The Bar
Visited 12/27/18 @ 9:30pm.
The Drink
Hops and Grain Haze County Double IPA. $8.
Now this is a beer. After having gone through my requisite college hopophilia phase I don't drink many Double IPAs these days, but I always appreciate them when they show up in my hand. You expect a strong bite and a strong pour, and 8.2% is nothing to sneeze at. Hops and Grain wants you to
pair it with "dried meats, grilled salmon, and a chocolate caramel cheesecake". I didn't pair mine with anything, but maybe I should have, since it did have a little bit of sweet fruit flavor to it that I bet a cheesecake would have gone well with, although to be fair there's probably not many things that cheesecake doesn't go well with. I have issues these days with mainlining multiple hop bombs in a row, however, so after this beer I switched to something a bit easier on the palate.
The Crew
Travis, Aaron.
Notes
Edwin's Sports Bar replaced the Waller Ballroom, which makes me smile a bit - why even bother to change the name of the venue if you're just going to go from someone's last name to their first?
It's the same guy! But I suppose the owners wanted to maintain a little bit of continuity between their old joint and their new one after they reopened it as Edwin's, since whereas Waller was a concert venue, Edwin's is a sports bar, with the requisite bar food and flat screen TVs that you expect from a sports bar (evidently the original structure began life as a feed store for horses). The interior was quite nice actually, and an interesting example of how small changes in decor can make a big difference in how an audience perceives a venue. There wasn't much sports chat for us, though - we sat next to some New Zealanders in town to visit their friends and somehow ended up talking for like an hour about how New Zealand transitioned from a closed UK-focused economy to an internationally-focused open economy in the 80s and 90s via the amusingly-named (if somewhat less amusing in actual effect)
Rogernomics and
Ruthanasia economic reforms. Whatever your stance on macroeconomics and regulatory policy, you have to appreciate the wide variety of people you can run into who are happy to chat about anything at all with complete strangers. I am not sure that that was exactly what Edwin Waller had in mind when he was surveying the small plot of land along the Colorado River that became the city known as Austin, but hopefully he would have appreciated it just the same.
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