Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
St. Louis is a good drinking town. Of course it’s home to Budweiser, but there’s so much more about the Gateway to the West than mass-produced beers. There are 86 breweries currently operating in the area, per STLbeer.com, ranging from older independent standbys like Schlafly to newer shops like Wellspent.
I’ve got my favorites among that group. There’s a bunch of stuff from Perennial Artisan Ales I enjoy and just about anything Four Hands makes is wonderful. But given my love of German style beers, my go-to for trips south is Urban Chestnut.
Urban Chestnut isn’t an underdog tale. They’re a well crafted and well funded venture with an older taproom in Mid Town and an impressive, massive base of operations/bierhall/kitchen in the Grove. It’s easy to see why investors would bet on UC; their stuff rules.
Today I’m gonna dig into the last straggler in my fridge after my most recent Missouri trip. Urban Chestnut’s Zwickel is a Bavarian lager and the most likely UC brew to pop up in your local gas stations across the midwest. Let’s talk about how it tastes.