Philly to the Face

As much as I yammer on and on about my love of red wine, I’m really a beer girl.  Beer snob, I guess, would be the more precise way of putting it, because I have very strong beliefs about not drinking beer that tastes like water.  You should see Boyfriend and I picking out a 6-pack at a liquor store.  It takes us no less than 30 minutes every time, and this is after we’ve already hashed out what kind of beer we’re in the mood for during the car ride. Sure, I’ll drink the low-calorie, ten-bucks-for-a-whole-case junk if we’re, say, playing pong.  I’m not gonna ruin good beer by throwing a ping pong ball into it, let’s be honest.  But in general, if I’m drinking a beer, I want to enjoy it, and I don’t enjoy crappy beer.  Plain and simple.

Now, this kind of behavior annoys some people, but fortunately I don’t know any of them.  Or perhaps I’ve met them and they stopped going out with me because they know my disdain for bars with only crap beer on tap.  Either way, along with Boyfriend, I have several close friends who love to try new kinds of beer – which is how we wound up at the Philadelphia bar Eulogy last night.

If you’ve read any of my snide comments about the great state of New Jersey, you know I don’t live in Philly.  I’m actually about an hour-ish outside of Philly, and to be honest, I’m not a big fan of the city.  I have a strong bias towards The Only City That Really Matters, which you can blame entirely on my football and hockey preferences if you so choose, but is really more of a function of the fact that I do not like Pennsylvania drivers or their stupid always-delayed airport, and I hold grudges.  The point of all this being that it is an effort to get to Philly, especially on a weeknight, especially when I have to work the next morning, and especially when I do not want to drive because I’ll be drinking.  But off to Philly we went.  This bar was that big of a deal.  I mean, it has over 300 different kinds of beer.  Three hundred.

Talk about overwhelming.  I’ve been lucky enough to go to enough beer-tasting festivals (One at a zoo, even.  How random is that?) to know exactly what types of beer I do (stout, porter) and do not (emphatically not IPA’s or anything sour or bitter – why would I drink something that causes me pain like that!?) enjoy, but I don’t even know how you’d go about choosing a beverage at this place if you didn’t really know what different styles of beer taste like.  It’s even a challenge when you know exactly what you like.  And you don’t always pick winners.  I had one beer (a coffee-stout) that was unanimously voted by the table to be the equivalent of attempting to drink very strong coffee grinds (bet that sounds delicious, huh?), but mostly, I loved everything I ordered.  And we ordered a lot.  Including food, actually, because when you’re drinking beer with 10.5% ABV, you have to have something to soak up some of the booze.

Eulogy calls itself a Belgian bar, which means they serve some kickass frites (although, to be fair, they reminded me very little of the actual frites I had in Brussels) and delicious dijon-y and spicy dipping sauces.  We (read: I) polished off quite a few of those throughout the evening.  Boyfriend and I also went halfsies on the Brugge chicken sandwich and the Three-Cheese Grilled Cheese.  Effing great, both of them.  The chicken was sooo juicy (dry chicken = pet peeve), and really, how can you go wrong with three different kinds of melty cheese on thick, golden, toasted slices of sourdough (The answer is that you cannot go wrong. Ever.).  UGH. I’m salivating at my desk.  Bring me more frites.  And beer.  Definitely bring me some more of that.