Phantom Ales, Cider, and Cellar

Maybe I went on an off day but this was a horrible experience. i ordered a flight and the main beer my buddy and I wanted was tapped out. The bartender informed us they were completely out and made us choose another...We will get to those later. A few people came in after us and ordered the double red ale, the same beer we tried ordering. Needless to say they switched it out right in front of us and filled up their pints and never even mentioned that they actually had the beer we originally ordered. Strike one. So I requested their cherry pie mead since they didn’t want to give me the original beer I ordered. Bad move on their part. This was one of the worst tasting thing I have ever tasted at any brewery EVER. It was not mead. The taste was like drinking apple cider vinegar straight up. HORRIBLE. Strike two. My buddy to his amazement topped that with his passion fruit mango tea cider. How can you go wrong with a name like that? Well they must have been out of that too because the concoction they gave tasted identical to dish soap! Like Dawn mutha fuckin dish soap. Strike three! Three strikes and I’m out!

This is one of my favorite places to hang out and get a good cold beer. They are great brewers and cool people. Stop by, and pick up some supplies, have a cold one. Great time!

Friendly service. Innovative beers. Warehouse/wood/barrel decor. What’s not to like. Brisket Sannie and fries were good. January 2017 - cook/chef actually consulted me in detail on how my steak was desired and how he planned on accommodation. He really did a great steak.

Actually not bad. Little brewery slash homebrew shop, with a mix of Ales, meads and ciders. The Saison was a tad too sweet , but the meads were very good. 5x 4 onces for 10$. If you are in Anaheim. Limited food menu, and the wings looked good.

Stopped in on a weekday around 1pm, and surprisingly, there was at least 10 other people there. It’s located in a small business park with lots of other small businesses. Right inside there’s an area where they sell homebrew stuff. Not exactly a huge selection, but they have some basic things here if you need them. The tasting room is actually a fairly good size as small brewery tasting rooms go. Plenty of table space and a few spots at the "bar" that basically consisted of a couple large wooden tables pushed together separating you from the server and row of taps on the wall. A bit hokey, but it didn’t bother me. The service was good, but the guy running the bar was dropping F-bombs all over the place because all the taps were pouring foamy. He figured it out after a few minutes and then started chatting with me about the beers. They had quite a few on tap, probably around 10 with a one or two meads as well. I did a five beer flight and didn’t feel the need to try any more since most of them were just sort of meh being a little too sweet in the finish. The Citra Smash was really good though. I almost got a growler to go, but I had a lot of other beer ticking to do, so I passed. Overall, a decent brewery without any major flaws and a good amount of beers to try, but not as good as the others in the immediate area.

Essentially a short walk from Bottle Logic, they have a shared parking lot with plenty of spaces. This place is definitely lower key than its neighbors, and it was reflected in the much smaller "crowd" which basically consisted of three locals playing Battleship. Bathroom is in the entryway on the way in, nice and clean. Tasting room was indeed smallish, but not dark. They must have solved that little issue. Seating was at two long wooden communal tables. Would be tight if it was busy, but no problems when I was there. They have a bunch of board games for drinking entertainment purposes. I don’t think they had a TV; I can’t remember one any way. I believe that they did have food, but I didn’t try anything. Service was prompt, with beers poured right there, again an upgrade from previous reviews. They had about 13 lines, but only 7 had anything running. Phantom beers seem to be pretty experimental, and they have a bunch of Cider product as well, as the name would imply. They offered a build your own flight of 5 for $10, which seems reasonable to me, especially after my previous stops on the day. I was actually pretty impressed with everything I tried other than the Cider. I am guessing based on raw scores of what I sampled this was my highest scoring Brewery of my tour, despite being the emptiest and least rated here on RateBeer. Perhaps they started slow as per earlier reviews, but I encourage y’all to give them another chance. The beer quality is there in my opinion.

Visited March 23, 2014.

This is a really nice setup, in terms of everything but the actual brewing system. They’re using a little one barrel homebrew system but they’re slowly upgrading to a larger system and already have several fermenters in place (7 bbl?). I guess they’re primarily a winery and they do flights of house wine. I tried the port (made with Zin) and it tasted fine but smelled boozy as all hell. Someone ordered a bottle and they filled, corked, and labeled it right there on the spot. Kind of neat I suppose. I found it kind of odd that while they have a bar they have no taps behind the bar. If you order a beer they have to go to the back and pour from the taps sticking out of the cold box, which is on the other side of the room so there is no way to run the taps through the wall. They were friendly enough about the fact that our group of 10 all ordered flights which are served on a nice wooden paddle that’s been torched and then heavily shellac’d. The tasting area is dark with lots of nicely done wooden fixtures. It’s got a bit of a lounge feel to it. They also have a homebrew store in the front which is cool. I didn’t buy anything but it’s nice to know there is another homebrew store around. Just a couple years ago (before the Bruery had a store) there was More Beer, Heffernans, and Stein Fillers, and I think that Liquorama used to sell homebrew stuff. Now there is Addison, La Verne, the one out in Yucaipa, and I think one in Pasadena. Things are looking up.

They serve food here. Kind of interesting to be in an industrial warehouse brewery that has actually set up a proper tasting room and serves food. The food was pretty good, though it was mostly bar food. I ordered the chili bowl where the bread uses some spent grains from the brewing process. I also tried one of the pretzel balls and a couple of the "Irish nachos" which were actually made with potato chips rather than French fries. All around pretty good stuff. My chili bowl was $6 so not too bad for the amount of food.

So far so good, right? Not quite. The beers are mediocre all around. Not as bad as some people have made them out to be but with the possible exception of the peach cider (which actually tasted more like a white wine to me), I don’t think I found one I’d order a glass of. The birthday boy (leftissak here) was feeling sociable and walked into the brewery to talk to the brewers while they were brewing and came back with a sample of some wort from the dunkelweiss they were making. It tasted of spent grains. Not sure if that’s a second running’s beer or what but I’m not sure how that’s going to make a good weizen beer. The oaked Irish red was slightly sour. Half the beers had some butter in them. The two stouts were very heavily roasted and ashy tasting. They have a bunch of different iterations of the tasting flight cards on the table so some have 10 slots and others only have 5. Some ask for your email address and some don’t. As it turns out flights are limited to 5 samplers. They had 9 taps going (2 had kicked) including the peach cider and the perry, so I got two flights and said I’d pick the tenth after I tried them all. I tried an ounce of all of them and gave them away. I never ordered the last one.

Speaking of 10, it’s 10 freaking dollars per flight of 5 tasters. Yeesh.

I might make this a place to park the car and try a few ticks before walking to Bottle Logic.

I pretty much echo what brokensail said: It’s too dark inside; five beers on tap, none worth going out of your way for; probably won’t be going back. If you’re ticking, you could hit this place, Bottle Logic, Hoparazzi (when they open) and the Bruery pretty easily

New tasting room in what used to be a wine place (maybe it still is?). Tasting room is really small and really, really dark. Limited seating, but it wasn’t very crowded. They had five beers on tap, but one of them was a guest beer as they were out of one of the house beers. Service was really slow. The taps for their beers are back in the warehouse space in the wall of their cold box and not at the actual bar, and this was the main cause for this. The bartender also insisted on bringing them out one at a time, which seemed unnecessary. The beers were not good and a flight costs $10 for 5 pours, which is not exactly cheap. I’ll try again at some point, but I won’t be in a hurry to come back.