Sunday, June 15, 2008
Food, "Behind the Bar"

180 bottles of beer on the wall

Brick Store Pub pours a vetted variety

By Hope S. Philbrick

Beer connoisseurs widely consider Decatur’s Brick Store Pub to be the best beer bar in the state. This week, the owners are celebrating its 11th anniversary with 11 never-tapped (in Georgia) exclusive brewed barrels. For a behind-the-scenes story, The Sunday Paper chatted with Mike Gallagher, one of the three owners and founders.

Q What’s the history of Brick Store Pub?
A I’ve been in the restaurant business my whole life—it’s pretty much what I’ve been doing since high school and I paid my way through college with it. The first job was bussing tables and then you name it, I’ve done it: bartending, waiting, dishwashing.

    Tom [Moore], Dave [Blanchard] and myself were general managers at the same restaurant in Athens and shared a love of beer. When closing down the restaurant late at night we’d sometimes sit around talking about what we liked about the restaurant and what we’d do differently. Those guys already quit and gave me a call that they were looking to do something in Atlanta. We knew we wanted to do a gathering place with really good beer and really good food but also be accessible and good value—not simple, but easily approachable. When we started we knew we wanted to have a great beer selection and very good, affordable food. We wanted a true neighborhood pub, the antithesis of a sports bar—so no neon signs, no TV and no light beer.

Three guys graduated from college and set out to create the anti-sports bar?
It wasn’t our goal to say that. We enjoy sports and drink beer watching it, but what kind of influenced us at that age was a place in Athens called the Globe—at first, that influence showed through very strongly but over the years we shook that and became our own place. We enjoyed trying beer and having great conversation. We were in our mid-20s and no longer doing $1 beer nights—we’d graduated from that. It was more about a group of friends being able to get together for great conversation around great beer, not pounding as many drinks as you could for cheap.

How many beers are on the Brick Store Pub menu? What’s most expensive?
We keep it around 180 bottles and 24 draughts. We want to keep our beers fresh, so we change the draught list at least twice a week. It’s constantly updating, but some are stable and stick around. Weihenstephaner, a wheat beer from Germany, stays on draught pretty much all the time. Reissdorf, a Koelsch, is a German beer with all lager ingredients but it’s brewed like an ale at a higher temperature so takes a shorter amount of time to make. In the Belgian room we sell more St. Bernardus Abt 12 than anything.

    We have some large format beers that are 1.5 liters for $35, a wine-bottle size for $60 and a 4.5 liter for $200—it’s a St-Feuillien Triple and the menu price is fun and shocking, but we sell three of those a year. We have a few that hover in the $12 range, most of which are Trappist beers made by monks in a monastery.

What’s the difference between Belgian and other beers?
It depends on your preference, like single malt vs. blended scotches or Burgundy vs. Bordeaux wines. Belgian isn’t really where beer began but where they experiment with beer more than anyplace else in the world. By law in Germany they can only use four ingredients; there’s no such law in Belgium—they do have tradition, but they’re not held to anything.

What’s trendy?
Our place is certainly a little world unto itself when it comes to that sort of thing, but I do see a lot of wheat beer, which makes sense since it’s very refreshing. A lot of aficionados are looking for low-alcohol beers so they can have two, three or four of them and sit for a couple of hours and not get inebriated. SP
Brick Store Pub is located at 125 E. Court Square in Decatur. For more information, call 404-687-0960 or visit www.brickstorepub.com.