Hopewell Brewing - Monday Night Dinner with The Winchester

 

I have come for Hopewell's Monday Night dinner several times.  Unlike other beer dinners where a restaurant will invite a brewery to showcase their beer, in this case, the brewery is inviting local restaurants to do a family style dinner.  Hopewell has done a good job in bringing in a variety of interesting and Notable restaurants to work with them.  Their most recent collaboration was with The Winchester, a restaurant in Ukrainian Village (on Winchester as a matter of fact), that specializes in local, seasonal, and organic food.  While my friends have joined me a few times, for this one, I was attending by myself which was fine and actually kind of funny because I ended up sitting with a few people that after talking for a little while, we discovered that we frequently ran in the same culinary circles and yet had never met.  Many beer dinners start with a welcome beer and Hopewell's beer dinners do as well, though they are decidedly more casual.  There is a cooler in the corner filled with cans of beer and you can grab what you want.  For this evening they had First Lager and Swift IPA, a couple of their mainstay beers that, while not exceptionally creative, are solid beers and good representations of the styles they are representing.

 

For our first course, we started out with People Power, a Pale Wheat Ale created by an idea from a Brooklyn Brewery, Threes Brewing, who suggested breweries around the country should make a beer (choice up to the individual brewers) called People Power and donate 10% of sales to the ACLU.  Hopewell's version was a light and crushable pale wheat ale that is great for summer drinking.  Paired with People Power was a spin on a classic summer picnic starter, Deviled Eggs.  The eggs were colored with Sumac and finished with Red Pepper and Paprika.  There were 12 eggs to the board and there were 4 of us sharing, so if we had split them evenly, we could have had three each, but there were a couple people that didn't want three, so a couple of us had to make up for that.  While the eggs were a little messy because they were held to the board with the whipped yolk.  They had a sweet and spicy flavor, were very easy to eat, and it was very easy to eat multiple.

 

Our salad was a favorite of mine as was the beer.  The beer was called Crudite and was a Wild Saison.  Saisons will have a funk to them and this was more so.  The salad consisted of Pickled Beets, Burrata, Arugula, Mandarin Oranges, and Candied Walnuts.  I liked every part of this dish, all of which were done very well.  The pickled beets were sweet and tart with a slightly bitter finish, the burrata was exceptionally creamy as burratas are.  The Arugula was lemony with a slightly peppery finish.  The mandarin oranges added a tart and slightly bitter citrus flavor, and the candied walnuts were sweet and bitter.  The sweet, tart, and bitter flavors played very well with the wild saison and it was a great pairing.

 

For our main course we started with Stay Crispy Helles, a Helles is another classic German style and is another great summer drinking beer.  Because of it's lightness, it will pair with just about anything.  For our main course, it was paired with a Pork Tomahawk with Cajun Spice with Pesto Frascatelli, Frascatelli is a very simple hand rolled pasta (called a dumpling) similar to Spaetzle.  The pork had a nice flavor and a good spice, the frascatelli added a nice chewy texture, and the pesto added a nice herbal flavor.

To finish, we were served a spin on a couple of classics.  Many beer dinners will finish on the beer side with a dark beer, normally a stout or a porter, which will typically go well with the sweetness of dessert.  Hopewell has a good dark beer that serves this purpose well, Cold Brew, a brown ale which is brewed with Metric Cold Brewed Coffee.  For dessert we were served Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding with Dark Chocolate, Caramel, and Chantilly Cream, a sweetened whipped cream that also uses vanilla.  It was sweet with the chocolate caramel, and vanilla, and went well with the coffee flavors from the beer. 

This dinner was a lot of fun.  The food and beer were both good and they paired well together and the company was also a lot of fun.  I will definitely do this again.