I'm looking for "the best local beer" recommendations to be found in these two areas. I'm not looking for well-known stuff, I have a great trading partner who hooks me up with the bigger breweries in the region. I've already scoped out some of the places to drink/eat due to beerfly and searching the forums. My issue is that my wife won't tolerate me bar-hopping, so I'd like to make a good personal judgment based on current draft selections of the places I've already scoped. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and I look forward to supporting your local communities.
For bottle selection, you're not going to beat CBX. Floor to ceiling beer and friendly, knowledgeable staff. If it gets distributed to SC, you can more than likely pick it up at CBX. As far as bars are concerned, I would check out Closed For Business and Coleman Public House. CFB has one of the largest, quality tap selections in Charleston and some pretty decent bar food to go along with it. Go for the Pork Slap. Coleman Public House is just across the bridge in Mt. Pleasant and always has an excellent tap list and superb eats to go along with it.
Thanks for the thoughts on the locations guys. My true purpose here though was to get some local beer favorites, if anyone has some"must try" beers they'd recommend.
Local beer (Charleston) favorites that are currently available... (at least as of last weekend - don’t know when you’ll be in town so these may not be around): COAST: Boy King Double IPA - CBX may have bottles; and they may have bottles / growler fills at the brewery this weekend HopArt - a good and hoppy IPA Seasonals / One-off's - Dave Brown (brewed with smoked jalapeños), Dead Arm Pale Ale ... I haven’t had either of these, but they’re probably worth trying. (COAST also bottles some stuff, which would be nice if you want to take some home) Holy City: Right now they have Notorious P.I.G. (bacon porter) on for growler fills I also really like their Weak Sauce - a sessionable stout (at ~4.5%) (No bottles, just growlers) Westbrook: Their IPA is my personal favorite of their brews and its available in cans... They usually have some other interesting stuff available, too. Palmetto: Their Porter (Espresso Porter) is my favorite Palmetto brew... not going to knock your socks off, but pretty tasty. COAST, Westbrook and Holy City will all have good stuff! You can probably snag some bottles from COAST, bottles/cans from Westbrook, and growler(s) from Holy City. You can either hit each brewery, or hope for some at CBX. The bars mentioned above also usually have a fair amount of local brew on tap, and will likely have some or possibly all of these, too (with the exception of Boy King). Have fun!
