Phantom Canyon January Visit

February 4, 2019 Mike

Our little group of brewery explorers and beer snobs has a rotating membership, with whoever happens to be available joining Jesse and I when we visit somewhere. Recently we’ve added another Mike, we’ll have to refer to him as Evil Mike, and he wanted to go somewhere with pool tables. Since we hadn’t been to Phantom Canyon for the site yet, that turned out to be pretty easy to accommodate. Although I don’t know of any other breweries with pool tables, so we’ll see what happens from here out.

I already mentioned it in the post about Phantom Canyon, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good their beer was. In the past, I was never really impressed, and I don’t know if it’s the change in brewing staff or some other factor that I don’t know about, but everything that I had was just really well done.

Show Stopper Barrel Aged Cherry Chocolate Porter – I have to admit, I ordered this one by mistake. I was mixed up on what their charity beer was this month, and ended up ordering this. I don’t usually go for bigger beers, but I have to say that I really enjoyed this one. Huge Chocolate and Cherry flavors, nice and thick, and as dark as you could want. Really a tasty beer, and I was glad that they served it in a smaller glass, or it would have been my only beer that night.

Nitro Vanilla Cream Ale – (Pictured above) – The vanilla in this is really understated, I barely had a hint of it. I was really intrigued to try this one, a smooth beer like a cream ale, and then serve it on nitro. Well, I wasn’t disappointing, it was super smooth and creamy. The only downside is it made it seem like an even lighter beer than it already was. Really tasty though.

Resilience Butte County Proud IPA – This is the third example of this beer that I’ve tried, on at Gold Camp, and one at JAKs, and it was exactly like the other two. Just a delicious, crisp, classic IPA. Delicious.

[Jesse’s notes]

I, too, had basically given up on Phantom Canyon a few years ago when I took my wife to get a flight of beer in the hopes of finding a beer that she might like. All of the beers in the flight were “meh” to “blech”. So, after hear the PC had new brewers, I was excited to give them another chance and I’m glad we did – Thanks, Evil Mike!

Conference Call – 6.6% ABV, 15 IBU – This beer is listed as a Belgian ale that was brewed with a pear mash (I believe). While I enjoyed the beer quite a bit (I think I’m developing a taste for Belgian beers), I could not pick up ANY pear. I was a bit disappointed because I think that would have paired (no pun intended) very well with the Belgian flavor.

Phantom Canyon Two Headed Dog IIPA (L) and Nitro Vanilla Cream Ale

Two Headed Dog Imperial IPA – 10% ABV 97 IBU – In my humble opinion, this was the star of the show for me. This is a great beer. It checked all of the right boxes for me in terms of malt, hoppy, bitterness and citrus flavor. It starts out as if it’s going to be way too strong, but, mid-taste, it mellows with a great orangey flavor and finished very smooth. I was tempted to order another, but wanted try at least one ore unique beer.

DAS BRUT Brut IPA – 5.6% ABV, No IBU – Once again, I got sucker in to trying a beer because of the clever name. I’m OK with that in this circumstance, however. Normally, we’ll have two beers (or a flight or four or five) and call it a night, but since we were engaged in an activity and Evil Mike was not-so-evil this evening and drove me to the venue, I thought I’d have a third to round out the evening. This was the prefect beer to do it on. This is a SUPER light beer with really no hop flavor at all and only the smallest amount of malt. Definitely something to think about getting on a hot summer day after some yard work.

Beers we’ve reviewed here: