Nestled along the harbour road in the little oceanside town of Dildo, Newfoundland lies a microbrewery of the same name. I imagine most folks travel there for the humour associated with the name, but it is a microbrewery worthy of the trip alone, and the sights of the town are a much welcome bonus.

The brewery is located right on the water, and the upstairs taproom/restaurant has views of the harbour. The brewery itself is downstairs, and at the road-/hill-facing side of the building. The taproom has a nice bar, and then a bunch of tables. The wait staff were Newfie-friendly, i.e. friendly in a no-nonsense kind of way.

They had 12 beers on tap from their brewery, covering a wide spectrum apparently designed to encompass all kinds of preferences. I tasted 8, sampling a wide variety of what they had on offer. One pleasant theme, for me, was that many of the beers I sampled seemed to trend towards accenting the maltiness, rather than over-hyping on the hops (as has been a historical trend with microbreweries).

Enough of the preamble, let's get to the tasting!

• Dildo Light - light lager, 4.2 ABV - Nice and light and fresh, good malt, noble hops (hallertau?), slightly sweet nose. Very drinkable and refreshing.
• Heritage Ale - English mild, 3.8 ABV - Mmm! Caramely, toasty, and creamy, lots of malt flavour, with mild hopping. Milder toasty aroma. One of my favourites.
• Ise Da Bye - IPA, 6.5 ABV - Hazy/NEIPA, still good malt taste, but plenty of hops, some piney and some citrus, plenty bitter, as expected. Very citra nose. Not generally a fan of the NEIPA craze, but this one was not at all bad, at least not leaning into the cat pee hop tones so often exhibited with NEIPAs.
• Stout Dildo - dry Irish stout, nitro-carbonated, 4.5 ABV - Yum! Similar to Guiness, but with more obvious toasted malt taste, hoppy after taste, but hops not up front. Toasty nose. Another fav of mine.
• Blue Eyed Buoy - blueberry fruited blonde, 5.5 ABV - Pretty good, lots of hop, but not annoyingly so, and subtle with the blueberry. Slight fruity aroma.
• Session IPA - IPA, 4.3 ABV - Trending NEIPA, lots of citra or other piney hops, not so much cat pee, though, actually well done for a NEIPA. Pine and lemon nose.
• American red - as the name says, 4.8 ABV - Slightly sour, malty but with a hint of hops. Very sweet aroma, almost like honey or candy.
• Red rocks - Irish red, nitro-carbonated, 5.4 ABV - Malty, slightly more bitter, but still rich malts, less forward hops. Malty aroma. Quite good, another of my favourites from these flights.

For food, I started with a hearty pea soup, prepared with an abundance of root vegetables and a scance of ham; for main I had snow crab legs: 8 legs attached to the knuckle grouping, served with drawn butter and a tiny serving of coleslaw. The snow crab was a bit undercooked, but tasted good nonetheless. The server saw me struggling (even though this was not my first snow crab dinner), and gave me some tips on eating it. My wife started with lemon-butter shrimp and a side of fries. The meal was, on balance, ok. The service was good: quick and reasonably attentive.

After the meal and tasting, I went to checkout the brewhouse. The brewer was busy cleaning out spent grain from a mash tun, so I didn't chew his ear off, but he let me take a pic of the inside workings.

While I was scoping out the brewhouse, a local farmer was picking up the spent grains for his cows and sheep, and we chatted a bit. His Newfie accent was strong, and I was tempted to use my only learned Newfie phrase "Ay, By!" (that's a strong A, and the second word rhymes with "bye"), which is a phrase of general acknowledgement and mild agreement, fully suitable when you don't know what the hell someone just said to you; I did, though, get the general gist of what he was saying.

This was a very enjoyable brewery visit. I would strongly recommend anyone finding themselves in the area of the Avalon Peninsula (where St John's, Newfoundland resides) to take a side journey to the town of Dildo, if for no other reason (if the immature lure of the name is not enough) than to visit the Dildo Brewery.

#BeerReview #Travel