- For now you can only drink Around the Bend’s beers on tap. The brewery shipped this hand-bottled sample to me.
At CHAOS Brew Club‘s fabulous Cerveza de Mayo party, I encountered a jockey box from a new-to-me Chicago brewery called Around the Bend. I tried their galangal pale ale, Silk Road (how could I not be curious?), then filed them in the back of my mind as an operation to check up on in six or eight months, once they’d had time to complete the tortuous permitting and licensing process and start actually selling beer instead of just pouring it at festivals. Little did I know that Around the Bend would clear that hurdle less than a week later. I like to think of myself as pretty plugged in when it comes to Chicago breweries, but they’re propagating at such a rate that I can get surprised by a new one reaching the market.
Silk Road is 5.9 percent alcohol and a moderate 58 IBU (that stands for “International Bittering Units,” in case you’re reading a craft-beer column but have somehow failed to encounter that abbreviation before). Cuozzo hops the beer with Chinook, Simcoe, Ahtanum, Amarillo, and Citra, but the ingredient on the marquee ringed with rows of chasing lights is definitely the galangal. It’s a rhizome (aka rootstock) related to ginger, and you’ll often see slices of it in tom kha or tom yum soups (“kha” is Thai for galangal, though I’m not confident about my transliteration). Around the Bend use it dried and powdered in Silk Road.
To sign off the Beer and Metal way, I’m posting “Silk Road,” four minutes and change of doomy, hard-rocking old-school heavy metal from the self-titled 2014 album by short-lived Berlin-based band the Oath. Vocalist Johanna Sadonis has since formed the heavily hyped Lucifer with the Oath’s touring drummer, Andrew Prestridge; their self-titled full-length came out last month, and it’s definitely worth a listen.
