Pizza Beer Club

Tonight was beer club! For the uninitiated, beer club is a monthly gathering of like-minded coworkers and acquaintances at a local BYOB for drinks, food, and fun. This time we went to a favorite discovery of mine, Ravanesi Pizzaria, a tiny little joint out in the burbs that scratch makes almost everything. Pizza places are a dime a dozen around here, but these guys really distinguish themselves. It’s one of those places where they open at 4:30 pm and close whenever they run out of dough. Yes, it takes approximately 30 hours to make the dough, so they do run out fairly frequently. As a veteran BYOB attendee (because of beer club), most places aren’t so busy on Tuesdays and thus welcome a bunch of beer nerds who take up a table and drink a lot of beer whilst occasionally munching on their food. This place was pretty much bumping from around 5 pm until we left at around 8 pm. But the pizza. The pizza is almost absurdly good. And it’s not like Philly is bad at pizza (there’s plenty of bad pizza, but we’ve got our hotspots). Check it:

A most excellent backdrop for beer club.For the sake of posterity, some thoughts on each beer we had are below. Usual nerdy disclaimers apply, this was not ideal tasting conditions and I didn’t exactly take detailed notes, so take it all with the requisite mountain of salt. In order of drinking, not necessarily how they appear in the photo:

• Otter Creek/Jack’s Abby Joint Custody – Yep, it’s a pilsner, but it’s a pretty darn good one, crisp, light, and refreshing. Certainly a step up from your typical macro, and perhaps worthy of a closer look this next weekend. B+
• Night Shift Santilli – A rock solid IPA, nice citrus and dank pine character, nice and crushable. B+
• Two Roads Road Jam Raspberry Wheat Ale – Holy hell, this is terrible. Robitussin tones, artificial raspberry flavor, and the like. Perhaps not quite that bad, but not at all good. D
• Vault Mosaic Imperial IPA – Does this sound familiar? Of course it does, I just reviewed it yesterday. In fact, it performed supremely well in this tasting format, pairing well with the spicy Sopressata pizza and just generally standing up to the other beers pretty well. May be tempted to raise this one to an A-
• Night Shift Trifecta – Brewed with three Trappist ale yeasts, I found this a bit disappointing. It’s got some decent Belgian yeast character, but it isn’t quite carbonated or dry enough to really work well. Disappointing C+
• Smuttynose Spank – For a beer that labels itself as a “hoppy saison”, I have to admit that I find little in the way of hops here, even if it’s an otherwise unremarkable beer that is far from bad, but which won’t exactly light the world on fire. B-
• Adroit Theory Ortolan Bunting – A very odd beer, almost quad-like, but without the full fruit character, but a very nice nose that doesn’t quite live up to the straightforward taste, with some dark malts, perhaps even some smoked malt. Fine, but not quite a top tier effort. B
• Lickinghole Creek Enlightened Despot – One of the best beers of the night, a clear winner, Pappy 15 barrel aged imperial stout, is quite tasty, very sweet, loads of coconut and vanilla from that barrel, delicious stuff. A-
• Smuttlabs Durtay – Smuttynose – A rum barrel aged brown ale, this one works pretty darn well, very sweet, a little boozy, but a nice barrel and molasses character comes through too. B+

And that just about covers it. I really love this pizza and want to come here as often as possible, but it’s also a little out of the way, so I’m guessing it won’t be quite as regular as some other BYOB places. Still worth the trip though, so we’ll see…