Last time I was in St. Louis, I wrote about some of my favorites from the city. One thing I didn't get around to writing about, however, is the Schlafly Brewery.
St. Louis is synonymous with Budweiser, which does the city a great disservice. There are other breweries in St. Louis that focus their efforts on quality, not quantity, and are lesser known as beer making machines, and are instead popularly viewed as craftsmen. Tom Schlafly, the president of the St. Louis Brewing Company (another company name for Schlafly Beer) even wrote a book about the trials of building up a brewery in the same city as the "Goliath" Anheuser-Busch.
The Schlafly Beer company has two places in St. Louis where you can enjoy their beer. The Tap Room, and Bottleworks. Andy and I always find ourselves at Bottleworks, which is a production brewery that offers brewery tours and one of the only non-smoking environments in St. Louis.
My two favorite things about Bottleworks are the beer sampler:
And the Bison Nachos:
The beer sampler consists of five year-round brews: Pale Ale, Pilsner, Hefeweizen, Oatmeal Stout, and Wheat Ale and one seasonal brew. For this particular sampler the seasonal was the Winter ESB. They were all delicious, and I love having the chance to try all of them.
The Bison Nachos are a masterpiece built with yellow corn tortilla chips, ground bison meat, black beans, Monterey jack cheese, pico de gallo, guacamole, and sour cream. Schlafly takes something basic and makes it better with the use of bison meat. Bison is a great alternative to ground beef, and has incredible flavor- even though it is a very lean meat (it has less calories and cholesterol than both beef and chicken!). Schlafly also offers as much of their food from local farmers and businesses as possible, to help the country's efforts at sustainable living.
i'd like to see a brew pub with an original name, just once. there are like a billion "the tap rooms" out there
Posted by: cailyn | November 19, 2007 at 01:09 PM