Birch & Barley

This restaurant at Logan Circle has an upstairs bar, the Churchkey, featuring 50 craft beers on tap and another 500 in bottles, so I've been meaning to try it out and finally did this week. I hit a day when they were having a special event celebrating 21 years of the Schlafly brewery, a craft brewery in St. Louis, with 21 of their beers. This was fine with me, since I grew up in St. Louis and I'm glad that the city of Anheuser-Busch and Falstaff is also a leader in the craft revolution.

I started with the 2 oz. samples and liked that so much I stayed with it instead of picking a beer to have a full glass of. Keep this in mind as I rattle off the beers I tried, all 8 of them, because it is only 16 oz. of beer, or the same as one normal pint. The bartender recommended going just two at a time to keep them straight, so I started in the "crisp" category with Schlafly Pilsner and Oktoberfest. Both good, with the Oktoberfest a little spicier. Then two pale ales from Schlafly: the dry-hopped American pale ale and the Tanzanian IPA. Both good as pale ales but I like pilsners better. I took a break from Schlafly to try two cask ales: Oxbow and Winter Storm. Oxbow had a murky, new beer look and I didn't much care for it; Winter Storm was very spicy in a pleasant sort of way. I finished with two dark beers from Schlafly: the Porter and the Reserve Stout. I find most of these dark beers too raw -- can anyone really beat Guinness? -- so the smoother Porter was my preference here.

I'll suspend judgment on the food -- the bar has its own menu of bar-type food while the downstairs restaurant has a more ambitious menu. I tried the signature "brat burger" -- which adds some pork and sausage spices to a hamburger -- and was not impressed. It was supposed to have sauerkraut on it but the amount was small you could hardly taste it. Why get fancy? Serve brats, for god's sake. Also the ubiquitous and detestable coated fries accompanied it. They get good marks for grilled cheese and other simple fare, so will try that next time.

The beer is great, super-fresh, with a lot of attention paid to temperature and a studied array of glasses to serve the various types in. Arriving at 5:30, I got a bar stool, but when I left an hour later it was three deep at the bar.