United Nations of Beer

Bad Moon porter

by Joel Perry
(Beer Delegate, MD, USA)

Bad Moon porter

Having wandered to the end of Thames Street last weekend, I discovered that DuClaw Brewery has set up shop near the edge of my favorite neighborhood.

I'm not a big fan of chain restaurants and I'm usually not a fan of whatever "hand-crafted" beer they claim to have brewed in house. However, after indulging in a pint or three, I will begrudgingly admit that DuClaw might know a thing or two about brewing beer.

Having tried everything on the menu, via the sample option (small 3oz glasses of everything) I found that I liked their Bad Moon porter best. I'm not an expert on porters, but in general this was pretty good beer.

According to their website, they use two types of hops in the brewing process: Fuggle and Goldings. For grain they utilize pale, chocolate, crystal, black and special roast malt. Bad Moon porter is 5.1% ABV and its gravity (what ever the hell that means) is 13.5 platos.

It poured pitch black with a nice mocha-colored head that lingered towards the top of my glass as it went down. It offered up the scent of coffee, chocolate and smoky hops.

Drinking a pint, you can taste the coffee and chocolate, but the hops is nowhere to be found. It went down velvety smooth, lingering only a few seconds on the back of my tongue.

This is a pretty good beer. It's not perfect by any means, but for a beer brewed at a chain restaurant it's not bad. I only wish that it tasted as strong as it smelled.

All in all though, if you're in Baltimore and you happen to stumble across the DuClaw Brewery, I say stop in and order up a pint.