Urban life is good. Celebrate it with this exceptional premium lager beer.

So says Dennis Scott, former professional basketball player for the Orlando Magic and of late, contract brewer of craft beer. I don’t follow basketball, so I had never heard of Scott before. But you can be sure that if something is going on in the local beer scene, I’ll find out about it sooner or later.

And so I discovered Mr. Scott and his Brickhouse Premium Lager. Bob Townsend, Beer writer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, reports that Scott was interested in establishing a brand targeted mainly at African-Americans, something of higher quality than the average malt liquor.

At present, Scott doesn’t have his own brewery. He uses the facilities of the Atlanta Brewing Company to make and bottle Brickhouse. Contract Brewing is nothing new, of course. It’s a practice whereby a company without a brewery that wants to make beer pays a brewery with extra capacity to make their beer for them.

The idea is that in time the contracting company will sell enough beer to buy their own facility. Fortunately for Scott and his fledgling Inner City Brewing Company, Atlanta Brewing knows how to brew a good beer, something they’ve done for years here in Georgia.

Inner City touts itself as Atlanta’s first African-American owned brewing company. Certainly, black Americans are no strangers to good beer. As any dyed-in-the-wool beer geek is aware, Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery ranks among the nation’s finest brewers, black or otherwise.

Brickhouse Premium Lager pours to a deep golden color with a thick foamy head and a sweet biscuit malt nose. The palate is crisp and biscuity but a bit firmer and chewier than your average pilsner. There’s a bit more butteriness here than I’d like (just a touch is appropriate in a pilsner), but it’s balanced out by a pleasantly dry, gentle hop bitterness in the finish.

I like this beer. It’s a nice, easy drinking pilsner with plenty of flavor. Not so aggressive as to scare off the novice, yet flavorful enough to satisfy the veteran beer enthusiast. Targeting the beer at African Americans may help sales in an already crowded beer market, but this is a beer for anyone I think.



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