Legend Brewing Company (Richmond, VA)

Having been stuck in the Norfolk VA area for an extra 24 hours (due to the lack of affordable flights to fly me home earlier than planned), I decided to take a quick road-trip up the I-65 to check out what Richmond VA had to offer, beer-wise.

Now, I've had this brewery's wares lots of times -- and they're definately a brewery that "misses" more times than it "hits". But I figured that if I got their stuff mega-fresh from their own taps in their own house, it might be interesting.

I was wrong.

First of all, South Richmond is a rather scary looking place, even in the middle of the day. One creepy looking brick warehouse after the next creepy looking brick warehouse, with a smattering of burnt out factories and crack house wannabe buildings intermixed. But this was easy to find -- kinda sandwiched between Commerce (that turns into 9th St) and the river.

Big place, with lots of room for lots of folks. They have just recently gone non-smoking for the main room and bar (9pm and earlier) -- with a separate-but-equal smoking room just off the side of the bar. After 9pm, the whole place can light up. This is VA, so that seems like a fair compromise to me.

Got to the bar, and they had almost nothing on tap that I've not had before. No great surprise, but still....

First pint was their Golden Ale. Not an off beer, just not constructed very well at all. And having it mega-fresh right at the source didn't help this beer any.

Ordered up the Buffalo Chili to go with. Can't say when was the last time I had such a bland bean-and-meat combo. No amount of salt/pepper/Tabasco was able to rescue this boring-ass bean stew....

Service? Here's where things get especially "interesting". Now, you may be a local, and actually want to hear the extended version of the bartender's trip report while she was hiking around Tanzania on-the-cheap -- but I really couldn't care less. She had a very hard time figuring out how exactly to cut up her story into manageable chunks -- in order to tend to other server's orders, to tend to folks' empty pint glasses, to listen to the kitchen telling her that my chili order was ready, to answer the god-damned phone, and so on, and so forth! With the phone ringing some fourteen or fifteen times, even the locals actually listening to her long-winded African Safari story were wondering when she would wrap it up and answer the damned phone!

Second beer (which took quite a while to get, naturally): I ordered the "Cask Pilsner". Now, I didn't see any hand pumps anywhere behind the bar, so I was curious how she planned on pulling this off. Maybe gravity feed from a tank in the back? Nope. She took my exact same glass (that still had the lacing remnants of the Golden Ale clinging to the insides), and poured off a glassful of their Pilsener off the tap into it! Was this their Pilsner that I've had from a bottle tons of times, or was this some sort of "special" Pilsner, with the "special" name of "Cask Pilsner"? Beats the hell out of me. But with the huge stack of clean pint glasses directly opposite of me behind the bar, why did she even think that reusing my same glass would be okay? And since when is cask pushed with CO2 like any other draught beer? In a word, WTF?!?

The final straw was when she was describing the only beer that I had not had before to other customers. Here's a clue honey: it's pronounced "Vienna Lager", as in Vienna, Austria. It's not "Vi-enna" -- that is to say, it's not meant to rhyme with the wild animal called a "Hyenna"!!

That's it. I'm out. Here you go honey, here's one whole American Dollar to convert into 1,175 Tanzanian Shillings for your next trip....

Legend makes some wildly indifferent beers for consumption at others bars, and bottled for various liquor stores. But their own restaurant? Even more problematic. Avoid.
//TB