The Judge's Bench in Ellicott City and its owner Mike Brown got a friendly profile about the bar's craft beer selection in the Sun.
Check out the Baltimore Beer Guy for real news on the Howard County brew scene. The BBG cites the Judge's Bench and the Frisco Grille in Columbia as the best beer bars in Howard County -- with Frisco as his favorite.
6 comments:
Not only does the Judge's Bench have a great beer selection I highly recommend the Chicken Jammies. My favorite is the Inferno sauce and ask for the Old Bay Can for a good coating of Maryland Flavor.
Brandon,
Nice! Haven't tried those yet, I enjoyed the poppers but those are hard to screw up anyway. The chef seems to put up some specials now and then that are interesting, I remember a month ago or so she had some mushroom soup on, never got around to it though.
Thanks for the tip on the jammies.
Frisco is great for variety, but you can easily spend $40 or more if you love beer like I do. I would recommend checking out Loonies Pub in Maple Lawn. During happy hour you can get one of their 20ish draft brews for just $2.50 a pint. Right now they have Heavy Seas Loose Cannon Hop3 Ale on tap which is one of my favorite IPA's. The food is good too, particularly their hot wings and crab dip.
Begin rant...
I give Frisco a thumbs down for the single fact that they don't have a beer list. They list drafts on a tv (on rotation with random ads) but no list of bottle beers.
If your establishment has more than 5 beers and/or the wait staff doesn't have the beers memorized then you need a list for customers! I went twice and had horrible service both times, including wait staff with zero beer knowledge.
I'll go to JB or The Phoenix anyday. Or Max's, of course.
Mike at Judge's Bench really knows his stuff. He let me try one of his own homebrew beers and it matched anything on tap.
For those who avoided JB's prior to the smoking ban, it is a cool place to try now.
Tim,
I recommend sitting in the bar area. You can see all the taps as well as the digital board displaying the beers on tap and the tap wall with most of their bottled selections.
The bartenders are also excellent (Oliver and Keith are the main two) and won't let you down.
Obviously the dining area is not going to be as accommodating a beer experience, one has to expect that.
I talked to the owner Adam just the other day about beer lists and he did that for a while but the taps change so frequently as to 1)make them out of date daily and 2)he was killing a bunch of trees doing that so often with how much paper he went through. Its a nice idea but the alternative is to head to the bar before/after being seated and see whats available if you don't trust the servers' insight, ask the bartenders or patrons at the bar, the vast majority of whom at most hours are die-hard beer geek regulars happy to discuss or suggest.
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