New Brewery Review: Peoria Artisan

Okay, technically, Peoria Artisan isn’t a new brewery per se, as they’ve been open out in Litchfield Park for a few years now.  However, they just opened their North Peoria location a few weeks ago, which happens to be about 4 miles from our house!  Score!

The growler centerpiece on our table

On Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving, we headed to the new location and met our friends Matt and Kristie as well as their daughter Kailyn.  Since we’re old people and are hungry all the time, we met them there at 4, so we had our pick of seating options.  The weather was pretty lovely, so we picked the outdoor patio, although the inside seating also looked great. 

This location had a wide variety of beer on tap – around 20 handles or so, which is pretty impressive.  However, most of those were not Peoria’s creations; 5-6 of the options were their own and the rest were made up mainly of other Arizona breweries.  I suppose if you can’t fill up a tap list, it’s best to source from other local options.

Chris and I started by splitting a flight of Peoria’s homemade options:

From left: Savannah’s Lil Sis, bRown, 

ESB, and Artisan Amber

All of the offerings were decent with my favorites of this bunch being the bRown and Artisan Amber, each earning 3.5 bottle caps out of 5 on UnTappd from me. 

Foodwise, the brewery had a decent list of options, ranging from traditional pub grub like burgers to slightly fancier items like the short ribs.  We started out with small orders of the deviled eggs and mac n cheese croquettes.

Delicious!

The deviled eggs were great (actually, the best thing I ate all night) and the croquettes were good, but they needed a bit more salt (a caveat – I’m an over-salter, so I think most things need more salt.  It’s in my genes, but running a lot doesn’t help either).  For our main, Chris and I split the short ribs, as he’s never met a rib of any sort he couldn’t pass up.  Overall, they were okay, but for $22 for the entrée (the priciest thing on the menu), we were expecting much more.  The meat was tender but the whole dish was a bit on the heavy side; it was crying out for more acid to balance out the meat.  There were a few pickled onions that helped with this, but they were vastly overpowered by the richness of everything else.  The grits under the meat had a great consistency, but I didn’t realize they had jalapenos in them until I just read it on the menu picture above; had the jalapenos been more prevalent, this probably would have solved the acid issue as well.  Because we were still craving salt, we also split a soft pretzel, and we made quick work of it.

The food menu

Matt, Kristie, and Kailyn also started out by splitting the croquettes, but from there, our paths diverged.  Matt chose the PAB bacon burger for dinner (he put his veganism on hold for the moment), while Kailyn did the Little Brewers mac n cheese; both of their meals looked outstanding, and they seemed to enjoy them.  Kristie, however, beat us all.  Figuring the portions would be smaller, she asked to have the chicken tenders from the Little Brewers menu, and the waitress was happy to comply.  What ended up coming out was a giant plateful of hand cut and breaded chicken tenders the size of my forearm, complete with French fries as well!  All for $6!  It looked delicious, and when we head back, we’re planning on having some of those to enjoy.

We tried a few more brews, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Christmas City Ale by Prescott Brewing, while Chris finished off the list of Peoria Artisan beers with their Haboob Black IPA, our clear winner of the night.  Although black IPAs aren’t normally my bag, this one was great with a fragrant nose and well balanced character overall.  Near the end of our experience, one of the existing Peoria kegs tapped out, so the beer list was updated to include their peanut butter porter.  Being completely full of food and beer, we asked for just a sip, and it had promise.

By the time we left around 6:15, the site was completely full and a decent size queue had formed outside.  Although I’d say Peoria Artisan has a few things to work on, overall, our experience was pleasant and we’ll be back for sure!  Let us know when you want to meet us there!

Later!

Amy