CLAG Brewing Company

What a great bar. Big space with nice bar and attached restaurant. Both food and beer were very good. They seem to specialize in New England style beers by the a count of offerings. However their stouts and porters are quite good. Food menu has a good sushi offerings. We tried the spicy tuna and TNT roll. The beef Pho soup was also delicious.

The proprietor was there and was a hoot. You'll find his likeness on many beers they brew like 50 Dong. He joked and talked with us for a while. When my buddy spotted an old Founders beer on a top shelf of the bar, he asked if it was for sale and the owner agreed, named a super fair price and climbed up to get the bottle himself.

The atmosphere was ok, just slow because it was a Tuesday afternoon. It’s a big space. The side I was on had a long bar rail with 26 chairs, and some tables and coolers for take out beer. The other side had another bar and more tables. It kind of seemed like the place reproduced by motosis or something, and was split in half, probably over time they acquired an adjacent place and expanded. There were quite a few beers on offer, especially IPAs, but they also had a number of house and guest stouts. The quality of the beer was quite high. The service was great. And the food was very high quality Asian food. Bottom line, if it was just an Asian restaurant I would want to go, and if it was just a brewery I would want to go, but the fact that it is both is unique and unexpected. Very good place.

Visited on back-to-back weekdays while vacationing at Cedar Point. Didn't realize at first that the brewery is connected to a restaurant, but once we got that figured out, we had a wonderful sushi lunch and a flight of NEIPAs and Fruited Sours.

Came back the next day for a can release and had a similarly good visit.

Yeah, it's out of the way, but if you're even just driving through, a stop is in order.

Great place , huge big rooms , they have dozens of great beer on tap and a huge food menu. Its actually a full restaurant and full brewery. Its family friendly and Kha and the staff are amazing . If you're visiting Cedar Point in Sandusky Ohio definitely stop in.

Since I last reviewed Small City Taphouse in 2018, they opened their own brewery--Cocky Little Asian Guy, if you're curious about the acronym--and renovated the entrance side to have a much more expansive bar space, as well as a greater volume of table seating.

The wall above the large line of taps, which seems to have expanded on this side, is decorated with all kinds of fallen soldiers from beer geek renown. They still host fairly rare guest drafts, particularly during events, but because they brew so much of their own beer now--focusing heavily on NEIPAs and pastry stouts--the taplist is very much CLAG dominant.

The food is much the same--owing to the menu focused on Vietnamese and Japanese cuisine--and fairly satisfying, though perhaps a little lower in quality than I remember, at least during their 3rd anniversary party.

However, things overall just feel different now. They lost the magic of hosting events well, seeming to be less prepared to coordinate and plan for as smooth a customer experience as we had last time. The wait staff was pretty overwhelmed by the idea of taking multiple orders per table, and there was this unusually massive gap of time between the time slot for retail sales and the taproom opening, leaving everyone to kind of linger around wherever they could, or even stroll around the not very touristy town of Sandusky.

It was nice to revisit the location and see their growth as a brewery, but considering how far out of the way they are, and that they distribute a lot of their production my way anyway, it will probably be another five years before I return.

This is a tough place to review. It shares a physical space with Small City Taphouse. Since we were just there for drinks, we sat on the CLAG side. It was dirty. Lots of used glassware sitting around. Our server (who may have been the owner) was very disinterested in taking our orders at the bar. Thankfully the beers were good. However, they weren't as great as the reviews/rating on here and Untappd. Bottom line: Really good beer but not World Class beer.