well as an interesting not-so-local touch – the mug club mugs are housed in an old post office box system that was salvaged from a New Orleans post office flooded by Katrina’s federal levee failures.
Meyers also set me up with tastes of all their beers – eleven in all. Their current small system allows them to play around with different styles with a “low cost of failure,” Meyers says. They are also moving to a larger system down the street to increase capacity of their flagship beers as well as beginning to distribute them locally. That beer should be ready sometime next month, if all goes well. Of the beers I tried, I really liked their two IPAs – the O-Hi-PA and the Pride Smash, part of an ongoing hop series, dryhopped with Super Pride hops.
The atmosphere of the tap room was very welcoming – it was bustling, but not too crowded, and the staff and the patrons were very friendly. In a funny way, it eased my homesickness, because no matter where I go, beer is my home, my comfort zone. Having the opportunity to sit down and have a beer in the city’s friendly and inviting breweries, beer bars, and growler fill shops made me feel like I was a part of the scene, like I had friends that I just hadn’t met yet. This is one of my favorite things about traveling in general, but specifically in Columbus. The craft beer scene in Central Ohio is exciting, drinkers and brewers are passionate, and most importantly, everyone’s having fun.
Y’all have a great thing going here – don’t take it for granted, and I’m looking forward to my next visit. And I’m pleased to report I was able to successfully fly home with a half-growler of Jackie O’s Oil of Aphrodite (courtesy of Ohio Taproom) in my checked luggage. Damn, that’s some good stuff.
This is a guest post from Nora McGunnigle. Nora is a beer writer based in New Orleans and has been published in Beer Advocate, All About Beer, and Southern Beer News, as well as many local Louisiana publications. You can check out her work at nolabeerblog.com, follow her on Twitter at @noradeirdre, and like her Facebook page. She’s looking forward to her next trip to Columbus, let her know if you want to grab a beer!
