Brewing & Pouring in Columbia

It's no secret that ever since I decided that I did like beer that I've been on a little bit of a brewery kick. When you have so many to choose from in Charlotte it's kind of hard not to be on a brewery kick so you really can't blame me for that.

But until this past weekend, I hadn't made it out to any of the breweries in Columbia. I'm glad that we changed our plans at the last minute on Saturday and checked out two of the three.

First up was River Rat Brewery and a flight of six of their beers.

American Kolsh Story

Broad River Red

Heritage Cream Ale

Double IPA

Moncks Corner Abbey Ale

My Morning Stout

I branched out and tried three styles of beer that I had never had before {the top three on the list} and loved every one of them. If you read about them on their website, they're all beers to be enjoyed on a "hot, sunny day". Just about every beer I like could be described that way so it's no surprise that I enjoyed these.

We decided to extend our impromptu two person brewery crawl to Conquest Brewing since it was right around the corner from River Rat.

  

Our flight of four beers from this brewery included:

Berliner Weisse

Coffee IPA

Hefeweizen

Sacred Heart IPA
+ they threw in Medusa Stout for free for Patrick to try

After this tasting, I have now had a sour beer {Berliner Weisse} and Patrick has found his new morning tailgate beer {Coffee IPA}.

Had I known how close we were to Swamp Cabbage Brewing... I probably would have pushed to make it to this one as well. But I was starving by this point and we still hadn't made it to our original destination {Craft & Draft}.

We finally made it out to Craft & Draft.

Inside we found delicious localish beers on tap. They were all from a Carolina brewery... including some of my favorites {Westbrook & Foothills} and some that I had never heard of.

I went with the Full Steam El Toro Cream Ale and made it 6 for 6 on all of the different beers that I tried on Saturday. I can't tell you another time that I had 6 options and liked them all.

I ended up getting a sample of another to try that tasted just like vanilla ice cream. I want to say it was the Tides of Galway Irish Red? Whatever it was, I want to try it again!

So if you haven't heard of Craft & Draft before, it's a local craft beer store and growler shop. In addition to have local beers on tap, they also had a bunch of bottled beer for sale.

We will definitely be going back here the next time that I'm in Columbia.

Whew.

I'm impressed if you made it all the way to the end of this post! & to think: Saturday was just supposed to be a stop into Craft & Draft and then an early dinner at Henry's. It turned out to be a lot more entertaining than that!